Twyla Tharp writes about collaboration with Elvis, where Elvis met Look Now producer

Pretty self-explanatory
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Re: 'Nightspot' - Elvis/Twyla Tharp ballet , March/April '08

Post by sweetest punch »

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/breakin ... 68438.html

Two musical legends keep dancers on their toes

Legendary choreographer Twyla Tharp has plenty to do on a recent afternoon: costumes to adjust, rehearsals to run for the much anticipated world premiere of her latest creation, Nightspot. But as soon as a photo shoot of the rehearsal gets going, she can't help it. Give Tharp an opportunity to play, and she will.

As the six dancers from Miami City Ballet slide and spiral and shimmy, Tharp gets in there with them, flirting, posing and subverting her own steps, while the dancers laugh and play along -- intent but happily unintimidated by the world-famous choreographer who has challenged them for a new piece that's making a buzz far beyond Miami.

When Nightspot makes its debut Friday at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, it will be a major cultural event. Not only is it a creation by Tharp -- whose many credits include Movin' Out, the hit Broadway dance musical set to songs by Billy Joel -- but it has a new score by pop-music icon Elvis Costello and costumes by famed designer Issac Mizrahi.

But for Tharp, the primary motivation behind creating a new piece in Miami, rather than in a cultural capital more used to unveiling significant new dance productions, was the chance to work with Miami City Ballet, which commissioned Nightspot and brought the artists together. For Tharp, it was also a way to take her constant quest to create something new to a different environment.

''That was great,'' Tharp, sitting in a meeting room upstairs at MCB's Miami Beach studios, says of the chance to create something with Costello, someone she's admired for years. But she says that working with MCB artistic director Edward Villella and his dancers ``would have been reason enough. Somebody who does as good a job as he has done here and created such a wonderful instrument, it's very seductive to come play on it.''

And to play on it here. ''What's different here -- among other things -- is Miami,'' Tharp says. ``It's an opportunity for me to learn, to ask some different questions. It's a new launching point. It's in my imagination, this Miami. It's not in the real world.''

Nightspot brings together for the first time two giants in their fields: Tharp, 66, who has conquered modern dance, ballet, Hollywood and Broadway; and Costello, 53, who has gone from punk to songwriting icon, ranging into rock, jazz, classical, blues, swing and more. Both are pioneers with a history of eclipsing barriers between classical and popular; relentlessly curious and rigorous, they continually expand the possibilities of their art forms. It could be a potent partnership.

That they've come together in South Florida is another validation, not only of MCB, but of Miami's growth into a place with the talent, facilities, energy and chutzpah to make something like this happen.

''It's been an incredible experience,'' says Costello, who arrived Monday for final rehearsals with the musicians. ``There's a sense of an event about the occasion, which I'm looking forward to. I like things to be rare.''


It is not just rare for Miami.

''Any new piece by Twyla Tharp is a major event in the dance world,'' says Arlene Shuler, president and chief executive officer of the storied dance venue New York City Center, who plans to come to Miami to see Nightspot. ``And having a score by Elvis Costello certainly gives it added interest.''

That's true in large part because of what Tharp -- especially in collaboration with Costello -- brings to the appeal of dance in general, Shuler says.

''A choreographer of the stature and talent of Twyla Tharp creating work for ballet companies is very important to keep the creative energy flowing,'' Shuler says. ``It gets people excited and, hopefully, will bring in younger people. We need that for the future of the art form.''

Villella hopes Nightspot will extend the company's audience and reputation. ''With these international people, we are hoping we will attract an audience that would not necessarily go to a ballet but might go to something like this,'' Villella says. ``It's a major event in our world.''

Nightspot got its start in March 2005 when MCB Executive Director Pamela Gardiner, an ardent Costello fan, arranged to visit the singer backstage after a concert at the Jackie Gleason Theater. Gardiner had taken note when in 2000 Costello composed Il Sogno, a score for the Italian ballet troupe Alterballetto. She hoped he would do something for MCB.

''I thought it would be really important for the company's development, and that it could become an important piece for the field,'' Gardiner says.

After an enthusiastic two-hour conversation about Balanchine and Stravinsky, Villella and ballet, Gardiner invited Costello to visit MCB's studio the next morning. At first the singer said no -- but at 3 a.m. he sent an e-mail saying he had changed his mind. He showed up in his tour bus the next morning and was so bowled over watching the dancers in their daily class that the planned half-hour visit lasted much longer.

''It would kill most horses -- and that's just what they do to loosen up,'' Costello says of the dancers' routine. ``The dynamism and dedication wasn't something I'd experienced before.''

Even though both Costello and Tharp were interested, bringing them together, with their complex schedules planned years in advance, was a challenge. They didn't meet until May 2006, in Tharp's office and apartment in New York. Both are formidably intelligent and intense, and sparks flew.

