By Elsa Johnson & Victor Lucas
Verb Ballet’s Winter Series concert at Breen Center began with a new dance choreographed by Associate Director Richard Dickinson, “Cowboy Soul.” As everyone knows, true cowpunchers mostly don’t dance so, rather than launch directly into the contemporary ballet vocabulary that is Verb’s default idiom, Dickinson began “Cowboy Soul” with your basic saddle-sore cowpuncher’s slouch and swagger, only gradually allowing Stephen James to jump and turn in his opening solo, ” On the Range.”
Verb’s women got into the act in Square Dance, slouching and strolling wonderfully well on their pointe shoes before the actual square dancing began.
Dickinson and the Verb dancers took us through a genial tour of “The Schoolmarm and the Cowboy”,” The Gunfight,” and other scenes from the lives of the cowboys. One number, “Walking,” managed to maintain interest despite heavy reliance on what looked like a standard step from country-western line dancing; step together step, half turn, repeats other side. That kind of economy of means would seem to be an important aspect of “Cowboy Soul,” for we hear that it is intended for heavy rotation on Verb’s round of school concerts and lecture demonstrations.
Second on the program was an exciting revival of “The Gathering” (2009) choreographed for Verb by Terence Greene, Dance Director at Cleveland School of the Arts (CSA). Call it African-American concert dance, a style the Verb dancers have mastered with — we guess — a lot of help from Greene, just as Greene’s mastery of that style probably owes a lot to his long association with Jeraldyne Blunden and her colleagues at Dayton Contemporary Dance Company.
Lavish expenditure of energy is kind of the point of ” The Gathering,” but behind the appearance of frenetic emotional outpouring, the dancing is rhythmically and spatially precise.
Joining the Verb dancers in “The Gathering” were Emani Drake, a student of Greene’s at CSA, and Philip Williams, a graduate of CSA and Greene’s assistant there. Both reflected credit on their teachers and their school.
The final dance in the concert, “Contra Con,” choreographed for Verb by William Anthony, was performed twice; once to live African drumming led by Linda Thomas Jones, Sogbety Diomande, and Baba Jubal, and once to a recording of J.S. Bach’s Keyboard Concerto No. 1 in D minor.
Full disclosure, Anthony, Thomas Jones, and Vic were close friends back in the day; the three took dance classes together, saw a lot of each other’s performing, and worked on choreography projects together.
A lot went right in “Contra Con.” We saw a clear and coherent ballet composition, heard drumming that pleased the ear in Breen’s carefully engineered acoustic space, and saw beautiful dancing from the Verb dancers in the challenging classical dance idiom. “Contra Con” performed to the Bach was quite successful. We were somewhat disappointed that the drumming and the ballet dancing didn’t complement each other more, but we are loath to follow in the footsteps of Akim Volynsky (1865 – 1926) who infamously transformed himself from dance critic into choreographic advisor and jackass, spouting a veritable fountain of unsolicited advice to dancers in the early years of the Soviet Union.
This was a very good Verb concert, with 3 strong dances in varied styles. Go to http://verbballets.org and click on Calendar, 2013-14 Season to see upcoming performances in March, April, and May.
Verb was presented at Breen Center on 2/22/2014 by Shah Capital Management.
[Photo via Mark Horning]
From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas. Elsa and Vic are both longtime Clevelanders. Elsa is a landscape designer. She studied ballet as an avocation for 2 decades. Vic has been a dancer and dance teacher for most of his working life, performing in a number of dance companies in NYC and Cleveland. They write about dance as a way to learn more and keep in touch with the dance community. E-mail them at vicnelsaATearthlink.net.
Cleveland, OH 44113