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IN REVIEW: Kansas City Ballet goes one for three in winter performances

The Kansas City Ballet threw heart and soul into Lambarena, Val Caniparoli’s heady mixture of ballet, modern and ethnic dance set to Africanized arrangements of the music of Bach, and the result was if anything more beautiful than when the company performed the work in May 2004. The sheer look of the piece is irresistible: Sandra Woodall’s scenic and costume designs are vaguely African without being exaggeratedly so. The men wear giraffe-print pants and plain blue shirts or none at all, the women ankle-length skirts with pastel-dappled prints. The décor consists of bold, simple desert designs, lit with brilliant oranges for daytime and dark-blues for night, with Lisa J. Pinkham’s original lighting design meticulously recreated by Kirk Bookman.

The dancers have adeptly assimilated Caniparoli’s hybridized vocabulary of balletic turns and leaps flavored with exotic twists, leg-arches and shimmies. Adam Rogers is disarmingly limber in his almost Fosse-like solo, and Luke Luzicka and Deanna Doyle elude each other coyly in a tender duet. At times, Caniparoli strives to express Bach’s counterpoint almost literally, with dancers moving in fluid canonic imitation in pairs and threes. In one striking number, Laura Wolfe and Marcus Oatis dance in counterpoint from a distance, one upstage and one downstage, and the five horizontal guide-marks on the stage suddenly look like lines on a musical staff, with dancers as “notes.” (Casts vary throughout the run.) Caniparoli’s movement is a fluid amalgam, at times frankly balletic but infused with a sense of freedom and flow, echoing the social dances of the Africa that inspired the music. The choreography even manages to remain inventive, for the most part, at moments where the music grows mind-numbingly repetitive.

The rest of the program was less engaging. Robert Hill’s Piano Concerto No. 2, which I found likeable enough when the Ballet first presented it in 2005, seemed overlong and conventional this time around. The pas de deux slow movement, in which a haughty Kimberly Cowen is wooed by Luzicka with increasing abandon, was a highlight: Its spinning lifts signaled her consent to his advances, letting us know that despite her final rebuff, things might still be negotiable. But the literalness of the lifts in the first movement, timed to explosive orchestral chords, seemed too predictable, and the exuberant finale felt like it was still cohering among the dancers. Lowell Liebermann’s Second Piano Concerto, heard on recording here as with the rest of the program, felt limp and tepid.

José Limón’s The Moor’s Pavane had its strengths, in particular the glowering, explosive snaps of jealous anger by Christopher Barksdale, a recently retired company dancer who was invited to return to reprise the role he danced in 2007. His Othello-likepetit mals sent Catherine Russell (the Desdemona figure, though not named such by Limón) into matching paroxysms of bewildered terror, which punctuated their restrained but strongly conveyed love-duets. Charles Martin danced the part of the Moor’s Friend (=Iago) and Stefani Schrimpf was the Friend’s Wife (=Emilia). This piece seems to thrive on Baroque grandeur and nobility of gesture, and here it felt busy and overwrought with exaggerated facial expressions. The Moor’s ungainly maroon robe — part of the original costume design by Pauline Lawrence — looked dated and out-of-place, and moreover it was frustrating for the viewer in that it hid much of Barksdale’s movement.

One can only hope that those who attend this program to see the piece around which the Ballet has built its marketing campaign — Lambarena, which is performed last — will stick it out through the two initial works and two intermissions beforehand. Those who do will be rewarded.

The Ballet’s winter program continues through February 28 at the Lyric Theatre downtown. For more information go to kcballet.org or call 816-931-2232.

To reach Paul Horsley, performing arts editor, send email to phorsley@sbcglobal.net.

 

Paul Horsley, Performing Arts Editor 

Paul studied piano and musicology at WSU and Cornell University. He also earned a degree in journalism, because writing about the arts in order to inspire others to partake in them was always his first love. After earning a PhD from Cornell, he became Program Annotator for the Philadelphia Orchestra, where he learned firsthand the challenges that non profits face. He moved to KC to join the then-thriving Arts Desk at The Kansas City Star, but in 2008 he happily accepted a post at The Independent. Paul contributes to national publications, including Dance Magazine, Symphony, Musical America, and The New York Times, and has conducted scholarly research in Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic (the latter on a Fulbright Fellowship). He also taught musicology at Cornell, LSU and Park University.

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