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Pennsylvania Ballet's 'Carmina Burana'
A farewell to monks
LEWIS WHITTINGTON
At least one fan of the old ‘60s “monk gone wild” version of Carmina Burana hated that Pennsylvania Ballet turned the piece over for a remake by company auteur Matthew Neenan, complete with 32 near-nude dancers. But that fan was in the minority: On two occasions this month, full houses lustily pounded the rafters in approval of Neenan’s reconfiguration of one of their repertory favorites on the Academy of Music stage.
Carmina continues Philadelphia’s love affair with Neenan, Pennsylvania Ballet’s unofficial resident choreographer. Two years ago, he turned balletomanes into Rufus Wainwright fans with 11:11.
Neenan has scrapped all of the famous John Butler choreography that allegorically tapped into the social, sexual and civil unrest of the ‘60s and interpreted the medieval poems into a spacey journey for a menagerie of exotic dance creatures. But he’s kept the famous Carl Orff score, restoring it to a more authentic reading. Inventive and campy costuming by Oana Botez-Ban along with stark geometric set design by Mimi Lien created otherworldly environments.
Some conceptual problems
But for all of its flair, Neenan’s interpretation of those lusty poems into a more universal and timeless scenario encounters conceptual and pacing problems in the heavy-handed first half. The first section is ponderous, with dancers in gold Spandex pique-ing around prone bodies like some Ballet Galactica (maybe that’s what happened to the Solid Gold Dancers?) and a fragmented narrative with bodies being dragged off.
The appearance of ominous robed figures (the only image Neenan borrowed from the Butler version) is also sketchy, and The Character seems so important in his garb that we need to know his message. And some of Neenan’s signature traveling body friezes looked as accessorized like Botez-Ban’s flowing carnival tutu tails and snaking body stockings.
Neenan seemed to be hedging his bets by using what has worked so well before in transitional phrasing, and in so doing he choreographed himself into several corners. Not helping was Lien’s sail structure, which should have been more imposing, though the dancers’ manual movement was richly symbolic.
Oscar de la Renta meets Martha Graham
About halfway through— when the lighting gets dark, the orb overhead more ominous— Neenan gets more concrete. The flesh tone two-dancer costumes (Oscar de la Renta meets Martha Graham) that connected male-female couples did work, creating bizarre bodyscapes with intricate choreographic variation.
An acrobatic and pugilistic duet with Francis Veyette and Phillip Colucci is powerfully danced. Throughout it, Jermel Johnson sliced through the air with inverted ballet capoeira moves and huge lateral splits. Cyclonic pirouette runs by Amy Aldridge and Martha Chamberlain (in terrific red-beaded bodices that flared out when they spun) seemed to propel everything into fifth gear.
Julie Diana and Arantxa Ochoa were great as the lost-in-space ballerinas dressed in black-and-white androgynous couture headed for café Mars. Later Laura Bowman, in an inked unitard, did a lushly intimate and airy duet with Johnathan Stiles.
A potent corps section becomes hostilely co-mingled à la Sacre du Printemps, with sexually aggressive and ritualistic communal movement. The finale, with the full ensemble in perpetual motion in fleshy waves that kept evolving with thematic wholeness, was too short. But it matched the humanistic reach of Orff’s concussive finale.
At its best, Neenan fused ballet with abstract, signature moves and formalism, and richly essayed some of the medieval poems with great invention. But several chunks of the piece, particularly the transitional narrative content, have the feel of a middle draft.
A hypnotic Ochoa
The program opened with George Balanchine’s Serenade, which displays this company’s women’s corps de ballet at its best. The strings of Tchaikovsky bathe over the ballerinas, first seen with their hand raised; then they set in motion Balanchine’s pristine matrixes. This corps was airless during Balanchine’s opening phrasing, eventually achieving pulsing unison. All of the leads danced with technical flair and radiant deportment. And in a difficult adagio rotation en pointe, Arantxa Ochoa was diamond-hard (best I’ve ever seen it executed) and, later, with her hair down, both figuratively and literally, she’s absolutely hypnotic.♦
To read a response, click here.