''She's not shy of an opinion, and then again, neither am I,'' Costello says. ``In that, we got along fine.''

''He is obviously a great collaborator,'' Tharp says. ``He is very quick, efficient, imaginative, creative -- all good things.''

Not so good: Between touring and other projects, Costello couldn't come to rehearsals. ''It's been an MP3 relationship,'' Tharp says. They sent recordings back and forth, Tharp often working with a hodgepodge of Costello's songs while she waited for updates to the score.

Although Costello has written only once for ballet, and never for a choreographer of Tharp's caliber, he was undeterred, focused on composing something that excited and stretched him.

''A lot of the music I've done was written for dance, but for a different kind of dance,'' he says. ``We're living in a time where this perceived ownership and elitism of certain types of music has been eroded by people's experience and desire to work together. And that's the way it should be.''

He has created a score for a 35-piece orchestra in the pit and a nine-piece dance band onstage, which includes a horn section and a guitarist who also plays Cuban tres. There'll be fleeting references to his other songs, and some Latin flavor -- although Costello insists that he's not trying to reproduce rumba or salsa, just seeking something new.


Tharp is just as passionate about the possibilities of popular music. She used Petulia Clark's Downtown for her first concert in 1965, and set the Joffrey Ballet dancing to the Beach Boys for 1973's Deuce Coupe, which broke down the barriers between ballet and modern dance and catapulted her to stardom.

A nightclub and some kind of Latinidad are part of Nightspot, but Tharp will not reveal any details, saying she wants audiences and critics to make up their own minds.

For MCB's dancers, working with Tharp was a mind-opening experience. Although four of her dances are in MCB's repertoire, creating something from scratch with her was very different from their routine of learning preset sequences of familiar ballet steps. Instead, Tharp had them follow her as she improvised to constantly changing music -- rock, tango, Costello, the Gypsy Kings.

''At the beginning, we were all really intimidated,'' says Callie Manning, an MCB soloist enjoying her most important role as a lead in Nightspot. ''We were afraid we'd do something wrong.'' Instead, they found Tharp's intensity and creativity inspiring. ''She's always excited,'' Manning says. ``She's excited about waking up every day. She's excited about getting a cup of coffee. It's really inspiring to work with her.''

This is exactly what Villella hoped for. ''It is a very, very different challenge for us,'' he says. ``It extends the dancers.''

For Tharp, it's the first time since she worked with the Joffrey Ballet that she has made an original work for a troupe other than huge, world-renowned companies like American Ballet Theater, New York City Ballet and England's Royal Ballet. But like the division between pop and classical, categories like regional and world class no longer make sense to Tharp. She's just interested in the dancers and the moment that inspire her.

''The talent pool is becoming interchangeable,'' she says. ``It's all up for grabs. Whoever's got the energy and heart and passion and the determination to go for it, go for it.''

photos here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/breakin ... 68438.html
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Re: 'Nightspot' - Elvis/Twyla Tharp ballet , March/April '08

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Re: 'Nightspot' - Elvis/Twyla Tharp ballet , March/April '08

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sweetest punch wrote: There'll be fleeting references to his other songs, and some Latin flavor
So he'll be quoting from Clubland then. I'm placing my bets now
--Paul--
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Re: 'Nightspot' - Elvis/Twyla Tharp ballet , March/April '08

Post by johnfoyle »

Photos from above link -

Image

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JOHN VANBEEKUM / MIAMI HERALD STAFF
Twyla Tharp moves among Miami City Ballet dancers as they perform a sequence from her new piece, Nightspot, which features music by Elvis Costello.
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Re: 'Nightspot' - Elvis/Twyla Tharp ballet , March/April '08

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http://www.jacksonville.com/apnews/stor ... KH80.shtml

March 27, 2008

Tharp/Costello ballet gives Miami another 'nightspot' for dance

By JENNIFER KAY
Associated Press Writer

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. - The bouncer at Miami's new nightspot is a compact, silver-haired woman who looks six dancers up and down when they walk in the door.

Twyla Tharp approves the plaid shirttails peeking out from under one man's gym hoodie. The famed American choreographer tells a woman in a long red skirt that she's lovely, but needs to rethink how she's twisted her hair. Then she orders the three couples to pose.

Tharp's "NIGHTSPOT" opens this weekend. Her new ballet, commissioned by the Miami City Ballet, is a collaboration with British rocker Elvis Costello.

Black and red posters around the city promise "a ballet about the dark side of love." The six principal dancers who joined Tharp last week in a Miami Beach rehearsal studio either face off or coil around each other at her commands to pose in their red, street-styled costumes.

The nightspot where their dance takes place "could be in the future, could be on the planet Jupiter," Costello said in a telephone interview last month.

"We were just trying to arrive at a title evocative of a nightclub, people spotted at a swanky nightspot," Costello said. "It's not trying to marry us to an overt narrative. I just didn't want it to be too fixed in time by calling it 'Disco' or something very specific."

