Caine They Dance



Dancer David Krensing

The Jaybird Lounge— now being world premiered by the Pennsylvania Ballet — starts off with dancers doing classical gestures to a pretty aria by Bach, so audience members may reckon they’re in for a bit of traditional ballet. And they would be right. Right about the bit part, that is; as the piece progresses the dancers bend, stretch and otherwise transform their original movements. Jaybird’s choreographer, Val Caniparoli, noted that the evolution is in correlation to the music, 18 selections from Uri Caine’s The Goldberg Variations. In that piece, the composer works his own series of eclectic variations on Bach’s originals with instrumentations ranging from baroque to Latin jazz to drum ’n’ bass electronica.

"I go with the music," says Caniparoli. "I took the aria as a point of departure and [extended] it over time." In a duet done to the bluesy The Nobody Knows Variation, the choreographer has Kelly Moriarty and Portia Maria Jones getting into "a little bit of turmoil. It’s a bit of an ‘I love you I hate you’ situation and the movement is a little more extreme in the hips."

Much like the music it’s performed to, Jaybird Lounge presents variations on a theme. Caniparoli was inspired by The Goldberg Variations disc, and after hearing Caine on a radio interview looked him up in the NYC phone book and called to ask if he could use the music as the basis for a new work. Caine has since played a small role by helping decide the order of the excerpted variations for the dance. Caniparoli, who lives in San Francisco, did not know the jazz pianist/composer Caine hails from the Philadelphia area. So it’s a happy coincidence that the work was created on the Pennsylvania Ballet.

Two additional pieces round out the company’s current program, titled In Triplicate. There’s Vicissitudes, an ambitious multi-patterned Balanchine-inspired work by the ballet’s own Matthew Neenan. And the closer is Arden Court, an acrobatic work by Paul Taylor last presented by the Ballet in 1993, and now providing principal dancer Jeffrey Gribler a final opportunity to perform what is considered one of his signature roles.

—Deni Kasrel

Pennsylvania Ballet presents In Triplicate, through May 6, Merriam Theater, 250 S. Broad Street. $16-$60. 215-336-2000, www.paballet.org.