On Tuesday, January 20 the
VPAC's 2009 Dance Series gets underway with the award winning
Lar Lubovitch Dance Company celebrating their 40
th anniversary. This is a very special performance at the
VPAC and a show not to be missed for dance enthusiasts. We encourage all our
Vail International Dance Festival patrons to also consider this show... especially if they have never seen a dance performance at the
VPAC.
CLICK HERE for more information and tickets for
Lar Lubovitch Dance Company at the
VPAC.
ENJOY A REVIEW of LAR LUBOVITCH DANCE COMPANY
From New England's Bay Window's:
Bon Anniversaire
by Alan Helms
Bay Windows Contributor
Thursday Dec 18, 2008
STILL DANCING. Lar Lubovitch Dance Company, celebrating its 40th season, wowed crowds on the Boston stop of its national tour. Photo Credit: Steven Schreiber
Celebrating its 40th anniversary season, Lar Lubovitch Dance Company appeared at the Tsai Performance Center last weekend [Dec. 12-13] courtesy of the Celebrity Series of Boston. The company of seven men and seven women, all exceptionally gifted dancers and all barefoot, performed three pieces for an audience that both nights gave them a standing ovation.
Placed in historical context, Lar Lubovitch presents an interesting case. For two hundred years Western dance was exclusively narrative, and then Balanchine appeared on the scene. Though Balanchine occasionally created story ballets (notably Nutcracker and Don Quixote), his works were largely abstract, and with the slow, stubborn persistence of the genius that he was, he gradually created the audience he needed to appreciate his radically new work. Ever since, most choreographers have either specialized in dance that tells a story or dance that is basically about movement, which is to say dance about dancing.
From the time when Lubovitch formed his company in 1968, he has straddled the fence, creating story ballets as well as choreographing for ice skating spectacles (Sleeping Beauty) and Broadway musicals (Steven Sondheim’s Into the Woods) but also creating abstract works praised for their musicality and unabashed romanticism. He’s as resistant to easy definition as the critics have been to any unanimous opinion about his work, which is to say he’s as denigrated as he is admired. Of the full-length Othello he created for American Ballet Theater in 1997-8, Anna Kisselgoff of The New York Times called it a great success while Arlene Croce of The New Yorker pronounced it an unqualified "dud." But then Gide once remarked that the worst thing that can be said of a work of art is that it offends no one, a perennial solace to people who get bad reviews.
The performances last weekend showed Lubovitch’s abstract side in three pieces set to mainstream concert music. The first, "Concerto Six Twenty-Two" (1986) to Mozart’s Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra (K. 622), is a festive, large-spirited work for the full company which began with the dancers skipping in large circles. (Lubovitch is enamored of circles and spirals and he uses them well.) It was immediately apparent how much Lubovitch’s choreography emphasizes the upper body. Torsos bend every which way while arms are used in bold, expressive gestures, embracing, celebrating, welcoming, worshiping, whirling and twirling and swimming through space in a constant stream of movement. The style throughout this half-hour piece was extremely eclectic: folk and country, Broadway show dance, ballet and striptease. The dance careened from balletic grace and poise to cartoonish lumpenproletariat movements. In the second of three parts, Jay Franke and George Smallwood performed like mirror images in a slow-motion pas de deux that instantly became a standard at AIDS fundraising events in the late 80’s. In the third part, I’d never seen so much jumping and leaping as the dancers raced to keep up with Mozart’s vertiginous scales.
The second piece, "Jangle" set to Bartok’s Rhapsodies No. 1 and No. 2 for Violin and Piano, is a piece so relaxed the dancers exchanged spontaneous smiles throughout, which seemed appropriate for something that in spirit and movement recalled Fiddler on the Roof. (A dependable hallmark of Lubovitch’s style is its unaffected joy.) The men wore baggy pants and boots and the women an edgy version of peasant dress, and all stomped and whooped in great glee. In the second of four movements, Jonathan E. Alsberry’s sharply etched, bravura solos brought the house down.
Last up was "Dvorak Serenade" set to the composer’s "Serenade in E Major," another four-part piece and one that displayed Lubovitch’s emphasis on the theme of community in dance. Here as elsewhere in his choreography, there’s often no difference between what men and women dance, so it becomes unsurprising when two women or two men perform a pas de deux. Instead of the usual counterpoint in which people move in contrast to one another (and in contrasting sexualities), Lubovitch’s dances emphasize how each dancer contributes to a unified whole in a smooth-flowing line from one body to another. The dance thus moves forward sequentially from dancer to dancer, rather like a game in which each person in turn supplies the next word of an evolving sentence. One dancer begins a movement which a second dancer picks up and carries forward and so on down the line. The dance ripples through several bodies to arrive at some kind of meaning, the completed sentence, and this sequencing is what gives Lubovitch’s choreography its form.
Lubovitch has a special talent for concluding his dances with compelling images that have a sculptural impact: a man holding a woman arrested while clearing a hurdle, another man holding a woman upside-down frozen in a sprint. Here the piece concluded as the dancers exited into the wings, leaving a couple silhouetted against the bright backdrop, arms rising slowly in a gesture of reverential awe. Kudos to Wendy Winters for her beautiful costumes: diaphanous classical Greek shifts for the women and a sheer version of what in the 1920’s were called "bathing costumes" for the men.
The New York Times has called Lubovitch "one of the ten best choreographers in the world." Last week at the Tsai Performance Center, the audience clearly agreed.