Eighteen dancers will perform between an onstage nine-piece band on risers and a 32-piece orchestra in the pit in the 38-minute piece.

Miami City Ballet's founder, Edward Villella, and executive director, Pam Gardiner, sought out Costello after his 2005 concert in Miami Beach to propose scoring a new dance for them. The rock musician had recently released his first orchestral composition, "Il Sogno," the score to an Italian ballet production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

Tharp joined the project soon after, drawn to the rhythmic, speedy dancers Villella has trained in the Balanchine tradition.

"He has built here a company that is a company - a very unusual thing, to have a group that is really a solid group and not just an influx of strangers who pass in the night," Tharp said.

She tersely deflects questions seeking clues about the new ballet in an interview at Miami City Ballet's offices. But when she talks about the dancers and the audience, she doesn't stop moving, rolling back and forth in her conference room chair. She demonstrates with her hands what she wanted to see in Villella's dancers: precise movements building from a simple repetition to a more complex variation that quickly sends her hands and forearms swinging in the space before her.

"NIGHTSPOT" is Tharp's first new work to premiere since her productions on Broadway, the Tony-winning "Movin' Out" and "The Times They Are A-Changin'," narratives based respectively on the songs of Billy Joel and Bob Dylan. Unlike those two works, "NIGHTSPOT" is not a direct adaptation of Costello's songs.

For research, though, Tharp studied everything in Costello's varied musical catalog, along with books by Carl Hiaasen and other Miami histories. The two artists traded MP3s as the project developed.

"She would play just a few bars of something and say, 'Could you write something that just said this?' That's a perfect way to start to write," Costello said.

Fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi created the costumes with layers of T-shirts, hoodies, skirts and shrugs over leotards and tights. Hibiscus red was the only color that made sense for a dance in Miami, he said.

"The music has a blaring, hot, red quality about it," he said while at Miami City Ballet for a costume fitting in December.

He briefly considered tagging each couple with a number, as though they were racing, he said.

"It doesn't look like it's taking place in a tango place or a polka place or a ballroom thing. It looks like a competition of ballet, of ballet-dancing couples," Mizrahi said.

Tharp didn't quite support that image last week.

"In the opening scene where you have two dancers who obviously have their eye on another couple, for that the word competitive is fine, but there are no prizes given out for the best dancer," she said. "They are all the best dancers."

Costello set up the piece as a test of allegiances. "That tension, the common thing you observe in any dance place," he said. "People are attracted to one another, attracted to people they shouldn't be."

For a group photo a week before the premiere, Tharp drops to one knee in front of her six principal dancers. Her intensely blank expression - her signature for portraits - looms in the foreground before their lithe, costumed forms. She's giving nothing else away.

"NIGHTSPOT" premieres Friday at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County. The dance is expected to travel to Los Angeles in the fall.

___

On the Net:

Miami City Ballet: http://www.miamicityballet.org
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Re: 'Nightspot' - Elvis/Twyla Tharp ballet , March/April '08

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http://www.miamiherald.com/tropical_lif ... 74696.html

Image
DONNA E. NATALE PLANAS / MIAMI HERALD STAFF
Dancer Jennifer Carlynn Kronenberg is carried away by fellow dancers.


Sat, Mar. 29, 2008

Exploring love's dark side
BY JORDAN LEVIN
MIAMI HERALD

Love is dark and overwhelming in Twyla Tharp's Nightspot, less emotional force than sheer force of nature. And while there's definitely some nightclub moments in the famed choreographer's new ballet, which Miami City Ballet premiered Friday night at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, it's as much about the dark place inside as any place to hit the dance floor and the opposite sex.

Like Elvis Costello's richly atmospheric score, Nightspot swells and swirls with emotion, taking audience and dancers along for a heart-snapping ride.

Tharp said that Nightspot contained her imaginary vision of Miami, and she's captured some of this city's feverish velocity and sense of anything-can-happen wildness, with blessedly few Latin clichés. And this being Tharp, the choreography is inseparable from the dancers, magnifying their personalities and their gifts. When the magnificent Cuban dancer Isanusi Garcia-Rodriguez throws down like a body-snaking, hip-hop battling, machete wielding Santeria street god, or Jennifer Kronenberg twists round Carlos Miguel Guerra like an endlessly seductive serpent, it's a moment you can only imagine in Miami and from these dancers.

There's a Broadway musical feeling to the dramatic opening, a Latin dancing crowd with three couples standing out: yearning and conflicted Guerra and Callie Manning; malevolently, carelessly seductive Garcia-Rodriguez and Kronenberg; and optimistic, impulsive Katia Carranza and Jeremy Cox. Guerra and Manning quarrel, which sends Guerra off after other women, Carranza and Cox try to bring them back together, there's lots of flirting and hand slapping. Isaac Mizrahi's crimson and purple costumes -- their color intensified by John Hall's lighting -- layer hip street and clubwear with dancer gear: Spanish lace and crinoline skirts, sexy bustiers and shrugs, hoodies and T-shirts.

