Verb’s last concert at Cleveland Play House (5/18 & 19) showed three pieces with live music by Cleveland Composers, quite an achievement for a local dance company when Playhouse Square is complaining that they can no longer afford to present ballet companies with live music.
Verb’s concert also provided some balm for us in that all three of its featured pieces contained many balletic elements. We love modern dance but sometimes we just want to see some good local ballet.
Verb’s Artistic Director Hernando Cortez choreographed the evening’s premiere to Klaus George Roy’s Christopher Suite (1953). The suite included Overture, Passé pied, a couple of Minuets and so forth, mostly up-tempo dance forms performed on solo piano by Michael Schneider off stage. Cortez used a program note and costumes by Suzy Campbell to set the piece in ancient Egypt and found movement suitable to the exotic setting in his standard Paul Taylor tool kit. The mix of archaic frieze positions, balletic footwork and sculptural use of the torso worked for us; we sat through the 17 minutes of “Shadows of Nes-min” happily speculating on Cortez’ influences. The ending tableau looked like a direct quote from Vlasav Nijinsky’s “Afternoon of a Faun”. The solo piano rendition of music composed with dance in mind reminded us of Martha Graham’s dances to music by Louis Horst. What did Graham’s alma mater, the old Denishawn dance company, look like in their many renditions of ancient Egypt? Probably not as good as Verb.
Our happy mood was only slightly dampened when we belatedly read the complete program note and learned that “Shadows of Nes-min” aspired to treat of weighty matters, the judgment of souls in the afterlife. Could the music, a dance suite, support such a scenario? To be fair, we’d have to see the piece again with Cortez’ scenario in mind but we often do better watching dances without paying too much attention to the stories they try to tell.
Also on the program was Cortez’ “Backlash” set to Eric Ziolek’s composition for saxophone and percussion. We’d seen and enjoyed “Backlash” at Cleveland Public Theatre last October. Talking later with Ziolek, Chair of Cleveland State University’s Department of Music, we’d learned that the collaboration was the result of a long process of grantsmanship and “trying for years to get residency at CSU.” Still, seeing the final product in performance was “a treat” for Ziolek who allowed that his composition was “jazz influenced” but with “nothing improvised.”
Jazz or not the music for “Backlash” was definitely live. Saxophonist John Perrine entered from the back of the house playing an improvised prelude, processing slowly down the center aisle and taking his place backstage.
In “Backlash” Cortez worked with a very balletic vocabulary and the 6 Verb dancers looked good in the steps and in their costumes, iridescent trunks with halter-tops for the women by Studio Sangha and Gina Dudik. Ballet to jazz-influenced saxophone and percussion? No problem for Cortez and his dancers who found it easy to integrate some appropriately jazzy movements of the hips into the mix. And the story? Happily, “Backlash” is without any narrative content. “Pure abstraction,” was Cortez’ succinct description.
All our misgivings centered on the first dance on the program, “Six Easy Pieces,” which we’d seen and had problems with at its premiere at the Ohio Theatre last March. To be fair, “Six” looked considerably better at the Play House than it did at the Ohio. Problematic, unfinished costumes at the Ohio were replaced by different, successful designs by Campbell. And the music for solo piano, composed by Jonathan Sheffer of Red and performed onstage by Schneider at both performances, sounded even better to us in the smaller Bolton Theater of the Play House than it had at the Ohio.
Casting at the Play House also made some improvements, especially the substitution of the diminutive but wonderful Jason Ignacio in the apparently rechoreographed Tango. As performed by Ignacio and Kallie Marie Bokal, the formerly slinky Tango became a drunk dance, paradoxically precise in its tandem wavering.
Ironically, our difficulties with the revised “Six” centered on the opening movement, Waltz, and the third movement, the speedy Octave Etude, both of which include refugees from Ohio Ballet, Oren Porterfield and Damien Highfield. In Waltz, Oren Porterfield on pointe doesn’t so much shine as outshine the ensemble. At the Ohio we had described the problem in the words of an old drinking buddy – “it don’t look right” – but at the Play House we confirmed our suspicion that it was a matter of the relative stability of the dancers on their respective axes, especially during the turns with laterally curved torsos. Porterfield made the ensemble look ragged by comparison. It was a striking demonstration of the relative technical levels of the two companies, Verb and Ohio Ballet.
To be fair to Verb’s dancers, Porterfield has had the advantages associated with a fully professional company such as a living wage and Workmen’s Compensation Insurance. Many of Verb’s dancers, we understand, are working 3 jobs to make ends meet. Verb does not offer WCI – can’t afford it.
The Octave Etude section of “Six” had been performed at the Ohio by two of our favorite Verb dancers, Brickman and Robert Wesner, but Brickman had been lost in her costume at the Ohio. At the Play House, the apparently rechoreographed duet partnered Brickman with Highfield, but it remained problematic in our eyes. The partnering, such as it was, looked sketchy, perhaps because tempos at that performance were too fast, and Highfield, known as a very capable partner, was left covering rather than executing. It’ll get fixed. Ordinarily we wouldn’t mention it.
Or perhaps our problems with “Six” are a case of sour grapes -- if we can’t see Ohio Ballet’s dancers with Ohio Ballet we don’t want to see them at all. How unbecoming our bitterness! But our sense of loss is palpable. Ohio Ballet is gone and with it the professional infrastructure that Ohio Ballet was once able to offer its dancers. Gone too are other aspects of Ohio Ballet’s infrastructure that benefited the entire local dance community -- the salaried position for costume designer and wardrobe mistress Janet Bolick, for instance.
Verb is one of the best – if not the best – of the remaining local dance companies and they’ve done wonders with limited funding, patching together grants and residencies and collaborating with other local artists who are struggling with the same problems. But it all takes a toll on the artists and the artistic product.
Sure there’s hope for the future, a county tax to support the arts and another scheme to offer affordable health insurance to artists. But it’s also a matter of the present -- appreciating what we have now – and the past -- realizing what we’ve lost.
From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas vicnelsaATearthlink.net (:divend:)