Between their primary productions, Miami City Ballet offers scintillating programs of shorter balletic works. This season’s “Winter Mix” opened following the bittersweet news that the longtime artistic director Lourdes Lopez will depart City Ballet at the season’s end, two years before the expiration of her contract, to take up a new project within Miami’s thriving arts community.
But enthusiasm was not diminished among either the audience or the performers at this show, given at Fort Lauderdale’s Broward Center for the Performing Arts on February 22. The show opened with Walpurgisnacht, George Balanchine’s choreography of the ballet sequence belatedly composed by Charles Gounod for his best-known opera, Faust. The opera premiered in 1859, but the ballet music, which is rarely used in stage productions (the Royal Opera’s is a notable exception), came along for the opera’s final act ten years later. In Goethe’s original conception, referenced in both parts of Faust as well as in a separate poem, the scene is a witch’s sabbath held at the summit of the Brocken, Northern Germany’s highest peak, where the assembled sorceresses consort with the devil in mockery of the feast of Saint Walpurga, who protects against witchcraft. Here Faust, guided by Méphistophélès, takes part in devilish celebrations that add to his anxiety over his seduction of the young maiden Marguerite.
Balanchine approached the adaptation late in his career—the ballet premiered in 1975, just eight years before his death—and sheared it of much of its literary content. Set for twenty-four female dancers, Balanchine’s successive confections follow their beguiling pursuit of a single male. There is no trace of Faust or his tutelage by Méphistophélès; instead, we get a lengthy frenzy. For the Miami City Ballet, which claims that “Balanchine’s legacy is at the core of who we are” and has performed a majority of his works (Walpurgisnacht entered its repertoire in 2017), the performance unrolled over seventeen minutes with a charming naturalism that never lost intensity. More than seventy-five of Balanchine’s ballets were costumed by the inimitable Karinska (this was the professional mononym of his fellow émigré Varvara Zhmoudsky). Her lithe and breezy designs worn here, costuming the dancers all in cool blues and purples, reminded us of why the choreographer, who eagerly shared her commitment to ease and athleticism, attributed “fifty percent of the success of my ballets” to her.
Karinska’s vivid costumes came back in force in the final part of the program, Balanchine’s earlier (1951) setting of Maurice Ravel’s La valse. A thirty-three-minute “choreographic poem for orchestra,” conceived before the First World War but which only premiered in 1920, the titular “waltz” morphed from a high-romantic tribute to the form’s Viennese tradition into a sarcastic grotesque: warped music for a warped world. Ravel, who served in a combat-logistics role on the Western Front and memorably commented that his society was “dancing on the edge of a volcano,” ultimately offered a fractured memory of the prewar ballroom soundscape, feeling he could not do otherwise. Although the composer intended for the piece to be choreographed, the music so captivated the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who had commissioned it, that he refused to present it as a ballet because he thought a dance element would detract from its decadent glories. Ravel ended their friendship over the decision—leading Diaghilev to go so far as to challenge him to a duel—but within a few years other companies were presenting choreographed performances.
Miami City Ballet did not take up La valse until 2005, and the company’s production remains evocative. Jean Rosenthal’s sets transport us to an abstracted ballroom, where thirty-four partnered dancers move with a hypnotic and studied languor. Their movements yield to the central couple, a woman in white who leaves her partner for a mysterious figure. After the corps de ballet reveals her death under his malign spell, we learn he is Death himself. The principal Hannah Fischer’s movements conveyed innocence throughout, with growing hints of fascination with Death. Cameron Catazaro imparted noble and gentlemanly flourishes but ultimately fell before Steven Loch, who danced the part of Death with ruthless charm.
The evening was not all devils and death. The middle part of the program presented the world premiere of the modern-dance choreographer Pam Tanowitz’s Coincident Dances, a jazzy twenty-minute pastiche scored by the Grammy Award–winning contemporary composer Jessie Montgomery, currently the Mead Composer-in-Residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Hints of classicism undergird the jazz, though the program note’s seemingly obligatory insistence that the composer also infuses “social consciousness” into her work was nowhere borne out. Appearing before a minimal set with nondescript urban costumes by Harriet Jung and Reid Bartelme, Tanowitz’s movements suggest a city’s hurly-burly, with pedestrians who, after a few minutes of harmony set to Montgomery’s high-strung “Starburst,” crowd each other, back up, and ultimately move forward to a light source to the more insistent strains of the titular “Coincident Dances.” The meaning, if there is one, escaped me, but Miami’s dancers acquitted themselves with extraordinary discipline.
