American Repertory Ballet took a giant step in advancing its stature as a commissioning institution for new dance works with “Kaleidoscope Mind,” the main event of its 2022-23 season opener, “Kaleidoscope,” a four-piece program presented September 23 through 25 at New Brunswick Performing Arts Center.
A spectacular ARB commission that paired choreographer Da’Von Doane, formerly of Dance Theatre of Harlem, with scenic and costume designer Grace Lynne Haynes, a New Jersey-based visual artist whose work has graced New Yorker covers, “Kaleidoscope Mind” achieves that elusive complementarity, the ideal outcome that too often fails to result from artistic collaborations. Its ravishing choreographic and visual design components are so tightly and purposefully integrated that by the end I couldn’t imagine any particle of the piece existing without the rest of it.
Doane’s precise, speedy, neo-classical movements are expertly executed by four mixed-gender couples sporting gorgeous, sparkling unitards with matching face make-up — half are painted in blue-and-white sea-suggesting patterns, the others in flaming orange. The action is framed by modest-sized, free-standing metal sculptures, that never dwarf, but rather dialogue with the dancers, their metallic spirals, balls, and helix shapes reflecting the postures and pathways of the choreography. Accompanied by an ensnaring Steve Reich score, the spellbinding piece can certainly be appreciated on a solely formalistic level. Or, one can find meaning in the importance it places on oppositional relationships: the meetings of straight and curving lines in the artworks and dancing bodies, the interplay of fire and water referenced in the costumes and kinetics, and the life-sparking action of the backdrop, an abstract design made of shapes suggesting male and female reproductive forms.
Preceding the premiere of the remarkable Doane-Haynes collaboration, “Kaleidoscope” gave first look to two additional ARB commissions: “Delibes Duet,” a classical pas de deux choreographed to Leo Delibes music by ARB’s artistic director, Ethan Stiefel; and “Hindsight,” an ambitious ensemble work choreographed by company member Ryoko Tanaka to a commissioned score for piano and cello composed by pianist Ian Howells, here played live by Howells and cellist Paul Vanderwal.
Although crucial in the opportunity it provides his dancers to develop their classical technique, choreographically Stiefel’s work is distinguished only by how well it sits conventional phrases of ballet vocabulary atop the Delibes music. Its opening section of courtly partner work is followed by solo displays of challenging steps, and a showy finale of wowing turns, leaps, and lifts, all impressively performed by company apprentices Lily Krisko and Tiziano Cerrato (at the matinee I attended on September 24). Yet amid its familiar pas de deux fare the work contains a brief role-reversal episode in which the woman supports the man as he does the requisite posing and promenading. I would like to have seen Stiefel take this idea a bit further.
Inspired by the surrealistic Salvador Dali painting “Swans Reflecting Elephants,” which shows lakeside swans reflected in the water as elephants, Tanaka’s well-crafted octet purports to be about both visual reflection and self-reflection. While it proffers striking large- and small-group sections, full of quirky gestural vocabulary and lines of dancers separating into mirror images that distinctly embody the work’s concept of literal reflection, the interspersed solo passages disappoint. They feel under-developed against the boisterous, rhythmic score, and register as presentational displays of physicality rather than internal explorations of self.
Completing the program was choreographer Claire Davison’s “Bewitched,” a beguiling duet recalling the deliciousness of a romance that ultimately sours. Set to an Ella Fitzgerald recording of Rodgers and Hart’s “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” the dance elegantly mixes ballroom and ballet movements in replaying a couple’s time together. We see them partaking in nightlife à la Fred and Ginger, dancing, laughing, joking, and falling in love, before spatting and splitting. Yet the choreography alone doesn’t convey the full story. It was the drama-imbued dancing of company member Madison Elizabeth Egyud and apprentice Roland Jones that made the piece a completely bewitching affair.
American Repertory Ballet, the New Brunswick-based professional company founded in Princeton, where it operates the Princeton Ballet School, continues its season with “The Nutcracker,” at McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, November 25 through 27; Patriots Theater at the War Memorial in Trenton, December 11; and the State Theatre New Jersey in New Brunswick, December 16 through 18. www.arballet.org.
