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• [FEATURE] Jonathan Poretta: Finding the Artist Within
  by Rosie Gaynor
  
• [REVIEW] Ballets Russes at Boston Ballet
  by Theodore Bale
  
• [REVIEW] Diaghilev Seasons Festival in Russia
  by Elizabeth Stern
• [REVIEW] La Scala's Pink Floyd Ballet in Italy
  by Valentina Bonelli
  • VIDEO: Roland Petit on withing with La Scala Ballet
    

[Top] Photo © Angela Sterling Photography

"It was so quiet; and you felt the power of his dancing, but he didn't wear it on his sleeve. He just let you get inside. I think he has just rounded out his presence in the right direction." -- Peter Boal, artistic director of the Pacific Northwest Ballet         Finding the Artist Within Known for his unbounded energy onstage, Jonathan Porretta finds the artist within without losing touch with his audience. By Rosie Gaynor

No one expected Jonathan Porretta to rest upon his laurels once Pacific Northwest Ballet promoted him to principal. He is, after all, the dancer to whom Seattle Weekly attributed "the stamina of a dozen men and women," a man "charged with a primordial energy leached from the bowels of the earth." Of course, someone with that kind of get-up-and-go would continue to grow. He didn't just continue to grow, however, he re-invented himself as an artist. In the process, Porretta risked losing one of the attributes that distinguishes him as a dancer; his relationship with the audience. Pacific Northwest Ballet has other technically proficient dancers who can -- and do -- reach across the footlights to the audience, but Porretta practically jumps into your lap. His outrageous charm energizes us; we love his dazzling bravura, his bigger-than-Broadway smile, the contagious joy he evinces while performing. He never holds anything back. Porretta's vibrant personality manifested early on. Not long after he started dance classes (a present for his seventh birthday), Porretta's teachers began preparing him for competitions -- more than 10 a year, all over the state -- giving him his earliest lessons in performing. He usually did solos in every category (ballet, tap, jazz, lyrical), plus duets, and small and large ensembles. The set-up didn't vary, however. "There were always three judges in the front," Porretta explains, "and you were performing for them. You had to stare at those judges; you had to smile at those judges; and if you were doing a lyrical piece, you had to be emotional and convey those emotions to the judges." These directives came from the teachers. "As much as they would teach you your dancing -- 'point your feet here, do another turn there' -- they also said, 'look at the judges here, smile more here.'" At 14, Porretta joined the School of American Ballet. How did they respond to his outgoing energy at that elite temple of serious study? Porretta's warm brown eyes start to twinkle: "I think they tried to tone me down." But that didn't particularly bother him. "You have to be able to focus in the studio. Just tone it down and be calm," he says. "Not that I'm a calm person by any stretch of the imagination! But I tried to be. I wanted to fit in as much as possible. I was a total Jersey boy in the city with all these New Yorkers. It was very exciting. I was quiet, actually. And then when I got to be onstage, I could break out." Performance opportunities being (relatively) limited at the School of American Ballet, Porretta kept up with outside competitions, winning his last one -- Teen Mr. Dance -- at age 16. By then, he had found another outlet for performance, with Dances Patrelle. He was "just phenomenal" in these performances, says Pacific Northwest Ballet Artistic Director Peter Boal, adding that he appreciates Porretta's "splashy" side. "More often than not," Boal says, "dancers are not conscious that they have to engage as in a conversation with an audience." For Porretta, he concludes, it comes naturally. Porretta worked hard to focus during his years at the School of American Ballet, but that didn't quash his love of fun or his passion for performing. Case in point? [Top] Photo © Angela Sterling Photography Boal tells the story of watching an old class videotape: in the back, while the teacher corrected another student, there was Porretta, dancing Kitri, the ballerina from Don Quixote. "Porretta had license to get away with things like that, because he was smart and on top of things. He knew every combination; he knew the musicality you were looking for. He was incredibly receptive to corrections. So we gave him a loose leash … as far as doing Kitri in the back corner." And not just Kitri. One profile on Porretta (ballet-dance.com, 2005) recounts how he happened to be joking around, doing Odile's 32 Swan Lake fouettés and ending in a Dying Swan position, on the very day that Pacific Northwest Ballet's founding co-artistic director, Kent Stowell, happened to be watching class. The punch line? Stowell offered Porretta a job that same day. Since that day in 1999, Seattle has seen Porretta in more than 50 roles at Pacific Northwest Ballet -- not Kitri or Odile, but Mercutio, Puck, Mopey; Stowell even re-choreographed the Jester in his Swan Lake to take advantage of Porretta's technical brilliance. It seemed as though every season Porretta moved faster, jumped higher and forged a stronger connection with the audience. And then, during the 2004-2005 season, Porretta hit a new high. "That was my year of soloist getting promoted to principal -- probably the