BalletX and Wilma re-imagine Apollinaire (1st review)

Paris audiences may have rioted during the opening of the Stravinsky-Ballets Russes Rite of Spring in 1913, but a century later a Philadelphia audience was treated to a gloriously playful onstage riot for the opening of the BalletX production of Proliferation of the Imagination. If there were an award for the freshest, most original offering of the current Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts, it might well go to this inspired, cabaret ballet-theater adapted from a seminal play by the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), known as the "impresario of the avant-garde."

Fittingly, Apollinaire coined the term "surrealism" for the play on which this BalletX/Wilma joint production is based. Proliferation was written while Apollinaire was a soldier at the front in 1916, and first performed while he was back on leave. It's a paean to the creative spirit and the imagination, cut loose from all its bourgeois moorings.

Joy amid war

The play begins with a gently mocking, poetic monologue by The Director (Luigi Sottile), who describes trench warfare to the audience. As he speaks, dancers enter along the Wilma's side aisles, garbed with saucy and complex head and body bandages that both evoke frightful wounds and tease with their abundance of bare skin— the first appearance of Maiko Matsushima's knock-out costumes.

The dancers perform a Brechtian danse macabre as they join The Director on stage. Even given this reference to the grim realities of armed conflict, it's hard to imagine how Apollinaire could create such a joyous theater piece in the midst of the "war to end all wars."

You know you're in for a roller coaster ride when Therese (Mary McCool), dressed in a fanciful, sculptural costume by Matsushima that sports outlandish, floral removable boobies, decides to toss off her Husband (Sottile). Right before your eyes they switch genders by adapting their garments and by donning new ones. Hilariously, Therese transforms into Tiresias as she relinquishes mammarial balloons.

Gender swap

Like her colleague Sottile, McCool is an actor who moves with ease among a cadre of topnotch dancers. Her Shadow is played by Matthew Prescott, a comically gifted, expressive male dancer who plays her in drag. As the central characters enact their gender swap, the dancing male Shadow also makes a transformation from the womanly Therese to the male Tiresias. The Husband's Shadow is danced by the always impressive Tara Keating.

Having been defeated in my attempt to logically understand all that I saw on stage, I sat back to enjoy a variety of personages traversing the fluid continuum of gender identity and to accept an omni-sexual, omni-gendered universe. Just bring it on, Apollinaire's world-view suggests.

Throughout, we are spirited along by a most eclectic array of music composed and played by the impressive New Zealander Rosie Langabeer, and accompanied by Joshua Machiz and Jesse Sparhawk. Evoking a Kurt Weillian air of joyful sadness, Langabeer taps into the fertile sounds of the early 20th-Century and composes music that sounds both vintage and contemporary— no mean accomplishment.

Don't ask why

The plot, such as it is, advances with two gambler friends in noirish get-ups— Presto and Lacouf (Jaime Lennon and Anitra Keegan)— who pull off entrancing duets as if their precise, sharpened leg movements and body attitudes mirrored a pair of obsessed players at a poker table. This scene ends in duels over the location of the play (as the Brecht-Weill "Alabama Song" says, "Oh don't ask why.").

The elegantly dancing Policeman (Gabrielle Lamb) falls in love with the Husband, the male actor now costumed in ruffles with a prominent tattooed shoulder. The inanimate springs alive when the Husband speaks to a friendly Kiosk (yes a Kiosk), a wonderfully inventive puppet-like construction designed by the multidisciplinary artist/set designer Steven Dufala. It is manned, so to speak, by the versatile dancer Colby Damon, who controls the Kiosk's one hand, which grabs butts and cops feels when it can.

A husband gives birth

Rosie Langabeer's music artfully carries us through this absurdist romp. Midway, as the musicians appear on stage to offer what sounds like an Eric Satie interlude, we begin to hear sounds of crying babies that gradually interrupt this music. After first checking out the audience to see if someone had brought offspring along, I soon learned that the Husband had indeed re-written the laws of nature behind the unfolding stage curtain.

The Husband demonstrates a birth for us: Out pops the Son (Damon), cum diaper, suspenders and cigar, belting out a rap song that gets dad and friends dancing to the beat. Tiresias/Therese returns to reconcile with the Husband with a refrain of "It can be fun to switch— just stay aware of it." And off all go on a Conga line to a Latin beat.

Geometry amid chaos

Mathew Neenan, Ballet X's choreographer, and Walter Bilderback, the Wilma dramaturg and literary manger, have captured the spirit of Apollinaire's original play with a highly talented crew of dancers, actors and gifted visual, costume and music artists. Proliferation creates synergies among its performers as Ballet's highly trained ballet and modern dancers inject formal geometries of movement (with Cubist allusions) into the jumbled chaos of the narratives, while also doubling as actors by way of their facial expressions and physical clowning.

The actors, Mary McCool and Luigi Sottile, who have shone on stage in past Wilma theater productions, were especially versatile in their narrative delivery, spirited movement and expressive singing, and were often indistinguishable from their dancerly co-performers.

Ballet X, the Wilma and their collaborators took a risky leap into venturesome, original art making here, where the mainstream of Festival performances have pursued more tried and true paths of work that they might normally present. With this grand success, they've lit up a few stars up there for Apollinaire.♦


To read anothr review by Madeline Schaefer, click here.