Although the nine-piece band stretches across the back of the stage, you can barely see it, and it plays no more part in the onstage action than the 35-piece orchestra in the pit. Costello's splendid score has its own sense of motion, the music moving between band and orchestra, rich with color and melody and a powerful, continuous pulse. There are snatches of salsa and tango, themes for the lead couples, an impressively orchestrated musical drama of its own.

But Tharp doesn't so much tell a story as let these couples' personalities and emotions take them for a ride. As Manning and Guerra keep quarreling, Guerra is seduced by the sinuous Kronenberg, who's carried by a group of men above a rippling train of red fabric, diving and floating above it like a fish over a river of blood, wrapping round Guerra until Garcia-Rodriguez, her manipulative pimp/jealous lover, battles him down -- with Kronenberg kicking him to make sure he stays there. (The women are as fiercely aggressive as the men here -- Manning slaps and punches Guerra in a kind of mutual Apache dance).

The dancers have an edge and energy they've never had before -- Cox almost turns over in sky-high kicks, a bolt of energy. If Manning hauls Guerra back to his feet and into her arms, and everyone reconciles on the dancefloor at the end, you can still feel chaos round the corner, because Garcia-Rodriguez is whipping up madness with his flipping arms, like he can't wait for whatever craziness might happen next.
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Re: 'Nightspot' - Elvis/Twyla Tharp ballet , March/April '08

Post by johnfoyle »

http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/riptide/ ... o_awed.php

Tharp and Costello's NIGHTSPOT: Shocked and Awed

Sat Mar 29, 2008 at 08:30:59 AM

It seems fitting that Miami would be the city to host the world premiere of Twyla Tharp's NIGHTSPOT, an energetic work that fit together in a discordant yet stunningly compelling way.

Splashes of classical ballet, Broadway, Cirque du Soleil, fight clubs and Latin dance percolated constant curiosity throughout this highly anticipated work.

Tharp, and musical innovator, Elvis Costello, collaborated on the piece that was Miami City Ballet's first major commission. Costello's original music, played by a nine piece onstage band along with the orchestra underlined and bolded Tharp's varied choreography, as did costumes in shades of red and fuchsia designed by Isaac Mizrahi.

Grand jetés and pirouettes gracefully transitioned into jazz and salsa steps. Tharp toyed with traditional ballet gender roles in the work as a lusty, principal female became the aggressor and the male dancer was the broken, frail one. The first male principal solo was filled with karate-like kicks that transitioned into ballet leaps, making for a spectacularly bad-ass ballet.

There were only brief moments when the work felt forced. A movement highlighting a swath of long red silk felt like an imitation of an artful circus and, at times, the multiple partner dances seemed too West Side Story. Overall, NIGHTSPOT felt refreshing, cacophonous and cohesive --very much like an evening in the Magic City.

--Janine Zeitlin
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Re: 'Nightspot' - Elvis/Twyla Tharp ballet , March/April '08

Post by johnfoyle »

http://www.moli.com/p/blog/v23gG7THSPhb ... ./NDY2NA==

Evelyn McDonnell blogs -

29.Mar.08

A new ballet with music by Elvis Costello, choreography by Twyla Tharp, and costumes by Isaac Mizrahi would be big news in any town. For Miami, the world premiere of Nightspot on March 28 was an historic event. The breathless, vivid, Romantic (with a capital R) dance is the first major commission by the Miami City Ballet, a 22-year-old company that has been increasingly catching the dance community’s eye. Opening night, drawing a mass of tuxedoed swells and South Florida glitterati, was also a momentous occasion for the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, now in its second year and under new management with a new name. Nightspot was a world-class performance – was there any more important dance event on the globe that night? – that, with its infusion of multiple Latin and club beats, moves, and styles, was also very Miami. It was a blast even for the ballet skeptics who were there just to see what Elvis was up to.

Following three couples as they dance and flirt their way through the nightlife, Nightspot is sort of a modern-day West Side Story (with no words). There’s forbidden romance, betrayal, good girls and bad girls, and a climactic fight – though in Nightspot, it’s between two men, not gangs. The fight scene draws heavily on Brazilian capoeira (as well as American break-dancing). It seems like the creators spent some time in Miami clubs, where salsa, bboying, and house music frequently rub elbows, as well as studying up on Latin styles: There’s mambo, tango, and boogaloo. The snaking bass lines Costello has loved so well since "Watching the Detectives" fit in well here. His moody jazz studies and experiences with classical music also came in handy. There were nine players on stage and 35 in the pit, from congos to clarinet to strings.

