A Winning Collaboration
Verb Ballets teams up for Performance, Gala Benefit

What makes for a successful dance company? For Verb Ballets, the recipe is on display this Friday at the Ohio Theatre: an exemplary staging of a modern dance classic, genuinely exciting collaborations with two of Ohio's best dance companies, and repertoire both new and old by Verb's Artistic Director Hernando Cortez.

Verb has built much of its cachet on the acquisition of modern dance classics like Martha Graham's Appalachian Spring or Paul Taylor's Esplanade, works that come with built-in buzz among long time dance enthusiasts like ourselves. Their latest acquisition, Vespers, is choreographed by Ulysses Dove, someone whose dances we’ve read and heard about since he began choreographing in the 70's, but whose work we'd never seen live until Verb's preview showing at Idea Center Studios last August.

A dancer and choreographer with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater from 1973 to 1980, Dove cut a swath until his death from AIDS-related illness in 1996. After setting a number of high-profile pieces on the Ailey company, he choreographed for Paris Opera Ballet and other top ballet and modern companies in the US and Europe.

Why such success for a man who started out as a self-taught choreographer in his disapproving parents' living room? As Gus Solomons put it in an insightful article in Dance Magazine, "he translates emotion into movement with stunning clarity." We contribute our own observation that the emotions and movements he chooses are intense and passionate. Vespers, possibly his finest dance, is a case in point.

We saw this for ourselves last August at Verb's showing at the Idea Center. Dawn Carter of Dayton Contemporary Dance Company -- who was setting Vespers on the Verb women -- reminded the dancers of one of the central movement motifs of Vespers, a breakneck run that stops abruptly in a balance, a suspension. "That pique has to come out of nowhere, like hitting a wall. (demonstrating) Bam!" This explosive translation of momentum -- from running horizontally to aspiring heavenward -- presents an unmistakable movement metaphor for spiritual aspiration.

As Dove himself put it in an interview, "The idea of Vespers started in childhood when I would go in the summer to visit my grandmother and she would take me to a local church service. There was no preacher, there was nobody in the pulpit. It was all about prayer and it was all about energy. I made Vespers to show not how it looked but what it felt like, to translate age as energy as opposed to the lack of it." (for more, go to "Vespers Rehearsal and Commentary" on YouTube).

Despite Dove's association with Ailey and other companies with national and international prominence, he maintained a long and influential association with DCDC. Vespers, for example, was originally set on DCDC and premiered with them in 1986, a year before Ailey first performed it. Dawn Carter thinks Vespers wears its years well. "Twenty two years later and it still has just as much power and passion, elegance and femininity; that’s the sign of good choreography."

Good choreography, but a tough test of a dancer's skill and mettle. Before the Idea Center performance the dancers were tense, steeling themselves for the demands that Vespers makes. After the performance, it was smiles of relief and accomplishment. "It’s amazing,” said spectator Terence Greene of Verb’s Catherine Meredith, who’s the principal dancer in Vespers, "she saw this as a little girl and now she's doing it."

Greene and Meredith exemplify the interconnectedness of Ohio's dance community. Greene, currently Co-Director of Cleveland School of the Arts Dance Program, was for many years a mainstay of DCDC, where Meredith did a summer workshop in her youth.

Also as a part of this same concert, again emphasizing this interconnectedness, 2 members of DCDC (Crystal Perkins and William McClellan) will perform Unresolved (2002), a duet choreographed by Shonna Hickman-Matlock to music by Henryk Gorecki.

Cincinnati Ballet also contributes to this program's dance company interconnectedness theme by sending two dancers, Janessa Touchet and Zack Grubbs, to perform the pas de deux from Rubies, Balanchine's virtuosic neoclassical homage to the Jazz Age (to watch other dancers perform Rubies on YouTube google "Aurelie Dupont & Alessio Carbone in Rubies pas de deux.")

We're not familiar with Touchet and Grubbs' dancing but note that Touchet was a semifinalist in 2002 and a finalist in 2006 at the USA International Ballet Competition and that she and Grubbs performed the Rubies pas de deux together in the 2003 production of the complete Jewels -- Emeralds, Rubies, and Diamonds -- by the combined companies of Columbus' BalletMet and Cincinnati Ballet. Starved-for-ballet fans, this could be very, very good.

Finally, on this list, we get to Verb's own prolific Artistic Director Hernando Cortez, who offers the world premiere of Afterimage, described as a virtuoso showcase for Verb dancers Sidney Ignacio and Brian Murphy and DCDC dancer Deondre Horner. An all male dance, Afterimage was created in memory of Paul Taylor dancer Jeff Wadington, who died of complications from AIDS in 1994.

Also on the program is Cortez's Chichester Psalms (2003), a full-company work set to the music of Leonard Bernstein.

Experience the entire program this Friday, October 24 at 8PM at the Ohio Theatre on PlayhouseSquare. Call 241-6000 or visit http://www.playhousesquare.org for tickets. Verb's "pay-what-you-can-afford" policy makes some first-come-first-serve tickets available only in person at the PlayhouseSquare box office.

The gala benefit for Verb includes dinner at Bricco restaurant (across the street from the complex on Euclid Ave.), the best seats in the house for the performance, and a post-show reception with the dancers. Tickets $100. Phone Verb at 216—397-3757.

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

Photo by Tyson Lambert

Pictured: The 6 Verb dancers performing ''Vespers' (L to R) Erin Conway, Anna Roberts, Katie Gnagy, Catherine Meredith, Danielle Brickman, Ashley Cohen. On farright, understudy & high school intern Leisa DeCarlo. In Front, Rehearsal Director Dawn Carter of DCDC.
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