LEWIS WHITTINGTON
At least one fan of the old ‘60s “monk gone wild” version of Carmina Burana hated that Pennsylvania Ballet turned the piece over for a remake by company auteur Matthew Neenan, complete with 32 near-nude dancers. But that fan was in the minority: On two occasions this month, full houses lustily pounded the rafters in approval of Neenan’s reconfiguration of one of their repertory favorites on the Academy of Music stage.
Carmina continues Philadelphia’s love affair with Neenan, Pennsylvania Ballet’s unofficial resident choreographer. Two years ago, he turned balletomanes into Rufus Wainwright fans with 11:11.
Neenan has scrapped all of the famous John Butler choreography that allegorically tapped into the social, sexual and civil unrest of the ‘60s and interpreted the medieval poems into a spacey journey for a menagerie of exotic dance creatures. But he’s kept the famous Carl Orff score, restoring it to a more authentic reading. Inventive and campy costuming by Oana Botez-Ban along with stark geometric set design by Mimi Lien created otherworldly environments.
Some conceptual problems
But for all of its flair, Neenan’s interpretation of those lusty poems into a more universal and timeless scenario encounters conceptual and pacing problems in the heavy-handed first half. The first section is ponderous, with dancers in gold Spandex pique-ing around prone bodies like some Ballet Galactica (maybe that’s what happened to the Solid Gold Dancers?) and a fragmented narrative with bodies being dragged off.
The appearance of ominous robed figures (the only image Neenan borrowed from the Butler version) is also sketchy, and The Character seems so important in his garb that we need to know his message. And some of Neenan’s signature traveling body friezes looked as accessorized like Botez-Ban’s flowing carnival tutu tails and snaking body stockings.
Neenan seemed to be hedging his bets by using what has worked so well before in transitional phrasing, and in so doing he choreographed himself into several corners. Not helping was Lien’s sail structure, which should have been more imposing, though the dancers’ manual movement was richly symbolic.
Oscar de la Renta meets Martha Graham
About halfway through— when the lighting gets dark, the orb overhead more ominous— Neenan gets more concrete. The flesh tone two-dancer costumes (Oscar de la Renta meets Martha Graham) that connected male-female couples did work, creating bizarre bodyscapes with intricate choreographic variation.
An acrobatic and pugilistic duet with Francis Veyette and Phillip Colucci is powerfully danced. Throughout it, Jermel Johnson sliced through the air with inverted ballet capoeira moves and huge lateral splits. Cyclonic pirouette runs by Amy Aldridge and Martha Chamberlain (in terrific red-beaded bodices that flared out when they spun) seemed to propel everything into fifth gear.
Julie Diana and Arantxa Ochoa were great as the lost-in-space ballerinas dressed in black-and-white androgynous couture headed for café Mars. Later Laura Bowman, in an inked unitard, did a lushly intimate and airy duet with Johnathan Stiles.
A potent corps section becomes hostilely co-mingled à la Sacre du Printemps, with sexually aggressive and ritualistic communal movement. The finale, with the full ensemble in perpetual motion in fleshy waves that kept evolving with thematic wholeness, was too short. But it matched the humanistic reach of Orff’s concussive finale.
At its best, Neenan fused ballet with abstract, signature moves and formalism, and richly essayed some of the medieval poems with great invention. But several chunks of the piece, particularly the transitional narrative content, have the feel of a middle draft.
A hypnotic Ochoa
The program opened with George Balanchine’s Serenade, which displays this company’s women’s corps de ballet at its best. The strings of Tchaikovsky bathe over the ballerinas, first seen with their hand raised; then they set in motion Balanchine’s pristine matrixes. This corps was airless during Balanchine’s opening phrasing, eventually achieving pulsing unison. All of the leads danced with technical flair and radiant deportment. And in a difficult adagio rotation en pointe, Arantxa Ochoa was diamond-hard (best I’ve ever seen it executed) and, later, with her hair down, both figuratively and literally, she’s absolutely hypnotic.♦
To read a response, click here.
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