greatest season I will ever have in my career," says Porretta. In addition to dancing the thrilling Bach-meets-Africa Lambarena and a made-to-fit jazzy romp, Dual Lish, he interpreted with succès fou the punishing lead roles in Balanchine's heart-wrenching Prodigal Son and Tetley's soul-gripping Rite of Spring. The latter presented the dancer and audience alike one of those rare, total mind-body-spirit experiences. Francia Russell, founding co-artistic director of Pacific Northwest Ballet, was quoted at the time as saying: "The audience knows there is nothing he won't give onstage." [Top] Photo © Angela Sterling Photography Enter choreographer Victor Quijada, with a commission from Boal to create a new work for Pacific Northwest Ballet. The dancers were open, eager and game for anything, says Quijada. "It was like a completely foreign country," says Porretta. "Craziness. It was very weird." Porretta wasn't commenting on Quijada's remarkable movement, but rather about how Quijada performs his pieces. "It was not to the audience; it was never about performing to the audience," explains Porretta. "What I was proposing to the dancers at Pacific Northwest Ballet was: 'Let's be present. Whatever is happening in that presence, we'll amplify and allow the audience to be part of it,'" says Quijada. Since Quijada has ties to hip-hop, Porretta visited Seattle's War Room to get a feel for the art form. "The street dancers here in Seattle are brilliant," Porretta says. "In a hip-hop circle, the dancers may be showing off, but they're also working from within themselves. They're not looking out. It's inside. It's your own thing and you're sharing it with other people, but it's really just about your experience with the movement. We had to learn how to perform like that." The inward-focus approach worked well for Quijada's Suspension of Disbelief, which scored a major success in Seattle. But while it might work for certain mood pieces, it can get stale on the ballet stage. Picture the languid ballerina who keeps her vacant eyes forever downcast. Or, worse, the artist who is so into his own self that the audience has no point of access. "Inward" seemed antithetical to who Porretta was as a dancer. [Top] Photo © Angela Sterling Photography Nevertheless, this experience with Quijada set a major change in motion. Porretta made a conscious decision to interact differently with the audience. He experimented with inward focus in class and kept learning -- from his colleagues, from visiting choreographers (among them, Jean-Christophe Maillot and Twyla Tharp) and from works such as Molissa Fenley's marathon State of Darkness, where the dancer communicates through movements as small as a slight twitter of the hand. "That," says Porretta, "taught me a lot about performing." Porretta didn't view this sea of change as a risk. However, what if the audience didn't like his new presence? Would that matter? "The greatest thing about performing is when you feel the energy from the audience," Porretta says, passionately. "That's what feeds you as you're performing." That, was at risk. It is naive -- though tempting -- to believe that every artist who keeps exploring his art and himself will prevail. It worked for Porretta, though. He has discovered how to use his whole body when connecting with the audience and he did not lose his individuality in the process. And whereas before we knew exactly what kind of fireworks to expect from him, now we have the fun of surprise. Who in the audience would have guessed, years ago, that Porretta could reveal, as Boal describes it, "a side that is so refined and so subtle"? Boal points to Porretta's solo in Square Dance, one year after Quijada's fateful visit: "It was so quiet; and you felt the power of his dancing, but he didn't wear it on his sleeve. He just let you get inside. I think he has just rounded out his presence in the right direction." <end> [top] [REVIEW] Ballets Russes at Boston Ballet By Theodore Bale During the recent wealth of Ballets Russes-related activities in Boston and Cambridge, I was reminded of the first staging I saw of The Rite of Spring by Martha Graham, at the New York State Theater, in the late winter of 1984. That was an unforgettable evening, not in the least because Graham made a powerful curtain call dressed in a Halston gown, her hair impeccably styled in what looked liked two enormous conch shells. The audience leapt to a standing ovation, but this seemed more like respectful applause for the legend rather than for Graham's own version of the modern masterpiece. Terese Capucilli danced the Chosen One. There was a lot of thick rope onstage, and the male elders carried huge wooden sticks to bang on the stage floor. I remember thinking, however, that something crucial was missing, as if the ballet had been diluted from its original essence to something less outrageous, even if the production had centered on rape. That was the same year I witnessed work that struck me as shockingly new -- Lucinda Childs' field dances for Philip Glass' and Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach, Pina Bausch's epic Bluebeard at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Mark Morris' early dances at various venues, to mention only a few. In this context, Graham's Rite couldn't help but look old-fashioned. My only reference to the original ballet, prior to Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer's skillful later reconstruction of Nijinsky's choreography, was