PA Ballet Company B, Oct. 11, Merriam Theater

POSTED: Saturday, October 20, 2007, 4:36 PM

Filed Under: Arts Dance

Do the Experiment

Lights up, dancers on stage, Pennsylvania Ballet invited its audience back into its world of tour jetes, sassy social dance, and experimental moves out of nowhere. For its Merriam opening, PAB began with George Balanchine's Concerto Barocco, a deceptively simple intertwining of bodies to Johann Sebastian Bach's gorgeous Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins. This is a dance of pure abstraction which requires the ladies of the corps to be perfect, and they were. In the principal roles, Arantxa Ochoa, Amy Aldridge and Sergio Torrado were excellent as well. Torrado is a fine partner, strong, confident and responsive to his lady. Keep in mind this abstract ballet which looks so pretty today was considered almost offensively experimental in its day.

As It's Going, choreographed in-house by Matthew Neenan, is generations away. Balanchine extended and speeded up the ballet line, Neenan wants to play with it. This ballet from 2006 is set to challenging Shostakovich music and, like Barocco, uses only colored lighting to create its setting. Neenan turns ballet lines upside down and sideways. Ballerinas get dragged across the floor by their feet, or tossed out from the wings into their partner's arms, or held aloft horizontally like lumber. Dancers even suddenly stop and pant. Julie Diana and partner Zachary Hench got a lovely almost traditional romantic pas de deux. Ian Hussey, just promoted to corps, showed speed and flare. Neenan's mixture of somber, dramatic music with easy-going, playful movement works. This generation's experimentation could easily end up the next's classicism.

Polishing off the evening was Company B, a crowd-pleaser from modern great Paul Taylor. Using nine Andrews Sisters songs from the World War II era, Taylor incorporates the social dance steps, swing and fox trot, from that era into a mix of modern and ballet. Silhouetted dancers move slowly across the stage back in postures of soldiers slowly marching, kneeling to raise a rife, or falling, thus underlining without hitting the audience over the head that this great joyful music was being sung in time of war. The music is so inviting the audience squirms around rhythmically with the dancers. Corps members Abigail Mentzer and Andre Vytoptov had a great romp with Pennsylvania Polka. James Ihde got the Latin beat just right in Tico-Tico. But it was Matthew Neenan whooping it up, and hitting every leap as the Bugle Boy of Company B who brought down the house.

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