Verb Features Local Artist
Reviewed by Elsa Johnson & Victor Lucas
Any local dance concert is old home week for us, an opportunity to catch up and reconnect with dancers and others we know. Verb Ballet’s concert last Saturday at Breen Center for the Performing Arts was all that and more; we’ve never seen so many dancers in the audience.
One attraction was doubtless the choreography and dancing of local-artist-made-good Antonio Brown. As detailed in our 2010 Cool Cleveland interview here, Brown graduated from Cleveland School of the Arts and then the Juilliard School and immediately landed a job dancing with Bill T Jones / Arnie Zane Dance Company, one of the most prestigious and controversial contemporary dance companies in the world.
Local audiences saw Brown dancing prominently and well in Jones’ DanceCleveland concert here in 2010. The following year Brown’s Continuum premiered with Verb and we saw that he can choreograph as well. This year’s collaboration between Verb and Brown offered a reworked reprise of Continuum at the beginning of the concert and a new piece in much the same vein, Passing By, at the end.
Both Continuum and Passing By are mostly abstract choreography, 15 – 20 minutes long, for 8 or 10 dancers. Both pieces showed Brown’s contemporary choreography on Verb’s dancers to good effect, taking full advantage of Brown’s and Verb’s ballet chops, showing nice arabesque lines and fleet feet in jumping movements. Oft-repeated core phrases remained interesting to watch thanks to an intricate variety of groupings (which must have been hell for the dancers to keep track of). Dazzling changes in facing and level kept taking us by surprise.
Lacking a narrative arc, abstract ballets are in need of other organizing principles. Continuum exhibits an ABA form in that it begins and ends with a group of dancers crowded together walking backwards downstage. Brown teases us with at least one false ending in which the dancers form upstage left in what looks like the finale but leaves one dancer out of the group until the false finale breaks up and the dance continues. The music for Continuum, described in the program note as a remix by the choreographer, sounded to us like Philip Glass punctuated by crescendos of machine noise – not sounds to everyone’s taste but providing a form for the dance.
Passing By maintained interest with the suggestion of emotional content, the dynamics of relationships. Much of the dancing involved (mostly) heterosexual couples dancing together in intensely lit white rectangles. (Lighting Design by Trad Burns.) Sometimes another dancer sat nearby, watching rather than participating.
Sandwiched between Brown’s 2 group pieces was a solo he set on himself in which we watch the choreographer-at-home-alone, a timeworn but honorable trope. He’s apparently getting ready to go out so he tries out some dance moves, sorts thru a pile of clothes, reassures a group of friends that ”I’m On My Way,” the title of the piece, and dilly-dallies some more in an entertaining, charming, good-humored way until one of the dancers enters from stage right and apparently tells him to “come now of get left behind” and he exits.
Also on Saturday’s program, a new duet, The Road Together, choreographed by company member Brian Murphy, which explores “the challenges that keep us together.” Performed by Ashley Cohen and Ryan De Alexandro, Road read to us as a series of tight, ardent embraces punctuated by flicks of Cohen’s long blonde hair. Call Road a testament to passion or tell these two to come up for air.
Also on the program, Tom Evert’s solo from 1986, The President, performed by Murphy. Set to a recording of Emperor Waltz by Johann Strauss, Evert and Murphy’s President is the complete political animal, striking grand poses, leading triumphal processions, blowing kisses. He’s also human, signing a tedious succession of documents and taking a quick trip to the men’s room.
Some say that this dance puts them in mind of a particular POTUS but we are simultaneously reminded of all or none. The President presents our expectations for the role rather than a comic impression of a particular commander-in-chief.
Similarly, we’re hard put to pick a favorite dancer in the role of President. Evert choreographed the dance on himself and performed it many times to excellent effect, bringing to bear his large, clear facial expressions and his rock-solid stances. Murphy’s gifts differ but he nails the role in his own way while holding his impish sense of humor and his balletic extensions in check.
We look forward to seeing Murphy perform The President again, but we also wonder who else Verb may cast in this juicy role. “Antonio Brown for President” might be too obvious; counting Bill Clinton, we’ve already had 2 black presidents. Maybe one of Verb’s women…
Verb Ballets performed at Breen Center for the Performing Arts on Sat 9/22/12.
Verb has many upcoming events. The new Carnival of the Animals at Cleveland Metroparks Zoo at noon Sun 10/7. Go to http://www.verbballets.org/calender.html for more on Verb and Antonio Brown. More on Tom Evert at http://www.dancevert.org.
[Top photo by Harry Weller; bottom two by 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