Verb Ballets comes to Lincoln Park
What aspect of summer are you least prepared to part with? This summer, it seems as though we’re just getting with the outdoor dance concerts when we’re down to the last one, Verb Ballets’ FREE concert this weekend at Tremont’s Lincoln Park. Following in the footsteps of television’s Dancing With the Stars, Verb brings us Lady Be Good, a world premiere choreographed on Verb by champion ballroom dancer Gary Pierce. Bringing ballroom dance into the theater is a fun premise, but it’s always a question of bridging the gap between what Langston Hughes called "innocent amusement" and professional performance, making steps that are fun to do fun to watch.
We would guess that Pierce is up to the task, in that he was (along with Pierre Dulaine, the dancer / teacher portrayed by Antonio Banderas in Take the Lead and the initiator of Dancing Classrooms, the New York Public Schools program depicted in the documentary Mad Hot Ballroom) a co-founder of New York City’s American Ballroom Theater Company, a top ballroom company that won critical and popular acclaim for their performances from 1984 to 1995.
Urban Study (2002) was originally choreographed on Oregon Ballet Theatre by Ginger Thatcher, a former Clevelander who made good, first as a member of Cleveland Ballet and then as choreographic assistant to modern dance giant Lar Lubovitch. We remember her as a good dancer. Her credits as associate and assistant choreographer and rehearsal director are topnotch. So, take a look at this company premiere with us and see if she can choreograph as well.
Scent is a solo choreographed on Danielle Brickman by local choreographer and ballet master Troy McCarty. We’re hoping this piece is as full of emotional nuance as the ones he’s choreographed recently for Verb and in collaboration with Lisa Lock. McCarty himself is tight-lipped but upbeat about Scent. “Danielle’s becoming quite the actress,” was all he’d say.
Also on Verb’s program, a preview performance of Merce Cunningham’s Cross Currents (1964). Until his death on 7/26/09, Cunningham was, for all his 80 years, among the most innovative of contemporary choreographers. As with any artist, Cunningham’s demise puts his oeuvre in a new light, making Verb’s acquisition of this seminal period work particularly timely. With music by Conlon Nancarrow, arranged by Cunningham’s longtime associate, John Cage.
The one piece on the program that we’re familiar with is Elegiac Song (1968), Ohio Ballet founder Heinz Poll’s first work in Northeast Ohio. Depicting women left behind in time of war, Elegiac Song is set to Dmitri Shostakovich’s 8th Quartet, which was dedicated to the memory of the victims of fascism and war and widely associated with the firebombing of Dresden during World War II. It takes the same point of view as the Kurt Joos masterpiece, Green Table, a dance that Poll performed in frequently, but, as Poll told us in an interview, “my dance has a much smaller theme.”
By leaving the horror of war offstage and making one of the dancers an observer of the destruction, Poll’s Elegiac Song put a powerful statement within the reach of even modestly accomplished performers.
Verb Ballets performs FREE at 8:30PM on Fri 8/28 and Sat 8/29 in Tremont’s Lincoln Park, located between West 14th, West 11th, Kenilworth and Starkweather Avenues in the Tremont neighborhood, Cleveland, Ohio 44113.
From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas. Elsa and Vic are both longtime Clevelanders. Elsa is a landscape designer. She studied ballet as an avocation for 2 decades. Vic has been a dancer and dance teacher for most of his working life, performing in a number of dance companies in NYC and Cleveland. They write about dance as a way to learn more and keep in touch with the dance community. E-mail them at vicnelsaATearthlink.net.
(:divend:)