Beautiful Decay-Time & Aging-Ballet X

Philadelphia Inquirer





BalletX's 'Beautiful Decay': Time dances on Two of the city's older dancers, Manfred Fischbeck and Brigitta Herrmann (rear) perform in the BalletX premiere. CHARLES FOX / Staff GALLERY: 'Beautiful Decay'  Merilyn Jackson, For The Inquirer POSTED: Tuesday, July 9, 2013, 1:08 AM Beautiful Decay seems an odd title for a ballet. "Decay" denotes partial deterioration, a breakdown to component parts, decomposition, rotting, and doesn't sound beautiful. But that's what choreographer Nicolo Fonte named his new work for Philadelphia's BalletX, premiering Wednesday at the Wilma Theater, to connote the onslaught of time and the changes it brings. In the first evening-length work ever commissioned by the seven-year-old company, Fonte illustrates his point by filling the piece with multiple off-beat juxtapositions, mixing dancers, dance styles, types of music, costumes, and aesthetics of different ages and genres. Manfred Fischbeck and Brigitta Herrmann, the guest dancers in the work, are now in their 70s, were once married to each other, and still partner in dance. They have been fixtures on Philadelphia's dance scene since arriving from Berlin in 1968 and founding, with Helmutt Gottschild, Group Motion Dance, which is still evolving and operating 45 years later. (While Fonte has worked separately with Herrmann and Fischbeck, Herrmann has been jetting back and forth to Germany to assist on a reconstruction of The Rite of Spring by Mary Wigman, the pioneer of German expressionism; it premieres there in November. When Wigman's own reconstruction premiered in 1957, Herrmann says, "I was a relatively new student, and I was honored to be considered in the girls' choir.") Brooklyn native Fonte retired from dancing in 2000 and has since become a most prolific choreographer. He maintained a partnership from 2002 to 2006 with the Göteborg Ballet in Sweden. He has created seven works for Aspen Santa Fe Ballet, which performed his groundbreaking In Hidden Seconds (made in 1999 for Spain's Compania Nacional de Danza) at the Kimmel Center in 2010. With more than 40 commissions from companies in the United States and Europe, the fortysomething Fonte signed a four-year contract in 2012 as resident choreographer for Salt Lake City's Ballet West. Over the course of several Beautiful Decay rehearsals, Fonte broke the dance down to its component parts and reconstructed them to fit back together seamlessly. In contrapuntal fusion, Fischbeck and Herrmann slipped in and out among the BalletX dancers as if mystically passing the torch the younger dancers will have to carry when the older ones are gone. "There's a very sweet duet for Chloe [Felesina] and Manfred," he says. BalletX newcomer Zachary Kapeluck shadowed Fischbeck's German expressionist-derived movement. Herrmann walked regally away from a small abstract combination and turned back momentarily to the dancers behind her. Her upraised arm stayed the march of time, if only for a moment. Though the rehearsals were serious and intensely laborious, there were light moments that showed the rapport Fonte and the company have built over five weeks of working together. When dancer Willie Cannon veered off Herrmann, Fonte jokingly said, "Willie, find a way that doesn't look like you're snubbing her" - to which Cannon exaggerated a snub, giving everyone a little laugh. Fonte demands a very open-chested look of the dancers because, he says, "it gives the idea, the potential of flight. It's the same way I use demi-point, because it implies you might take off." His musical choices are time- spanning, like the theme of this piece. The wintry pizzicatos and stormy evocations of Vivaldi's baroque The Four Seasons cover the first half. In selections from contemporary Icelandic composer Ólafur Arnalds, which underpin the second half, you might hear the attenuated screech of a braking subway train. In the Vivaldi, the dancers wear soft ballet slippers; in the modernist second half, the women slip into pointe shoes. "Using the Vivaldi gave me an interesting point of departure," Fonte said. Not only does the music offer many choreographic changes, "its metaphor of the changing seasons fits the concept of the multigenerational cast and the idea of decay." He often uses baroque music, he says, "for its fluidity and adaptability." He is using a recording by the Italian baroque ensemble Europa Galante, "which is not a version for a virtuoso violinist," he said. "They play authentic baroque music on baroque instruments, with an element of improv-ing it, which historically we know that [baroque musicians] did. So it's unbelievably contemporary sounding, the baroque violin almost sounds scratchy, industrial," while the Arnalds in the second half has "an electro-acoustic sound that I love and that sounds very current." "Even if the work has an intellectual idea," Fonte said, "the music choice is extremely difficult. I really struggle with it because it's hard to get it right and the decision to choose The Four Seasons was a bit excruciating because it can be so cliche." Reflecting on his work, Fonte said, "I had worked in other ballets with the theme of time passing," so when he was contacted by Christine Cox, BalletX co-artistic director with choreographer Matthew Neenan, and they began discussing what he might do with a commission, "it gave me the idea to explore the theme more explicitly with a multigenerational cast, and she loved that idea," he said. "And the more we talked about it the more we felt it should be a full evening-length work." But Fonte also decided there should be an intermission, to cleanly cut away from the baroque to the second half's modern-day look, marked by black and white "rehearsal" togs, black suits for the men and simple gray frocks for the women by Martha Chamberlain. It opens with a Max Richter work, appropriately titled Recomposed, and moves on to the Arnalds, which is uncannily analogous in crispness to the Vivaldi. Mimi Lien, who has designed many shows for many Philadelphia performing companies, designed a set of pillared arches and draperies that glide away over the course of the ballet, another stripping away of classicism to modernity. Watching Fonte direct the dancers - where to place a swooping hand or landing foot, when to flex, when to be en pointe, how long to hold a lift - reminded me of watching Klaus Tennstedt conducting Mahler years ago, throwing each note into the heavens as if fixing a star. Only here, it was as if Fonte was conducting time itself. At the least, he is inventing a pithy dance language that anyone can read and most will find mysteriously ethereal.
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/20130709_BalletX_s__Beautiful_Decay___Time_dances_on.html#DfvvQf7LcBA5Ib8T.99