Pennsylvania Ballet's "Balanchine and Tharp'

The Pennsylvania Ballet opened its 45th season with “Balanchine & Tharp,” a program featuring two company premieres—Twyla Tharp’s Push Comes to Shove (1976) and Mauro Bigonzetti’s Kazimir’s Colours (1996)— plus George Balanchine’s Ballo Della Regina (1978), which the company first performed in 2004.

After a long summer hiatus from dance, I left the Academy of Music feeling refreshed, and only wished the Pennsylvania Ballet had staged these pieces after the election— because regardless of the outcome, these performances would have restored anyone’s faith in humanity.

Not that Bigonzetti’s choreography in Kazimir’s Colours made this readily apparent. In this dark work, Bigonzetti sought in dance to express the sensations evoked by the works of Russian supremacist painter Kazimir Malevich. I hadn’t seen any of Malevich’s works beforehand, but I knew I was in for something impressive from the first moments, especially with Carlo Cerri’s lighting setting a perfect mood of dark enchantment.

Some people know how to walk into a room and immediately command attention. When the curtain rose on Riolama Lorenzo writhing ecstatically against Sergio Torrado, they silenced the entire crowd. From here, the corps of dancers flooded in, wearing Lucia Socci’s brilliantly designed costumes: shorts split bilaterally between an array of bright colors that reversed the pattern in the jacketed-top. Under the low light, their movements through a succession of bizarre angles and repeated geometric forms created a kind of visual hypnosis from the boldly contrasting colors.

A painting coming to life on stage

Pairs of dancers would thrust their arms behind their backs, only to shoot them upward in a bolt of color as they turned, like a painting taking shape and coming to life on stage. As I watched, I felt as if I’d been handed a new set of eyes, or shown a series of sense impressions found nowhere in nature— much like an artist who creates a new conceptual language in which to paint.

The rest of Kazimir’s Colours reflected upon the seductive nature of art itself in a seductively sinister pas de deux between Gabriella Yudenich and Torrado. With deadly seriousness, Yudenich began flirting with Torrado, writhing against him suggestively before lolling him into a sense of confusion by dropping back to hang her arms down, like a bird feigning a broken wing. Then suddenly, she’d lunge forward, striking a pose like Artemis on the hunt. The pair created a painfully beautiful image as she writhed against him, and it was almost excruciating to hear the strings come in as he cradled her. Bigonzetti’s choreography between the movements provided a fantastic contrast for the interplay of styles in Shostakovich’s music (the Concerto Opus 35 for Piano and Trumpet).

Hidden emotions of a jilted lover

Tharp’s playful Push Comes to Shove shifted the mood immediately. Her piece opened on Zachary Hench snapping his fingers to a vaudevillian ragtime number by Joseph Lamb and brushing lint from his pants, playing with a bowler hat as he danced a leisurely jig. But as the music shifted to Haydn’s Symphony 82 in C Major, the mood quickly changed, and Hench’s clowning movements turned to furious dancing that revealed his true emotion— that of a jilted lover.

The overall tone of the piece mocks the story itself; Lorenzo (as the love-interest) dances carefree, oblivious to Hench’s pain, and the corps explodes across the stage in the fast, stagy movements for which Tharp became famous. The dance’s mocking tone, and the substitution of the traditional love-roles— usually a prince and a maiden in need of rescue, now replaced by a clown and Martha Chamberlain’s ditzy socialite— mildly scandalized the ballet world when this piece first appeared. Here, however, Elaine Kudo and Stacy Caddell’s staging rendered the offensiveness funny. I marveled over Chamberlain’s ability to look elegant even while appearing to trip over her own feet.

Balanchine at his most balletic

By contrast, Balanchine’s Ballo Della Regina proved all elegance from the start, opening on the company posed in an exquisite tableau of blue-costumed bodies silhouetted against a baby blue background. Regina showed Balanchine at his most balletic: very soft, with plenty of point-work and assisted pirouettes. Like the Verdi’s score from Don Carlo, the whole piece felt felt majestic and glorious.

The segments of Balanchine’s piece offer no story, although the paired dancing of Amy Aldridge and Hench inspired feelings of one—not so much of an entire love affair itself, but intimating the whispered breaths that fill the tender moments in every relationship. And after the second movement, the remainder becomes almost a showcase of skills, at times more explosively athletic, and entirely fun.

The genuine star athletes

The Phillies may have won the World Series handily, but this group of young athletes effected their movements with an ease that bordered on casualness. The constant glow on their faces radiated a joy of people happy to be in their bodies, and Aldridge executed the tricky, shifting pointe work with ease and a beaming smile that left me feeling refreshed and hopeful. You can’t feel anything less than admiration after watching a corps of young people dancing with such pure elation, so fluid, lovely, and promising, as they moved in perfect unison.

Before the performance, I ran into the local playwright Larry Loebell in the lobby, and we briefly chatted about his recent success with House Divided—a political play in which a family’s attempts at reconciliation fail to heal the wounds from three generations’ worth of conflicting ideologies. After the performance ended, I looked for Loebell again. I wanted to suggest to him that it’s useless to try to present drama with words or to resolve differences with argument—that perfection in human relationships is possible only in movement.