Herbert Ross' overwrought 1980 film, Nijinsky, with a stoic George de la Peña in the title role screaming out those compound rhythms from the wings. The extensive mythology of Rite had entered my consciousness. Over the past 25 years I have seen numerous versions, from Shen Wei's emphatic, monochromatic abstraction to Yvonne Rainer's recent and deeply theoretical ROS Indexical. Taking on this ballet, so loaded with psychological and aesthetic baggage, requires a choreographer with very sharp intuition. I've come to realize that most of the successful versions acknowledge the inherent binary oppositions in the original scenario, which seem somehow constant in Stravinsky's notorious and bi-tonal score (it is not atonal as some would prefer to describe). The Rite of Spring presented day and night, male and female, life and death, youth and old-age, the individual and society. At the abstract level, Nijinsky captured buoyancy and weight, polyrhythm, the horizontal and the vertical, and the beginnings of an aesthetic of repetition, particularly in the dance of the Chosen One. The question for living choreographers, it seems, is whether or not to ignore the basic form and intent of Nijinsky's original production. The success of Mexican choreographer Jaime Blanc's version for the Harvard Dance Center, which premiered in May, comes from his intelligent exploration of oppositions and a sophisticated look at the available performers, both young and old. The premiere was an outgrowth of a class at Harvard. Preceding performances of La Consagración de la Primavera, former principal dancer and artistic director laureate of the Martha Graham Dance Company, Christine Dakin, taught a weekly seminar at Harvard titled "Rite of Spring at the Nexus of Art and Ritual." She also danced a secondary role, the Ancestress, along with her students and Harvard alumni. Already, there was an opposition -- the experienced Dakin and a group of enthusiastic students. Intriguingly, the production completes a spiral of connection to the original; Graham danced the Chosen One in Massine's re-working of Nijinsky, while Dakin danced the Chosen One in Graham's version beginning in the 1980s. Blanc, who served as associate artistic director and choreographer of Ballet Nacional de Mexico for 35 years (he has since established his own company, Teatro Coreográfico Alternativo), is unknown to audiences in greater Boston. I was deeply impressed by his ability to rein this production into its final realization, exploiting the talents and experience of a former Graham star while giving the students reasonable yet dramatic movement. At a Harvard symposium running simultaneously with his premiere, Blanc said that his scenario was suggested by his childhood in Oaxaca, where he explained that "women are very smart and run things." He added that he was also influenced by a sense of ancient southern Mexican ritual as well as contemporary Catholicism. Consequently, his staging is refreshingly non-sexist, even if the Chosen One is stripped of her mummy-like costume (made from endless yards of scrim-like cotton) and forced to dance to her demise. It seems that the women are shaping this event and the men are obeying them. Yes, there are echoes of Clytemnestra in Dakin's solos, but she is such a seasoned performer that Blanc saw no reason to ignore her attributes. The choreography was as dense as it needed to be and highly cognizant of the intricacies of the score, constantly unfolding into a spectacular ritual. By contrast, Jorma Elo's new version of Rite for Boston Ballet is lavish and the binary opposites of the original scenario seriously diminished. The premiere on May 14 at the Wang Theatre was part of the company's Ballets Russes Centennial Celebration, which included exquisite stagings of Prodigal Son by Richard Tanner, Le Spectre de la Rose by Isabelle Fokine and Afternoon of a Faun by Ghislaine Thesmar. Elo's Rite was the only premiere and when the curtain rose to reveal a thin line of actual flames upstage (by effects specialists Jauchem and Meeh), it was difficult not to gasp. The flames, in various configurations, remained throughout. They were successful as a kind of metaphor for primitivism, though the spectacle eventually dominated the choreography. It was as if once this concept was secured (perhaps with local fire authorities), the dancing became an afterthought. I happen to love Elo's reckless virtuosity. He likes accomplished, versatile dancers with perfect articulation and confident classical technique. The women usually wear pointe shoes. The spine, in all its permutations, is a certain focus for him, with the dancers always using the back and torso in a highly expressive manner. That was evident here, but it seems that Elo's most successful works are more often chamber ballets. Rite forced the same problem on him as his failed Carmen -- how to manage a large ensemble. Blanc had an accomplished modern dance diva to anchor his version, but the 16 dancers in Elo's Rite come off as an unlikely flock. Certain dancers (Yury Yanowsky, Larissa Ponomarenko, Sabi Varga and Lorna Feijóo) emerge occasionally from the group, starry-eyed, but with little dramatic effect. It's hardly a flop, but I felt myself working hard to love the piece or to discern any scenario. Those flames, along with Charles Heightchew's glam-rock red-sequin costumes, made this attempt at spectacle seem more desperate and showy than well-considered. -- Theodore Bale <end> [top]

