In Another Light

ARKA Ballet
American Dance Institute
Rockville, Maryland, USA
June 2, 2007

by George Jackson

The 13 dancers on ARKA’s program were familiar from their performances
under a different banner, that of the Washington Ballet. All regularly
appear with WB’s first company or studio group. Undoubtedly their
presence on this bill of 12 shorts was because ARKA’s artistic director,
Roudolf Kharatian, is prominent on the faculty of WB’s school and his
teaching draws not just students but the professionals too. Certain
traits – a gracious modesty, a concentration on style and technical
consistency – were brought out in the dancers appearing under
Kharatian’s eye.

Mikhail Fokine’s choreography fared particularly well. Fokine perfuses
movement with imagination. Even seemingly simple step combinations are
nuanced and caught up in a dynamic impulse. The result is theater that
yet remains pure dance. Although the two examples on this program had
been made for the ultimate legendary dancers – Pavlova, Nijinsky and
Karsavina – the ARKA cast made "The Dying Swan" (1905) and "Le Spectre
de la Rose" (1911) meaningful. Foremost was Elizabeth Gaither’s
after-her-first-ball Girl in "Spectre". Gaither wore charm and modesty
lightly, like her cloak which just slips off. When, having sunk into
chair, she first rises to waltz with the airborne boy conjured from a
rose she had held to her breast, her eyes are closed. We see her asleep.
As her dream intensifies, she opens her eyes so that we too enter the
dream, ultimately waking from it with her.

As the Rose, even the best dancers doing the steps brilliantly fail when
they forget to suggest that this boy is like a breeze that blows thru
the dreamer’s room. Marcelo Martinez remembered: he flowed commendably
and his arms remained buoyant without mannerism. Martinez’s leg work
more than sufficed but his torso should have had more plasticity. Rui
Huang, with a build contrary to Pavlova’s and a movement quality that’s
not soft as down but clear and bold, was cast against type in "The Dying
Swan". Yet she gave the solo a good showing by maintaining its dynamic
and never bleeding it for pathos.

Two divertissements were attributed to Arthur St. Leon, the 19th Century
French choreographer. "La Vivandiere" (1848), this program’s closer, has
survived because St. Leon notated it. ARKA, like most other companies,
danced it in a romantic-classical, somewhat bucolic style not unrelated
to that of Bournonville. It is joyfully intricate, step rich, pure
dancing for five lasses and a single lad. Brianne Bland, as the first
among the lasses, particularly sparkled. Tyler Savoie was promising as
the lad. The culminating "sunray" pose, with the ladies leaning on the
gentleman and extending their arabesques at different but precisely
spaced angles, always delights audiences and surprises those who thought
that Balanchine had invented it in 1928 for his "Apollo". Likely,
though, the configuration also predates St. Leon. The other St. Leon
selection, "Ocean and Pearls" (1864) opened the program. It has survived
by being passed on from ballet master to ballet master. Sometimes it is
attributed to one of them, Alexander Gorsky, and then it looks art deco
in its linearity. ARKA, however, dances this trio in an academic
classical manner with Bland and Gaither as the Pearls and Corey Landolt
a respectably expansive Ocean.

Kharatian’s choreography concerned itself mostly with aspects of the
music he had chosen. It was fascinating to watch how he used weight,
slowing down and drawing out movement and angling body planes to match
sonorities in the sound for the "Bach’s Passion" duo in which weight
predominated, and "Narayama" (to Japanese popular music) and "A Room"
(to a John Cage score) in which he modeled body surfaces. The musically
responsive Sona Kharatian and Luis Torres delivered the first two,
adagios both, and Martinez (this time with a suppler torso) the brief
"Room" solo.

Both of the program’s premieres were for a set of paired/opposed males –
Jonathan Jordan and Jared Nelson. Jordan is compact and short, Nelson
linear and medium long. Both have strong techniques and "leading man"
looks. Their first duo, "Two Houses", keeps one at the edge of one’s
seat. Something is about to happen, perhaps several things, yet it isn’t
necessary to know precisely what. The work’s choreographer, Jason
Hartley (himself a lead dancer and bravura gymnast) uses Albeniz guitar
music and a balletically-based athleticism to set the two men into orbit
around each other. The title’s disparate houses may refer to
nationality, temperament, sexuality or all of the above. This is the
best Hartley I’ve seen to date. He has to be taken seriously as a
choreographer.

The second duo for Nelson and Jordan, "Within," is less dramatic, more a
theme and variations. It is uneven, not surprisingly so since there are
three choreographers – Kharatian, Hartley and Jordan. Kharatian pays
closest attention to the accompanying Bach clavier music. Some people
thought that the two duets would gain a cumulative effect had they been
next to each other on the program, never mind what this would have done
to Jordan and Nelson.

Individual variations don’t inevitably look like school recital numbers
on a small company’s program. "Dying Swan" and "Room" didn’t. The
variations from Petipa’s "Raymonda" and "Sleeping Beauty" and Liz
Gahl’s Rachmaninoff "Rhapsody" did, despite Jade Payette’s panache as
the Act 3 "Beauty".

Volume 5, No. 22
June 4, 2007
copyright C2007 by George Jackson