MCB leads region’s artistic growth

By George Volsky

georgevolsky@aol.com

While not many observers have fully perceived it, our latest ballet season represented for Miami-Dade County a great cultural leap. Responsible for that nationally significant upward movement were, on the physical side, the success of the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts and, on the artistic, the nationally- recognized ascent of the Miami City Ballet (MCB) to the exclusive top tier of the American dance companies.

As for the ballet, all signs point out again to an even better 2008-2009 season. And it is not a coincidence that during the coming months MCB will dance in two major American performing art venues: in the Music Center of the Los Angeles County’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in October, and  in January 2009, in Manhattan’s New York City Center.

Our MCB season comprises, as usual, four programs that will include mostly ballets by George Balanchine and the performance of The Nutcracker, also by the Georgia-born choreographer, all at the Adrienne Arsht Center.

That MCB dominates our area’s dance scene is not coincidental either. Not enough can be said about the company dancers, the 57 young women and men who do not rest on their laurels but visibly aspire to reach even higher levels of artistic perfection. Their joie de vivre is infectious. Seeing them on the stage is wanting to be young, very young again. Their unaffected enthusiasm embodies the quintessence of dance. What distinguishes them from their piers in other major companies in the United States is that, still eager to learn and interpret more incisively their roles, they regard each performance, no matter how many times they’ve danced it before, as a creative artistic challenge. 

In the backstage there are first-class professionals - I would like to mention one, my heroine, Costume Designer Haydée Morales -  who ensure that the corps de ballet and the principals shine in each performance. These seasoned professional also make the difficult life of dancers more bearable and rewarding, not necessarily in the financial sense - which it seldom is - but in terms of cherished individual achievements.

Heading the MCB structure are two men who for the past several years have presided over the company’s exceptional artistic progress which, analyzed retrospectively, following the first dozen years of the group’s 22-year existence had seemed painfully slow, if not elusive. I am talking about Edward Villella, MCB’s Founding Artistic Director, and Mike Eidson, the organization’s President and since 2007 chairman. The synergy between these two men has produced a combustion that is propelling MCB forward and upward.     

Villella appeared to have rejuvenated after the 2002 completion of his four-act Neighborhood Ballroom, an American classic, still unseen outside South Florida, and thus unappreciated as a masterpiece. He began to instill into the company a new sense of expectation that enhances quality, of crispness and even humor, all of which were not always present there before.

Together with Villella, borad chairman Mike Eidson, is developing the “Cleveland Project,” a unique cooperative music-ballet effort, involving MCB and the Cleveland Orchestra which each year is more entwined in our area’s cultural life. The first fruit of this developing project will be seen and heard in January 2009.  

The new season, according to Villella, will consist of “a delightful selection of ballets.” Program I includes Balanchine’s Swan Lake Act II, his version of   the favorite classic, with music by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the act that the composer thought musically to  be the best.  Balanchine changed somewhat the1 original choreography by giving more parts to the corps de ballet and eliminated time-consuming, action delaying mime elements. The Four Temperaments, also by “Mr. B,” is a classic ballet in four parts, representing in dance the notion that humans have four different humors: sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic and choleric. Much less interesting than the first two, is the last piece on the program, In the Upper Room, by Twyla Tharp, previously danced here. I agree with the famed London ballet critic Clement Crist who, reviewed it, wrote: “I wish it would go away.”

In Program II,  Balanchine’s  Ballet Imperial, and Villella’s  THE FOX TROT: Dancing in the Dark,  Act 3 in Villella’s Neiborhood Dancing, features dancing to the music of Duke Ellington, Artie Shaw and others. Both are audience pleasers. The first, based on Tchaikovsky’s romantic Piano Concerto in G, presents the glittering splendor of the imperial court in the tsarist St. Petersburg. Mercuric Tidings, which Paul Taylor choreographed to the music of Franz Schubert, features 13 dancers displaying athletic excitement.

Don Quixote, which MCB masterfully premiered two years ago, will be shown again in Program III. Program IV comprises the company premiere of Jerome Robbins’ romantic ballet In the Night, which explores various stages of love: young, passionate and mature.  Concerto Barocco, another of Balanchine’s signature ballets, set to Bach’s Concerto in D minor, is also a popular favorite. The choreographer’s Symphony in C, danced to the music of Georges Bizet, has one of the most spectacular balletic finales, 48 people dancing on the stage. (For more information visit miamicityballet.org)

Concert Association of Florida, which earlier this year presented the American Ballet Theater, will bring in the current season Paul Taylor Dance Company. The Company will dance in  the Arsht Center on Dec. 13 and 14. In the same venue, the CAF will present Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, April 16-18, 2009.  (For more information visit, www.concertfla.org.)

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