Also this issue:

Tilted View
One Philadelphian's quest to bring a controversial piece of public art to our city.
-Robin Rice

Odd Fellows
-Jen Darr

BodyVox
-Janet Anderson

Louis Menand
-Sam Adams

tick tick ... Boom!
-Steve Cohen

By the Bog of Cats ...
-Toby Zinman

The Male Intellect: An Oxymoron?
-David Anthony Fox and Toby Zinman

Three plays at Triangle Theater
-Toby Zinman

February 20-26, 2003

dance

Carmina Burana/Le Travail

by Janet Anderson

Sometimes things just work. Matthew Neenan, Pennsylvania Ballet's emerging resident choreographer of note, chose the title Le Travail (The Work) for his commission to create a new ballet honoring the big PMA "Degas and the Dance" exhibit because he was struck by the artist's understanding of the work of ballet.

And from the first minute The Academy of Music's ornate curtain was lifted and Neenan's dancers appeared onstage wearing long white tutus and colored sashes of Degas' era, Le Travail worked. The dancers invite us into their world while Robert Maggio's original score musically quotes Giselle, and the audience is hooked. Not that anyone lingers in 19th-century romanticism.

Neenan is a movement impressionist. He experiments fearlessly with his canvas of the Academy stage, exploring Degas' drive toward modernity. The choreographer starts with the white tutu-clad ballerinas then adds in boldly moving dancers wearing the orange, red and aqua shades of Degas' later work. Finally he sends out unisex movers in neutral-toned body leotards, whose angular movements couldn't be more contemporary, to squiggle through the colors. Amy Aldridge and Edward Cieslak's angular pas de deux is the hot center of the bright colors, while Riolama Lorenzo and Meredith Rainey provide sinuous focus for the leotard squad.

The dancers all emerge and disappear from behind long movable colored panels designed by sculptor Steven Weber. The panels turn onstage, constantly changing color, becoming more vibrant as dancers seem to emerge from or disappear into their abstract surfaces. And Maggio's score seamlessly, even relentlessly, drives the movement away from Giselle and toward heavily pulsating modern sound. At times the tonal imperative is almost martial.

This is sophisticated stuff, a shaped, whole and terrific ballet. Neenan and his collaborators honor Degas, and themselves, with this mature work for the opera house stage, and give PAB a repertory gem.

The actual program headliner is Carmina Burana, long touted as PAB's signature dance. With the fine voices of the Choral Arts Society, the lush orchestra sound and provocative moves (no program notes needed to know the 13th-century Latin poems Carl Orff's cantata celebrates are about sensuous pleasures), this is a crowd pleaser. The dancers always look good performing in it, none more so opening night than fabulous Arantxa Ochoa, and the long-necked, willowy-armed Meredith Reffner. But I'd love to see the day that Le Travail was PAB's signature, a modern classical ballet created for, by and with the Pennsylvania Ballet.