October 16-22, 2003

dance

The Big 4-0

by Janet Anderson

It's a big birthday year for Pennsylvania Ballet -- 40! Looking flush with talent and confidence, PAB opened this landmark season with a company premiere of an American dance classic, Jerome Robbins' Fancy Free, a ballet even older than the company. But this World War II-era (1944) dance certainly didn't look quaint, nor was it performed reverently like some museum reconstruction. It was full-out dance, funny and honestly ageless. The jazzed-up Robbins ballet moves looked very Broadway, and why not? Robbins and his musical collaborator, Leonard Bernstein transformed this very successful ballet into the full-length Broadway show On the Town, and later created West Side Story. They knew something about movement and music, as well as audiences. The PAB production, with its slightly art moderne abstracted New York street-scene set and great orchestral accompaniment, felt more like musical theater than concert dance. It wasn't hard to imagine why the ballet was a smash all those years ago.

The three sailors opening night -- James Ady, Philip Colucci and Jonathan Stiles -- were terrific. They didn't just pull off all the jumps and crazy dance stunts, they were actually funny and created recognizable characters. Christine Cox and Amy Aldridge were equally good as the wary girls the sailors pursue. In a cast that could have taken this show on the road, no one had the cool, the knowing twinkle, the gum-chewing, heel-clicking stuff down better than Ady.

Traditionally PAB opens its season with works by George Balanchine, the New York City Ballet's founder and resident choreographic wizard, who also played godfather at PAB's birth. So balancing out Fancy Free's hijinks were two abstract Balanchine ballets, Concerto Barocco and The Four Temperaments, both in PAB's repertory since the 1960s. In Concerto Barocco, the PAB dancers elegantly wove their bodies in and out of Balanchine's maze-like body geometry dancing to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Dede Barfield and Martha Chamberlain led the ensemble crisply and cleanly, getting great partnering from James Ihde. Obviously The Four Temperaments, with Paul Hindemith's evocative orchestral music, was about four moods: the melancholic, sanguinic, phlegmatic and choleric (think gloomy, cheerful, apathetic and angry). But nothing is really obvious in this abstract dance -- except that on opening night Arantxa Ochoa and Meredith Rainey were quicksilver fast in the cheerful section, and Alexei Borovik looked wonderfully buoyant and not a bit apathetic leading the phlegmatic variations. Fancy 40 indeed!

A FANCY 40th

Pennsylvania Ballet, Oct. 8, Merriam Theater

-- Respond to this article in our Forums -- click to jump there