Perhaps most exciting for Miami was how spectacularly its dancers performed. Setting Nightspot in club land was a stroke of genius, allowing Tharp to accentuate the narcissism and abandonment of young dancers. At one point, Jennifer Carlynn Kronenberg duets with a long piece of scarlet fabric – a red carpet? – and a (literally) supportive entourage. This is only the second time I’ve seen MCB, but Miami Herald dance critic Jordan Levin writes that many of the moves seemed created for these precise bodies. Jeremy Cox grounds his kicks in a friendly smile. Isanusi Garcia-Rodriguez shook his body with Afro-Cuban exuberance rather than ballet’s usual restraint. Mizrahi’s purple and red costumes, mixing flamenco, club, and street styles, echoed the giant hibiscus flowers in the stage curtain, which is part of the Arsht Center’s collection of original art.

Costello, Tharp, and Mizrahi were all there opening night, as were photographer Bruce Weber, producer Sebastian Krys, and conductor Michael Tilson-Thomas. Outside, the subtropical air throbbed to the electronic sounds of the Ultra Music Festival, just blocks away. Across Biscayne Boulevard, at the PAC’s other theater, the Cleveland Orchestra was premiering an evening of Russian works. Parking and traffic were the infrastructural headache caused by this throbbing success. But what city doesn’t have those issues?

Nightspot moves to West Palm Beach's Kravis Center April 4 to 6 and then Fort Lauderdale's Broward Center April 11 to 13.
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Re: 'Nightspot' - Elvis/Twyla Tharp ballet , March/April '08

Post by johnfoyle »

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/arts/ ... l?ref=arts

Image
Joe Gato/Miami City Ballet
Jennifer Kronenberg and Carlos Guerra in Twyla Tharp's "Nightspot."

New York Times

April 1, 2008
Dance Review

Miami Spice: Saucy Club Crawlers Flirt, Sulk and Spar to a Crossover Beat
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY

MIAMI — Throughout its current program of four works, Miami City Ballet proves marvelous. Standards of musical playing are good; lighting is (mainly) excellent; the dancers are individual, skilled, colorful, confident, engaging. Since three of the ballets are choreographically first rate, this is rich fare.

It’s the fourth one, however, that counts officially as the program’s main event — “Nightspot,” a world premiere choreographed by Twyla Tharp to a commissioned score by Elvis Costello and with costumes by Isaac Mizrahi. This is Ms. Tharp’s vision of Miami as a dramatic club place where Latin, rock and romantic-pop rhythms meet, and where men and women turn up for (entirely heterosexual) scenes of temperament, flirtation, fights and reconciliation. At the Saturday and Sunday performances here at the Ziff Ballet Opera House in the Arsht Center, there were whoops and cheers.

But I am among those to whom “Nightspot” comes as a major disappointment. It is alarmingly hard in this piece to recognize signs of Ms. Tharp’s own greatness, and alarmingly easy to see points of striking resemblance to work by far shoddier artists.

Ms. Tharp, always the most apparently ambitious of today’s choreographers, in recent decades has applied her gifts principally to modern music. Annexing composers as if by way of empire building, she has stretched her range from Philip Glass to Bob Dylan, from David Byrne to Billy Joel. This year alone she is choreographing to scores commissioned from not only Mr. Costello but also Danny Elfman (to be presented by American Ballet Theater next month in Manhattan).

And yet in “Nightspot” Ms. Tharp doesn’t seem stimulated by her composer, even though Mr. Costello has supplied her with crossover music that sounds carefully attuned to the styles and devices she has developed. Hispanic and rock rhythms — now connected, now distinct — are delivered in terms that are both big-band and, in several passages, neo-Romantic (heavy shades of Prokofiev). But “Nightspot” often gives an impression that Mr. Costello delivered a score different from the one Ms. Tharp had in mind.

A few passages of the “Nightspot” music are theatrically weak, and none of its heavily amplified sound world appeals to me. (Most of the orchestra is at the back of the stage.) But the work has plenty of variety, with several obviously effective sequences, and I was startled by how often Ms. Tharp brushed aside chunks of strongly dancey rhythm. This would be fine if she showed us how her own design, at some other level, connected to the score.

“Nightspot,” however, concentrates on flamboyant tiffs, sulks and quarrels that are clichés even if you judge them by the far more focused dramatic standards of Tharp classics like “Nine Sinatra Songs” (which Miami City Ballet already dances, extremely well). Ms. Tharp, although she seems generally grateful for these Miami dancers, appears to dislike all the characters that she is asking them to play.

The version of womanhood in “Nightspot” is a watered-down pop rendition of those dated reductive ballet versions of “Carmen,” choreographed for divas like Zizi Jeanmaire (by Roland Petit), Maya Plisetskaya (by Alberto Alonso) and Marcia Haydee (by John Cranko). Katia Carranza, Jennifer Carlynn Kronenberg and Callie Manning are asked to do standard Hispanic preenings: hands on hips, placing weight on one leg while displaying the other thigh. (One of them even strokes her parted thighs salaciously, and taps on point.)

