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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2010 > March > 29 > Entry
Review: Ballet Austin’s ‘New American Talent/Dance’
Saving the best for last may be a cliche, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea.
Ballet Austin definitely saved its best new ballet until the end of Thursday’s New American Talent/Dance (NATD) program. Nelly Van Bommel’s Fanfarneta is smart, funny, and rich.
Fanfarneta was one of three ballets commissioned for the third biennial NATD competition. Three jurors—this year Alicia Adams of the Kennedy Center, Julie Nakagawa of DanceWorks Chicago, and Paul Vasterling of Nashville Ballet—select three finalist choreographers from a pool of video applications. This year’s finalists were Dominic Walsh of Houston’s Dominic Walsh Dance Theatre, KT Nelson of San Francisco’s ODC Dance, and Van Bommel, a French-born choreographer now based in New York.
Van Bommel chose La Cor de la Plana’s music for Fanfarneta, using the songs of the all-male French group for a series of vignettes. Sung in Occitan, a language indigenous to southern France and Catalonia, the throaty voices and the songs’ rhythmic complexity generate a folksy feel. Van Bommel ably couples music and choreography so the dance becomes another rhythmic layer. The two artistic elements feed one another, rather than one channeling the other. She accentuates this relationship by having the barefoot dancers slap the floor with their feet. The dancers may all have shin splints soon, but the foot-stomping provides a joyous, calamitous tone.
Fanfarneta’s sense of intense community captures folk dance’s spirit with a modern dance vocabulary. In a simple series of arm gestures, Jaime Lynn Witts and Joseph Hernandez demonstrate how performers can really see one another and connect. The piece seems intensity seems social (even in Michelle Thompson’s fabulous solo). Van Bommel brought the dancers together.
It’s reductive to compare dance pieces, since every work has unique successes and failures. But the NATD format—audience members use their cell phones to vote for their favorite work—makes comparisons hard to avoid. Next to Fanfarneta, Walsh’s “The Whistling” seems underdeveloped. Walsh chose an excellent cast and used their balletic skills well, but he also gave Hernandez a bad ballet version of breakdance popping and locking as a solo. The piece was littered with moments that screamed, “This gesture is very meaningful” without providing narrative or kinetic interpretive contexts.
KT Nelson’s “When Love is Hard” lacked sophistication. Nelson’s choreography generally followed a single instrument through Borut Krzisnik’s dense score. Couples paired by repeating a movement motif of poking one another with outstretched fingers: one couple poked with tenderness, another slashed with rage. But for all the different emotions expressed, the end result was monotonous.
‘New American Talent/Dance’ continues through April 4. See www.balleaustin.org.
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance arts critic.
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