Dance Reviews

Apr 2, 2000 - Diablo Ballet Radiant in Nevada Festival Ballet's Gala 2000

By Jack Neal

Fortunately, out of the ashes of Nevada Festival Ballet's planned full length "Cinderella" scheduled for the Pioneer Center Saturday night (4/1/2000) a radiant evening of dance emerged via the exhilarating dancing of the San Franciso Bay Area's exceptional Diablo Ballet.

When some of the members of the NFB's Board of Directors put the company through a near-death experience weeks ago causing major defections from the company's artistic and business leadership, it appeared hopeless that Saturday's presentation of Prokofiev's "Cinderella" would ever take place or that anything would be put in place to take its place.

Enter Beth Macmillan, NFB's interim executive director, Diablo artistic director Lauren Jonas and DB choreographers Nikolai Kabaniaev and Kelly Teo and a born-again coalition was quickly put in place to save the day.

In this instance, leaning on the Diablo Ballet makes sense. It's always been a thought of mine (and quite possibly others) that a close bonding of the two companies (the Diablo has played here under the auspices of NFB often) could make first-rate dance pay off handsomely here and there (mainly Walnut Creek, California) if repertory and dancers were regularly interchanged, but that's another story. The outgrowth of this current spurt of bonding was Saturday's satisfying evening of dance blending what remains of the NFB corps de ballet, including two of the company's excellent solo dancers, Gabriela Simich and Alicia Stipech, and the brilliant ten dancers that make up the entire roster of dancers for Diablo Ballet.

Using only the inspired lighting Michael Fernbach, in many cases replicating the lighting designs created for the Diablo Ballet by Jodi Feder and Jack Carpenter, the framing of each of the evening's four ballet's was never less than lyrical, but - then - so was much of the movement that graced the stage.

The "excerpts" from "Cinderella" which opened the program were the concert's most liquid case in point. The pas de deux between Cinderella (Tina Kay Bohnstedt) and the Prince (Nikolai Kabaniaev) was rapturous. Kabaniaev's choreography was sublime, the execution by both principals no less sublime. With additional choreography by NFB choreographer Victoria Iantchouk the inclusion of twelve young pre-teen ballerinas dressed in pink enhancing the ballet's notion of love at first sight was a particularly happy touch. The fresh duo dancing of Simich and Stipech, "Dance of the Oranges," was elegant and precisely managed.

Kabaniaev's setting of Duke Ellington's "The Single Petal of a Rose" for five, again very young, NFB ballerinas was adorable in its simplicity and deftness of execution and lent credibility that this was a shared evening of dance between the Nevada Festival and Diablo Ballets.

The remainder of the Gala 2000 event was all Diablo.

"Dancing Miles," to the music of trumpeter Miles Davis, was cool in both sound and look. With pairings of couples in with-it movements to the sophisticated smoothness of Davis's art, "Dancing Miles" snaps to attention and just boogies into several layers of ecstatic visualizations of Davis's take on the high art of jazz. Teo's choreography epitomizes coolness and cleanly defined, clear-cut snap-to movement. Barbara Breen's simple but classic-jazz and body-form costumes and Jodi Feder's lighting do the rest; "Dancing Miles" is cutting-edge, knock-out modern dance.

Rachmaninoff's "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini" was the inspiration for Kabaniaev's "Rapsodia," which struck me as being only a partially successful choreographic experience. The sharp-edged, military modernism Kabaniaev's employs through so much of "Rapsodia," considerable marching and trudging about, smacks a bit too much at "Star Wars" as a ballet. It's Kabaniaev's eloquence of movement with Rachmaninoff's love theme some three-quarters of the way through the piece that strikes home with the lyricism that fits the work's mood best of all. Done as a dream sequence, a handsome young man dreaming of sharing his night of rapture with the three young women of his dreams, "Rapsodia" is all it should be, a rapturous love fantasy that's rhapsodically danced. Another plus, Jack Carpenter's lighting is itself as radiant as the best portions of the ballet it enhances.

For information about future Nevada Festival Ballet events call 775-785 7915.