The three men opposite them are all characterized as creeps too. Carlos Miguel Guerra (dressed in a Superman shirt) is boringly brutish until he gets brutalized. This makes him more appreciative of his girlfriend but not more interesting. Jeremy Cox, barelegged, hyperathletic and coarse, gets his kicks by kicking (forward or backward) into 180-degree splits. Isanusi Garcia-Rodriguez, dressed Gypsy-style in tuxedo without tie (later stripping down to underpants), is a vaguely devilish and satyrlike master of ceremonies. Their attitudinizing is often aggressive, sometimes in the manner of William Forsythe.

One episode (a dream scene?), in which the third heroine is carried in like some exotic priestess trailing yards of red fabric, is an exercise in camp worthy of Maurice Béjart. Though there are passages when Ms. Tharp ceases to resemble these lesser artists, it’s odd how merely incidental they are. The narrow red-black spectrum of Mr. Mizrahi’s costumes doesn’t help matters — “Nightspot” takes place in a club where admission is refused to anyone wearing white, blue, green or yellow — and the fussy overlays of the apparel is a further distraction. John D. Hall’s lighting, elsewhere ideal, allows too much movement to be indistinct.

I caught the second and third performances of this program. Each of the three Balanchine ballets that preceded “Nightspot” — “Square Dance,” “Sonatine” and “Tarantella” — was danced at a level exemplary by any current standard. When you think how stylistically different these three are, the Miamian achievement becomes more remarkable yet.

In the Balanchine the dancers of “Nightspot” display the subtlety and complexity of which Ms. Tharp deprives them. Mr. Cox danced “Sonatine” (Saturday) and “Square Dance” (Sunday) as if he were another person: sensitive, measured and pliant. Jeanette Delgado in “Square Dance” (Saturday) and “Tarantella” (Sunday) was a riveting source of brilliance and joy; and in Saturday’s “Tarantella” Alex Wong was a gleeful powerhouse. Mr. Hall’s lighting helps faces and feet shine with luster.

I was especially pleased to see again (after many years) “Sonatine.” This pas de deux — to spellbinding Ravel piano music, beautifully played onstage by Francisco Rennó — includes two of the greatest exits choreographed by Balanchine. As the curtain falls, man and woman leap around the stage in opposite paths, like mirror images of each other, and depart to opposite corners.

And as the music’s first section closes, the woman is walking delicately forward on point into the wings, her arms raised above her head and holding onto the man’s hands. But he, behind her — his back to hers — is proceeding backward, seeing neither his partner nor where she is taking him. You know the old line about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers — that she did everything he did only backward? This moment in “Sonatine” shows that in gender reverse and inside out. The woman leads, he knows not where.

This Miami City Ballet program tours Florida through April 13; miamicityballet.org.
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Re: 'Nightspot' - Elvis/Twyla Tharp ballet , March/April '08

Post by johnfoyle »

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/ ... _0406.html

Palm Beach Post

Sunday, April 06, 2008

'Nightspot' novel but not hot

By SHARON MCDANIEL



WEST PALM BEACH — After months of curiosity, the curtain rose on Nightspot. Miami City Ballet's million-dollar commission premiered at the Kravis Center Friday.

Was it worth the wait? Well, yes and no. What is most impressive about the work is its pedigree. Nightspot is the child of renowned choreographer Twyla Tharp, and British rocker Elvis Costello, who created the original score. Third in this star power play is fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi, who dressed the hot party animal for action.

The proportions are equally weighty: a 38-minute ballet, a cast of 18 dancers, a 32-piece pit orchestra and a nine-piece stage band. But it all boils down to a night at the club, and six singles who become three couples after varying amounts of hustle, diffidence, rejection, pouting, fisticuffs, and reconciliation.

The best part is that Miami City Ballet didn't look anything like Miami City Ballet. The cast cuts through the company ranks from principal dancers to a company school apprentice. Tharp and Mizrahi transform the dancers into an edgy, prowling nightclub crowd with a hint of danger.

Light-years away are the elegant ballet dancers of the other Program IV highlights: George Balanchine's Square Dance (Tricia Albertson and Jeremy Cox in top form), Tarantella (Mary Carmen Catoya and Renato Penteado as the dynamos) and an especially fine Sonatine with Deanna Seay and Didier Bramaz, and onstage pianist Francisco Renno.

In Nightspot, a handful of sharply defined personalities, not all of them pleasant, give the ballet its subtitle, The Dark Side of Love. Of the reluctant couple, Callie Manning is the hard-bitten huntress; Carlos Miguel Guerra plays a slick womanizer who thinks more highly of himself than he ought.

But Tharp's ballet starts with is-this-all-there-is disappointment. She banks on Hispanic stereotypes and an all's-well finale.

