Point of Departure @ Cain Park 8/4 "A perfect summer evening," was a phrase we heard more than once on the way out of the Pointe of Departure concert at Cain Park last Thursday; Co-Artistic Directors Karen Gabay and Raymond Rodriguez had delivered a crowd-pleasing finale, exceeding reasonable expectations for a pick up company with a three-week rehearsal period. Their all-new program closing out the summer arts park's dance card was, as usual, completely different from their other three area concerts.

Although the first half of the program was somewhat unsatisfactory (more about that in a moment), Thursday's concert concluded with an hour-long premiere, Hooray for Hollywood. In Gabay's sure hands, this frothy premise was transformed into the perfect medium for the dancers to connect with the audience.

First, Gabay picked compelling, danceable treatments of music from the movies and arranged them into a theatrically effective score. From a bombastic orchestration of No Business like Show Business for an overture through a succession of short numbers in which the ballet dancers variously play off the movie music to a triumphant finale (That's Entertainment in a medley with Let Me Entertain You from Gypsy) with a choreographed encore, Gabay's choices gave the piece shape and pace.

Then Gabay made it a treasure hunt. Just before Hooray for Hollywood began the audience was invited to win a year's worth of free movie tickets by correctly checking off each movie on the entry form. We have seldom seen such an engaged audience. Guys who'd been dragged to the ballet by their dates and ancient balletomanes who could scarcely see the stage buzzed excitedly as each piece unfolded.

There was also plenty of excellent dancing. Gabay and Rodriguez know their dancers well (mostly from their day job with Ballet San Jose / Silicon Valley) and they drew on the dancers' strengths. For the sweeping violins of the second number Alexsandra Meijer and Maximo Califano displayed their partnering skills. For a walk on the wild side among jungle rhythms, Cuban Ramon Moreno was an obvious choice. It would have been easy to abuse this kind of formula, but each number seemed to set high standards for itself and proceed to wring the juicy setup dry. In the fourth number, for instance, where Travis Walker makes an exuberant drum major for a marching band number, the virtuosic turn combinations punctuated by salutes seem to reference Balanchine's marching band ballet, Stars and Stripes. And how wrong we would be to sneer at either Stars and Stripes or Pointe of Departure's three and a half minute evocation of it, for marching band music has its own inexorable logic. If you start turning here the music absolutely requires you to keep turning until you finish there. But "not to worry," Walker seems to say. "I can pull these turns in no problem." And he does.

The concert's first half was short on dance substance because Ravel's Sonata in G, 13 minutes of intense, serious music played live on stage by longtime collaborator Lev Polyakin, was left unchoreographed except for a one-joke solo performed by Rodriguez in a nightshirt during the second movement. We had understood from an earlier interview with Rodriguez that Gabay planned to finish choreographing the Ravel, a project she'd begun years ago as Ravel Blues.

Did Gabay simply run out of rehearsal time? Did the music prove undanceable? Or did Gabay actually choose to leave the piece as it was presented? Either way, it's hard to imagine either Polyakin, Rodriguez or Gabay happy with the final result.

Perilous Night, Avichai Scher's choreography to the John Cage composition of the same name provided the concert with an auspicious beginning. Cage's staccato rhythms for prepared piano furnished a musical framework for Scher to hang a meaty, up to the minute contemporary ballet trio on. Maria Jacobs appears first in blue, then Ramon Moreno and Patricia Perez appear in red. There's some suggestion of an erotic triangle and personal conflicts with stylized gestures of pushing away, slaps to the face, and a final joining of hands in apparent surrender, but Scher and his dancers' primary purpose is more formal, a wonderful realization of structure, invention and flow.

We'd love to go on about Scher as an up and coming choreographer and a very promising young dancer. We could wax similarly enthusiastic about the dancers in this year's version of Pointe of Departure; Gabay and Rodriguez bring better people every year and they apparently inspire loyalty in their dancers despite what Rodriguez freely admits to be a tough, stressful assignment. It is impossible not to speculate about the future of Pointe of Departure. Might they find a larger presence in Cleveland? When? What remains to be done? Rodriguez gave us thoughtful and candid answers to these and other questions in our lengthy interview; but that would be another article.
From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas VicNElsaAtEarthlink.net (:divend:)