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Verb Ballets @ Cleveland Public Theatre 4/18 We went to see Verb at CPT last Saturday night. It was a concert of all-new works by local choreographers. As Verb’s Chief Executive and Artistic Officer Margaret Carlson explained in a pre-concert speech, the dances were “sketches”/ “laboratory experiments;” the result of a drastically limited set of parameters – 5 hours for creativity, a brutally short rehearsal period, and even more brutally short time for lighting design and spacing.

Obviously, clear, obtainable goals were at a premium. What was remarkable was the high degree to which everyone pulled this off.

The concert began with Declaration of Sentiments, a dance in three parts set to three songs by Nina Simone – a lot to get done. Choreographer Catherine Meredith Lambert, who’s one of Verb’s go-to dancers for forte modern dance, seems to have drawn on her early training with Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, an African-American company, or perhaps her current experience performing Vespers. She has the dancers reaching for the soulful, the devotional, the exalted. That formula may seem surefire in Revelations or Vespers, but while there was much to satisfy in Declaration, D is not yet projecting the kind of excitement toward which Lambert seems to reaching. A program note about 19th century American social activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton posits a truly ambitious dance. Perhaps it’s simply a matter of having more time with the material.

Local choreographer and sometimes Verb Ballet Mistress Lisa K Lock gave us a spoof of classical ballet. It would seem to be an easy job, the comic abuse of our expectations, but it is certainly a departure for Lock. We give Lock & Co. credit for keeping the laughs coming and kudos to dancers Danielle Brickman, Michael Medcalf, and Brian Murphy for keeping straight faces and pointed feet throughout.

In Transient Encounters, a dance for 8, choreographer Lynn Deering gave us a straightforward music visualization to a flowing, legato composition, Suite for Transient Minds by George Thatcher. Like the music, the dance is a study in unity rather than contrasts, and the challenge to music and dance both is to offer markers and contrasts that prevent a lulling sameness. Which is kind of what happens here. That potential problem notwithstanding, we’d like to see more of her music visualizations (and when will we see another of Deering’s comic dances like the ones she did with Joe Booth for Dance/Theater Collective?).

The choreographer of To Lie In Wait, Robert Wesner was a dancer for Verb until recently. We felt we could see his personal preference for quick, articulate movements in this dance for eight. We also saw lots of movement coming out of a core phrase, rather more than we could take in. But whence the title? We were dazzled by the non-stop staccato, and would have welcomed a discernible moment of stillness – waiting – or change of level.

After the intermission, Volver, Volver, a love/lust duet choreographed by Troy McCarty, also sometimes Verb Ballet Master. The entire dance takes place on and around a square of carpet. At the beginning, Ashley Cohen stands on the carpet and her partner, Murphy, turns her around by turning the carpet. Later, she briefly rolls herself up in the carpet. Finally, he uses the carpet to draw her away. A protean prop, the carpet also reinforces the idea of unity of place, a tie-in with the title, which means ‘return, as to a place.’ Music by Buika, a flamenco singer, provides passionate dynamics for bursts of contrasting movements from the dancers where timing is everything. Low to high, apart together – even without the erotic context it would be exciting stuff. Like Lock’s spoof of classical ballet, a love/lust duet is low-hanging fruit, but it’s delicious stuff and we say more of both, please.

Choreographer Joan Meggitt set Prospect & Refuge: Stray on a beautiful, flowing Lou Harrison composition. Moments of stillness, changes of level, and dramatic transfers of weight among the 8 dancers kept the piece from lulling or dazzling us with sameness, as was our problem with Deering’s and Wesner’s dances. We’ve given little attention to Meggitt’s choreographic efforts up to now because of our perennial problem with what we think of as her pedestrian performance aesthetic. Verb’s glamorous and dynamic dancers obviate that criticism, especially given the short rehearsal period, forcing us to here acknowledge Meggitt’s craft.

One, choreographed by Medcalf for himself and Murphy is what we’d describe as a slightly sublimated love/lust dance for two men. Lighting Designer Trad A. Burns, who lit all the dances, put dramatic overhead spots on these 2 terribly fit dancers, better to highlight rippling muscles. Setting interesting, varied movements to very familiar music, Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, One successfully braved the minefield of the male/male duet, though one of us found the ending a bit clichéd.

Sarah Morrison’s Anatomical Whimsy sets out, like many of her projects, to have fun with a scientific subject, in this case the sacroiliac. In this, she is aided by eight game Verb dancers, actor Becky Cummings, and Henry, a beautiful, life-sized articulated human skeleton. And yes, we enjoyed the way the metallic pink pastel short-shorts called attention to the sacroiliac, which is after all continuous with that most entertaining portion of the human anatomy, da bootie. While the audience was receptive, we two proved a more difficult audience to please. We felt that Morrison’s considerable intelligence and wit seemed to abandon her and that the dance failed to develop. In this case her efforts were handicapped by the music, Johnette Downing’s The Sacroiliac, a children’s song that manages to plod around its subject despite relentlessly bouncy rhythms.

It’s good programming to save something really good for the end, and former Verb dancer Mark Tomasic’s shift fills the bill. Choreographing to the oh-so-familiar adagio and presto movements of Vivaldi’s Summer concerto, Tomasic makes good choreography look easy. In the slow, intense summer heat section, Tomasic clusters the 7 dancers together and breaks a different soloist off for each of the 4 solo violin passages. For the passionate summer storm, he has the dancers with arms around each other in a circle, whipped about by the wind and pausing in attitudes of stress. It worked so well.

Verb performed at CPT DanceWorks April 16 – 19.

What’s next for Verb is FusionFest May 1 & 2 at the Cleveland Play House. Modern dancers improvising with a live jazz ensemble might sound like a natural lock but nationally known choreographer, Guggenheim Fellow, and native Clevelander Diane McIntyre is one of the few known for making it work. Case in point, McIntyre’s In the Groove and Over the Top tops the bill. Cleveland Contemporary Dance Company founder Michael Medcalf, back in Cleveland and dancing with Verb, sets a new work, ‘The Nature of Things” on Verb. Verb’s exemplary staging of the seminal American masterpiece, Vespers, is also on the program. We hear that your Verb Dance Works ticket stub will get you $10 off your FusionFest ticket. Learn more at http://www.ClevelandPlayHouse.com.

From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas vicnelsaATearthlink.net
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