The mid-section begins a turnaround, including a quasi-dream scene with yards of silk: red, like nearly everything else. In this cloud of red silk, which dancers manipulate, is the unattainable Jennifer Carlynn Kronenberg as another temptation for the lovelorn Guerra. But Kronenberg and partner Isanusi Garcia-Rodriguez are the most watchable pair. A love-at-first-sight duo, they cover vaudeville tap dance in bowler hats and cane, to break dancing and pelvic gyrations equally well.

Costello's pop score can run from ultra-dramatic New Age to hip-hop heaven, raucous Dragnet jabs to sweet guitar ballad. Even an innocent, childlike music-box tune twinkles through. Strong rhythms dominate, whether in rock-drummer madness or bandoneon-flavored tango.

Principal Conductor Juan Francisco La Manna managed the dual Costello groups well.

Often, Costello and Tharp seem like ships passing in the night, each on a separate course. And what might Mizrahi have envisioned if he hadn't been handcuffed to red. It's the dancers' high-energy, give-it-your-all attitude in a grueling work that sells it.

Miami City Ballet continues Nightspot (Tharp/Costello) and three Balanchine classics today at 1 p.m. at the Kravis Center. For tickets $19-$75, call (561) 832-7469.
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Re: 'Nightspot' - Elvis/Twyla Tharp ballet , March/April '08

Post by twototango »

Ah, to go to the ballet and listen to snippets of Elvis's songs in a totally different context....so I get back on this site, which I haven't visited in...hum...4 year? I get back on because it always bugs me when I can't figure out something. And I couldn't figure out where all the snippets came from...I know there was the repeating prerecorded thingy from "when I was cruel no. 2" but as to the others...blank. HELP oh greater than I will ever be Elvis fans...HELP.
As to how I liked the ballet...yeah, I liked it. I don't know if it was great, and will stand the test of time, but it was emotional-stimulating and had clever juxtipositions of comic and tragic cords.
My favorite dancer was the dark horse, Isanusi Garcia. He infused his motions with pure poetry while remaining very masculine.
So...any help on the song snippets that Elvis used?
johnfoyle
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Re: 'Nightspot' - Elvis/Twyla Tharp ballet , March/April '08

Post by johnfoyle »

Welcome Two!

I'd love to help figure out which songs were used but being thousands of miles away I didn't get to see the ballet , never mind hear it. So , until a recording circulates, I can't help.
MOJO
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Re: 'Nightspot' - Elvis/Twyla Tharp ballet , March/April '08

Post by MOJO »

As for the creative process: Maybe a theme was created, then a score was composed, and then Tharp put the two parts together on stage to create a dance performance? It sounds like a major cultural event for Miami, given the size of the orchestra, and the cats involved. Whatever, genius minds meet, they create, collaborate, and the end result has loop holes for blaming one or the other for poor execution... whatever... I'm coming down from a hot "latin" show on the WEST COAST.. Conrad Herwig/Eddie Palmieri... amazing.
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Re: 'Nightspot' - Elvis/Twyla Tharp ballet , March/April '08

Post by johnfoyle »

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1207697 ... _days_only

Wall Street Journal

A Tharp Ballet That's Brand New

By ROBERT GRESKOVIC
April 9, 2008

West Palm Beach, Fla.

In 1973, when Robert Joffrey invited Twyla Tharp to create a work for his City Center Joffrey Ballet, the savvy director looked to the iconoclastic choreographer with a name in modern dance for a fresh angle on the ballet world. Last year, when Miami City Ballet director Edward Villella commissioned a new ballet from Ms. Tharp, he more or less brought the internationally acclaimed choreographer back to the ballet business after some five years of concentration on Broadway productions.

After five years of concentrating on Broadway, Twyla Tharp takes up ballet's challenge again with "Nightspot," featuring an Elvis Costello score.

With "Deuce Coupe," the Joffrey work inspired by Beach Boys music and now a classic "crossover ballet," and "Push Comes to Shove," created in 1975 to a Haydn symphony paired with a piece of piano ragtime especially for American Ballet Theatre and its super-stellar Mikhail Baryshnikov, Ms. Tharp first demonstrated her gift for giving ballet dancers renewed challenges into which to sink their feet.

For "Nightspot," with its score commissioned from Elvis Costello, Ms. Tharp has re-entered the ballet arena with some of her recent Broadway theatrics in tow. She has concocted an ambitious 40-minute production featuring three couples of differently characterized dancers in a world swirling with nighttime emotions. Her Billy Joel-inspired 2002 Broadway hit, "Movin' Out," concerned three Long Island buddies and their connection to the Vietnam war. "The Times They Are A-Changin'," Ms. Tharp's 2006 Bob Dylan-inspired creation, which flopped on Broadway, had a circus theme.

Mr. Costello's variously boisterous and intimate "Nightspot" score, spiced with Latino rhythms and sonorities, reaches the audience from two places: A full orchestra sends up its music from the pit, while a separate, sizable band banks the stage like a nightclub ensemble. These two musical forces at times remain separate and occasionally blend their parts.


