Pennsylvania Ballet's "Tango With Style' (1st review)

The Pennsylvania Ballet, in the penultimate performance of its season, offered a satisfying mélange of works ranging from classic to contemporary.

The program led off with a revival of Octet for Strings (1983) by the company's former artistic director, Robert Weiss, which goes through some very traditional corps de ballet paces before breaking down into more interesting, and expressive, solo and duet work. Weiss was a principal with Balanchine, and the latter's influence shows. As a curtain raiser, the Octet displayed the company's technical skills, pleasing enough to see but rarely offering anything much deeper than eye candy. The pit musicians sawed away gamely at Mendelssohn, but the sound was lost in the Merriam Theater— mercifully at some moments, when pitch and intonation were very ragged.

Visions of Medea

The evening's middle work was the world premiere of Keep by Matthew Neenan, the Ballet's choreographer in residence. This intricate, three-movement work, set to Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov quartets, uses a sequence of duets, trios and quartets to create a more fragmented and modernist depth, although its key image— of a dancer with arms outthrust and hierarchically bent at the elbows— recalls one of the most classic of sculptural images, that of the sorceress Medea in full magical mode.

The angular visual theme, stated at the outset, runs through the entire work, with its abrupt and sometimes wrenching turns. One could certainly imagine it with more pointed musical accompaniment than two lush Russian Romantics, but the off-kilter effect is clearly intended and works well enough.

A sophisticated take on the tango

The final work on the program was the oldest— Five Tangos (1977), by the Dutch choreographer Hans van Manen— but one receiving its premiere by the Pennsylvania Ballet. This was the draw of the evening— "Tango with Style" was the overall title of the program— but anyone expecting simple folklore would have been disappointed, for Van Manen's work is a highly sophisticated, and in part sublimated, take on the tango tradition, with set and costumes by Jean Paul Vroom, and (taped) music by Astor Piazolla.

The tango, associated with entertainment in the 19th-century brothels of Buenos Aires, bears somewhat the same relation to modern dance as "primitive" African sculpture does to the innovations of Cubism, or jazz to art music: It infused sexual energy and rhythmic innovation into traditional forms that badly needed them. Tango companies are still popular when they visit, and of course a well-executed tango (you'd better not try any other kind) is a striking feat; but cliché is inevitable at this point.

Van Manen wisely incorporates tango stylization— sharp turns, head pivots, stretched limbs— into more classic dance tradition, and the result is pleasing, like familiar fare refreshed by a piquant sauce. There's wit and humor here, and also a dash of the dark side, as always with tango.

The earlier Neenan work played nicely off Van Manen's, too, with its own sharp twists. It gave a more unifying sense to the evening than earlier promised. â—†




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