[REVIEW] Diaghilev Seasons Festival in Russia By Elizabeth Stern Perm, a provincial city located at the edge of Siberia and the Ural Mountains, is a city of paradoxes. Today, when you ask Russians what they think of when they hear the name Perm, they associate it most commonly with two things: the gulag and ballet. This Soviet city, with its checkered history, is where Sergei Diaghilev, the great impresario and creator of the Ballets Russes, came of age. Perm now hosts the eight-year-old biennial Diaghilev Seasons Festival. This year it brought representatives from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Paris and 14 other countries to Perm for a nine-day festival of ballet, opera, concerts, exhibitions, cinema and

Alexei Ratmansky's Russian Seasons, performed by the Bolshoi, was a perfect start to the festival. Ratmansky, a native of St. Petersburg, having ended a challenging stint as director of the Bolshoi, is now artist-in-residence at American Ballet Theatre. His piece echoes the more primitive works of the Ballets Russes (i.e. Nijinska) that sought inspiration from ancient Russian culture. This compelling work seems drawn straight from the palettes of Russian avant-garde painters: the bold, saturate colours of Petrov Vodkin, the dynamism and dizzying sense of movement of Malyavin's portraits of peasant life, and the raw grandeur of Goncharova.

Russian Seasons, made up of six couples, presents a microcosm of Russian village society. It is about youthful passions, nascent emotions and their developments, and it fuses classical ballet steps with the streamlined, colloquial vocabulary of Slavic folk dance. The work and its score are loosely based on the Russian Orthodox Church calendar, and play with the theme of what constitutes "Russianness."

Leonid Desyatnikov's score, composed in 2002 (not originally for ballet), waxes lyrical and dissonant - with its haunting melodies reminiscent of Copland, aided by the vocal talents of Yana Ivanilova. Desyatnikov considers Ratmansky's choreography "probably the most fitting embodiment of my music in ballet." Indeed, Ratmansky's choreography is extremely musical. His play with quick directional shifts, combinations executed at breakneck speeds, and his wonderful sense of phrasing and rhythmic pacing cannot help but recall another émigré Russian choreographer who founded the company for which Ratmansky first choreographed this piece -- the legendary George Balanchine. Ratmansky has a profound use of space and compositional grouping and pairings. His distillations of traditional line dances and the Russian "khorovod," sometimes panning out in a kind of canon between dancers, are particularly clever. This technically demanding ballet is diffused with a sense of both playfulness and anxiety. The dancers oscillate between moments of reverie, frolicsome games and vague dismay. The ballet seems to focus on two primary storylines: the couple in orange and the girl in red.

