In the Company of Dancers

by Regina Blakely

A friend of mine from Connecticut, by all measures a great lover of the arts, shocked me once by refusing to buy a ticket to a ballet performance I wanted to see. She was the type of person who could be depended upon for all manner of good information, from a genuinely thoughtful opinion about Jesse Helms vs. the NEA, to the proper way to address an invitation to someone more important than yourself. So it was somewhat sheepishly that she admitted to me that she would not go to the ballet because she had never acquired the taste for it. "It's no use," she explained. "I am never able to make the imaginative leap required to see the swan in Swan Lake. To me it's always beautiful bodies just jumping around."

Watching the Ohio Ballet perform at the Phoenix Symphony Hall October 14, I could not help thinking that this performance might have at last opened the world of dance to my friend. Watching these dancers' bodies "jump around" on stage was enough to deliver magnificent pleasure and feeling.

For starters, this is a well-trained and disciplined company and it shows in their full ensemble pieces. The lighting effects are powerful: the curtain opens to nine dancers in still poses against a blue background for the first movement in Concerto Grosso. As the music moves, so goes the dance- a community of feminine shapes move in and out of patterns on stage. Poll's choreography communicates emotion as the music does, through abstract patterns that resonate in a kind of familiarity of feeling.

By the second movement, Nian Mei Geng and Qian Ping Guo are filling the role of archetypes. Feminine meets masculine in graceful compliment, and then they part again. That is all we know, and all I need, to begin a hundred more remembrances of that very story in my own imagination.

In the third movement, the ensemble takes the stage again in playful, patterned variations on the theme of "apart and together." Here, Poll offers a dance full of energy and with significant variations contained in a larger pattern, in much the same way a film director might go after scenes from a New York rush hour.

My guest for the evening majored in music theory in college, and was gripped by the sound and sight of Trilogies, the music and choreography created specifically for the Ohio Ballet by Paul Schwartz and Lucinda Childs. Again, the company of dancers drew us into the rhythms and patterns of the music which might have been missed were it not for the frenetic movements in time to the energy beneath the melody line. In the second movement, a haunting sax dominates as a female dancers step forward and back with their male partners, and then again, the women turn and step away. Here, too, the pattern is unnervingly powerful: together and apart, forms moving in service to the strains of a tenor sex, and the whole saga of human contact is contained on stage.

For the lighthearted finale, "Eight by Benny Goodman," the Ohio Ballet revives the upbeat spirit of the big band era, with terrific costume design and a good deal of humor emoting from the dancers. My personal favorite was the piece "My Old Flame," in which a trio of torch singers mime the bonfire in their hearts by means of cleverly formalized arm movements.

The Ohio Ballet offered an evening of great dance to great music. If you've ever felt, like my friend from Connecticut, that you could not see the swans for all the tutus, forget all you think you know about ballet and see this company from Akron. In Arizona, where we have finally unearthed the arts lost in the rapid transition from cowboy to corporate culture, I'll be recruiting new fans to the Ohio Ballet's fresh style and urging Southwest Dance to bring them back again next season.

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