PCMS and BalletX present Petrushka, featuring ensemble132

According to BalletX artistic director Christine Cox, PCMS’s Miles Cohen first introduced her to the ensemble132 several years ago. It wasn’t until she heard the group’s arrangement for piano quintet of Stravinsky’s score that a new collaboration was born: ensemble132 performed its arrangement onstage, while the dancers told the story of love and magic in the foreground.

Bartók, Wiancko, and Mozart

It’s a short ballet, though—just 30 minutes—so the performance began with ensemble132 at center stage. The selection of violin duets by Béla Bartók, arranged for a string trio, was an interesting choice. Bartók originally wrote them in 1911 (the same year as Petrushka) for lesson books for beginner students. Bartók grounded each duet in the folk music of Eastern Europe, almost danceable if not for his characteristic dissonance and broken rhythms. The first they played, no. 32 in the collection, was a perfect example: a debate argued on opposing instruments between the folk melody and the modernist dissonance. No. 43 was a personal favorite, performed entirely by plucking the strings.

You can hear composer Paul Wiancko’s punk music past in his piece A Sanguine Clockwork for string trio. Folkish melodies floated through a soundscape of noise in a sampler of techniques. I loved the drone of the cello, the twittering of the violin and the viola. The group rounded out the first act with Mozart’s Piano Quartet in G Minor. I am one of those rare music enthusiasts with little interest in Mozart. But pianist Sahun Sam Hong played like he and the piano were old friends sharing a conversation with the strings. It was lovely, and the rondo was exquisite.

Petrushka, then and now

I came away from Petrushka with mixed feelings. Watching Peter Weil grow as a dancer with BalletX has been a delight, and he was fabulous as Pete, the story’s protagonist. Whether carried supine on the upraised arms of the other male dancers or navigating the wonder and dangers of the traveling show in a green, polka-dotted clown suit (by designer Emma Kingsbury), his technique and emotion just grabbed us by the throat. Laine Jackson brought innocence to the quirky movement of Belle’s puppet-dancer.

Mathis Joubert as Hercules flexed his muscles in booty shorts and a striped shirt, adding some broad comedy to the mix. He balanced two of the acrobats—one across his shoulders and the other across his knees—and swaggered and fought with the upraised fists of a 19th-century brawler, surrounded by a carnival of dancers with hoops and spinning ribbons, or tumbling as acrobats.

The hoopla masked the darker themes of the plot: Belle chooses Pete and teaches him to perform her puppet dance with angled arms and the drooping body of lax strings. But she is controlled by the traveling show’s evil magician and desired by Joubert’s Hercules, who fights Pete for her, and wins. There was of course some magical chicanery and a happy ending: Pete freed Belle and they walked off into the sunset.

A confusing close

Amy Hall Garner’s choreography is fun and tender by turns, and the core story is compelling, so the pieces were all there. But the most frequent comment I heard as we exited was “I’m confused.” The audience didn’t experience this when we saw the piece as a work in progress last July. As we saw it then, Petrushka took place in the Depression of the 1930s, and Pete joined the circus when he saw the ringmaster/magician paying the performers in cash. But for the performance at the Perelman, the story was transplanted to some unexplained ruined world, where Pete is sleeping on a park bench, dreaming, the program notes say, of the world he will enter, which somehow becomes the traveling show. And nobody gets paid.

Unfortunately, nothing on the stage showed that, nor would it have made sense of the milieu we did see. The piece retained its ’30s vibe in Kingsbury’s costumes and her filigreed false proscenium, the dusty richness of the gold curtains. The carnival scenes remained rooted in the past of such shows, as did the dark plot about the men around her fighting over Belle. I am not sure why they made those edits, though limitations on moving too many set pieces into the Perelman may have been a part of it. But I hope that, going forward, they rethink those changes.

Editor’s note: Before you go, did you know that BSR is celebrating 20 years at our Party with the Critics event on January 15? All are welcome! Get your tickets now.