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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2011 > October > 03 > Entry
Review: ‘The Mozart Project’
There’s no denying Ballet Austin’s artistic director, Stephen Mills, is a fan of Mozart. His newest creation, a three-piece series collectively titled “The Mozart Project,” was the company’s 2011-2012 season opener, which premiered at the Long Center last weekend. This work comes after Ballet Austin’s prior season’s closer, “The Magic Flute” — another Mozart-inspired ballet. But this time, Mills has taken Mozart to a new level: This is Mozart gone weird.
The first piece of the evening, “Wolftanzt,” was the most classical. Danced to Michelle Schumann and the Austin Chamber Music Center’s live, pure rendition of Mozart’s “Piano Concerto No. 12,” the 15 dancers maintained traditional male-female partnering relationships throughout the piece’s three movements, with Anne Marie Melendez as the lead ballerina, and Aara Krumpe and Rebecca Johnson as the two soloists. They were flanked by the corps de ballet and framed by a pink wonderland image of abstract roses projected onto the back screen onstage, which matched the ballerinas’ knee-length dresses in various shades of pink.
Though she was not the principal dancer in the piece, it was difficult for this writer to unglue her eyes from Johnson, whose physique and movement quality represented and interpreted Mills’ choreography in a seemingly effortless fashion. “Wolftanzt” is a joyful, expansive dance that calls for sweeping arm movements, high leg extensions, and the perfect arabesque line; the long-limbed Johnson delivered on all counts, especially in the slower second movement when she performed a gorgeous series of leg extensions that called out the delicateness of the piano. “Wolftanzt” ultimately communicates a sense of possibility and freedom.
In “Though the Earth Gives Way,” Austin-based composer Graham Reynolds’ musical composition, along with Michael B. Raiford’s set design, represented a dramatic shift from the production’s opening piece. Reynolds’ score was appropriately eerie, with an echo-y, pulsating beat and electric violin layered on top. The opening image — two white-clad women (Ashley Lynn Gilfix and Melendez) standing perfectly still underneath long veils — was flanked on three sides by five floor-to-ceiling light panels that shocked the eyes when illuminated for brief moments throughout the choreography.
The women were then joined by four men in black, who entered the stage by desperately falling into rectangles of light illuminating patches on the floor. The angular choreography — bent knees, sharp arms — comes to a stark conclusion in the piece’s final moments, when all of the gigantic panels flash at once, several times; with each illumination, the dancers are in a new pose. The chilling final image, with the two ghost-women once again covered with their veils, this time facing the audience head-on, is thrilling.
After the tone set at the conclusion of “Though the Earth Gives Way,” the opening of the evening’s final piece, “Echo Boom,” felt slow. The Austin Chamber Music Center began by playing Mozart’s famous “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik,” which was then “remixed” live by Paul D. Miller (also known as DJ Spooky). This introduction went on for a good 15 minutes, accompanied by an at-times-nauseating, black-and-white projection of words, musical notes and barcodes scrolling across a scrim, before the nine dancers entered the stage.
Christopher Swaim was easily the highlight of “Echo Boom”; his limber back and consciousness of stretching the movement while simultaneously maintaining sharpness to his dancing were engaging, despite a crucial moment when Miller’s composition, in suddenly switching gears to the dissonant, wobbly sound of electronic dance genre dubstep, created a need for audience adjustment to fall back under the spell of the dance.
Claire Christine Spera is an American-Statesman freealance arts writer.
Image: “Wolftanzt” from “The Mozart Project.” Photo by Tony Spielberg.
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