The stunning Natalia Osipova reprised her role as the rebellious soloist in red. She seems to fight against the expectations of the group, which circles around her, only at the end of her solo to lock arms back to back with her partner, Denis Savin. The two slowly sink to the ground, letting their heads rest on the other's shoulder, in a feeling of surrender. Osipova, who turned just 23 in May, performed her part with an earthiness, a kind of violence and maturity beyond her years.

Ekaterina Shipulina, performing to a hometown crowd, was superb in the lead role, which was first created for Wendy Whelan in 2006. She gave an impression of disaffected fragility, of aching loss, of latent agony in the face of time, growth and aging. Shipulina, changing from an orange dress to nuptial white, moves in elegiac lament to Desyatnikov's dirge-like music, as if she is mourning the loss of her youth and apparently that of a loved one.

Performed the same night by the Bolshoi, Twyla Tharp's In the Upper Room is a relatively new addition to the repertoire in Russia. Originally premiered in 1986, and well known in the West, the piece was only added to the Bolshoi's programme in 2007, thanks to Ratmansky's modernizing influence. Tharp's work is always a showstopper, with its pulsating score by Phillip Glass and the giddy athleticism of its choreography. The work drives on, like an overheating train engine, creating a heightened sense of anticipation in the audience. While still exciting, the piece, some 23 years old, is beginning to feel a bit dated, resembling a glorified, if hypnotic 1980s aerobics class. Giselle was also performed at the festival, by the Perm Ballet with soloists from the Paris Opera Ballet -- the husband-and-wife duo, Clairemarie Osta and Nicolas Le Riche. The set designs, costumes and lighting were breathtaking. The first act was diffused with a lovely golden light and the lush, georgic beauty of an autumn in the French countryside. This romantic warhorse of a ballet, however, fit somewhat clumsily into the festival's programme of newer works. Osta is a diminutive, but wide-shouldered ballerina, who physically fit the role of Giselle, yet nevertheless failed to convey the shy girlishness of her

Natalia Makina, of the Perm Ballet, who danced the role of Myrtha, the chilling wraith-queen of the Wilis, was excellent. With her sinewy form, wonderful rotation and control in her legs, and her somewhat stiff, if regal, upper body, she gave an intense portrayal of the icy fury of her character. The Perm Ballet, considered the third best ballet company in Russia, has had a well-established ballet scene since the Second World War, when teachers and dancers from the famous Vaganova Academy were evacuated during the siege and blockade of Leningrad.

Casting-Off, performed by Evgeny Panfilov's ballet company, is a relatively new work by the promising young choreographer Larisa Aleksandrova, from Moscow. Aleksandrova's piece is a theatrical exploration of gender roles, love, fate and the attraction (and trappings) of domesticity. The work relies heavily on innovative costuming that serves multiple functions. The costumes (sack-type dresses and then hoop-skirts) and props (such as orange yarn) do not hinder or act as gimmicky substitutes for legitimate choreography, but rather become instruments and extensions of the choreography itself. Casting-off, despite some of its darker overtones, is charming and touching and full of dramatic choreographic moments.

The one-act work Medea for the Perm Ballet was presented by Yuri Possokhov, formerly of the Bolshoi, and now choreographer-in-residence at the San Francisco Ballet. The work, also known as Damned, was first created in 2002. The ballet is based on Euripides' classic tragedy of the betrayed sorceress Medea, who is driven to commit the gruesome crime of filicide. It evoked the retrospective Hellenism that so characterized the Silver Age Russian artistic scene, which Fokine, Balanchine and especially Nijinsky also tapped into. Medea is set to the music of Ravel -- a composer who worked with the Ballets Russes. Unfortunately, Possokhov's choreography is not particularly musical or innovative in its use of classical ballet vocabulary. There was something of an anachronistic mismatch of plot, choreography and music. Possokhov's use of the corps (dressed in beautifully flowing white skirts, white close-cropped braided wigs and masks) was far more successful than his choreography for the soloists.

Ring, created by the young choreographer Aleksei Miroshnichenko, is a contemporary work set to the eclectic score of St. Petersburg hip-hop group the 2H Company. Originally created for the Maryinsky Ballet in 2007, Miroshnichenko brought the work to Perm. This meta-balletic work is set on a bare stage, meant to resemble a dance studio -- darkly lit with a series of lamps overhead and penned in by ballet barres lining the three sides of the stage. The mercurial referee or ringmaster of this balletic circus controls, evaluates and manipulates the dancers around him, like a schizophrenic, tyrant ballet master. Two couples, dressed in black and white, embellished practice attire, vie with one another, followed by their respective "packs" of similarly dressed corps members. The work is something of a cheeky commentary on the daily grind of a ballet dancer -- class, rehearsal, performance. Ring gives a stylized glimpse into the

William Forsythe's In The Middle Somewhat Elevated, performed by the Maryinsky Ballet, was spectacular as always and a wonderful final piece for the festival. Originally created for the incomparable Sylvie Guillem, then of the Paris Opera, the Maryinsky has had this piece in its repertorie since 2004, and it suits the lanky Kirov dancers well. Dressed in greenish-blue leotards and black tights, the dancers test the very limits of the human body, with wild extensions and exaggerated displacements of the body. Irina Golub, paired with Mikhail Lobukhin, brings a slinky eroticism to this invigorating work. The lithe Ekaterina Kondaurova is mesmerizing with her scissor-sharp hyper-extended limbs and her cool confidence. Forsythe's edgy and starkly neoclassical choreography still feels fresh and novel even 22 years after its premiere. As I overheard a few Russians say to each other while exiting the theatre: "I wish the piece was even longer!"

The Diaghilev Seasons Festival is a triumphant testament to an artistic mindset that forever altered ballet, both inside and out of Russia. -- Elizabeth H. Stern

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music. He immediately travelled to London to meet the English band members, who were enthusiastic about the idea of a ballet with their songs. They even offered to compose new music and play live at the debut at the Palais des Sports in Marseille.

The ballet, which premiered the very year of the foundation of the Ballet de Marseille in 1972, has received only acclaim, even without live music, in Paris, Germany, Russia and especially in the Far East, where in 2004 the work was danced by the Asami Maki Ballet, with some revisions and additions.

Chosen by the former director Elisabetta Terabust, Pink Floyd Ballet has also entered into La Scala's repertoire. It is an unusual ballet because of its severe staging, but reveals itself as a work able to handle the differences between classic and modern.

Asked about the effect of his rock ballet amid La Scala's gold and velvet backdrop, Petit answered that he never worried about distinguishing dance styles or theatre stages. In fact, Pink Floyd Ballet shows the choreographic value of mixing idioms and suggestions, from classical ballet to modern dance, even bringing movements and gestures from disco. You can find also a tribute to the famous "moonwalk" by Michael Jackson, added in one of the late revisions during the explosive song Run Like Hell.

If today the ballet has a dated style, when Pink Floyd Ballet was created it really captured the esprit du temps. The girls dressed in white leotards, while the boys went bare-chested with 1970s' style trousers. They swarmed on the stage with sinuous energy, drawing in the space effective maps reminiscent of powerful and seductive ensembles by Maurice Béjart, Petit's contemporary and rival.

In the current reincarnation, Petit adds a more classic attention to the principals. And it's not by chance that three étoile guests performed the first performances in Milan. From the Bolshoi Ballet, the sublime Svetlana Zakharova, for the first time engaged in a Petit's choreography, performed the two pas the deux, Hey You and Echos -- the first, romantic, the second, brillant -- without any ballet artifice, just sharp exactitude. Guillaume Côté from the National Ballet of Canada, also his debut in a Petit ballet, dances with elegance during Is There Anybody Out There.

The result is one-and-a-half hours of pieces that follow each other with a balanced rhythm, mixing ensemble, soloists and étoiles, and all amid special effects -- like laser lights and coloured fog -- taken straight out of a rock concert.
-- Valentina Bonelli

VIDEO: Roland Petit on working with La Scala Ballet (en francais):
http://www.teatroallascala.org/en/videoteca/index_video_8655.html
(Source: © Teatro alla Scala)

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