Essentially "Nightspot" focuses on one nameless man. This central figure wears a red T-shirt printed in gold with the word "Nightspot" and an image of a hibiscus blossom. (Isaac Mizrahi's costuming suggests dancers' practice wear crossed with the body-proud get-ups of youthful club dancers, all in scarlet set against accents of electric violet.)

In Ms. Tharp's sketchy scenario, the man at the heart of "Nightspot" finds himself at odds with his female partner, who is put out by his lack of full attention to her. Secondarily, a ringmaster-like fellow in a tailcoat and fedora, with a brazen temptress in fish-net stockings for a female sidekick, creates a mercurial and devilish presence. A youthful third couple completes the cast of leading players, with the guy in shorts and a sometimes pugilistic mood and his gal in a tulle ballet skirt and a dance-happy mode. Six lesser couples, occasionally separated as male or female sextets, back up or echo the main players.

What's rewarding about this action is the way in which, for all its dramatic underpinning, Ms. Tharp plainly utilizes the schooling of her ballet dancers. Her choreography works to often expressive effect with the steps and postures her performers practice daily. More than 30 years ago she first took the traditional workings of ballet in new, surprising directions by enfolding academic classroom moves with unfamiliar athletic accents and vernacular asides. Today her scrupulous craft remains worlds apart from the slapdash efforts of so many of those who have followed her ground-breaking lead with little more than vacuous attitudinizing and a flashy gloss on incidental, relentless motion, as demonstrated, for instance, by the currently ubiquitous Jorma Elo.

In the end, however, the evident craft of "Nightspot" doesn't carry the work from start to finish. Mr. Costello's score changes, but it rarely climaxes; it includes nothing like the punctuational pacing that gives Broadway shows their bite, accent and impact. Ms. Tharp's cannily constructed intermediate flashes of dance highpoints and artful groupings aren't readily supported by the score, and the ballet's momentum can become diffuse.

Similarly, her dancers' play-acting tends toward the general and monotonous. The svelte Callie Manning's woman spurned trades on little more than going-through-the-motions petulance. Carlos Miguel Guerra fails to reveal much about the temperament of the leading "Nightspot" man, his sense of drama mostly limited to throwing up his hands in "what gives?" gestures.

Luckily for "Nightspot" and for Miami City Ballet, Mr. Guerra's Cuban countryman Rolando Sarabia also dances this role. His elegant demeanor, powerful and pristine dancing, and charisma lent the ballet a welcome, compelling gravity. When, in 2005, Mr. Sarabia defected from Ballet Nacional de Cuba at age 23 to work freely in the States, he was a dance idol back home. Now the handsome, dark-haired young man, who joined Miami City Ballet as a principal dancer in 2007, has shown both himself and Ms. Tharp's dance challenges off to fine effect. It's too bad that Mr. Mizrahi's layered T-shirt costuming makes both Mr. Sarabia and Mr. Guerra look unnecessarily paunchy.

The ebullient and rapturous performance of Mary Carmen Catoya as the "ballet girl" in "Nightspot" stands out from the already high level of most MCB dancing. Likewise, as the mysterious ringmaster, the sinuous Isanusi Garcia Rodriquez, another alum of Ballet Nacional de Cuba, proves he doesn't need to crack an actual whip to embellish Ms. Tharp's slippery and sinuous choreography with whiplash finesse.

Three winning Balanchine ballets preceded "Nightspot" on this program. The playful classicism of "Square Dance" -- to selections of Vivaldi and Corelli that remind the listener that violins are also fiddles -- got especially lively performing from Jeannette Delgado, Renato Penteado and all the "ladies and gents" of their ensemble. "Sonatine," a duet to Ravel, found its rhythm in some willowy dancing from Haiyan Wu and in the secure steps of Jeremy Cox. All three casts I saw of "Tarantella" (to music by Louis Gottschalk, here played solely by piano) happily tore up the stage. The ballet's sly and feisty male role had been made for Mr. Villella in 1964. At MCB, Ms. Catoya was most stellar in the ballerina half of the duet.

As the program's climactic closer, "Nightspot" aimed to send its audiences home with something of a Broadway experience. Right now, Ms. Tharp's ballet doesn't exactly do that. But maybe, with her work now launched, she can still play show doctor and bring "Nightspot" up to -- or beyond -- the heights she hit with "Movin' Out." If anyone has the track record to fine-tune a work of contemporary ballet theater, it's the famously unpredictable Twyla Tharp.

Mr. Greskovic writes about dance for the Journal.
johnfoyle
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Re: 'Nightspot' - Elvis/Twyla Tharp ballet , March/April '08

Post by johnfoyle »

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/ne ... 7819.story


Twyla Tharp-Elvis Costello work to open 'Dance at the Music Center'

By Chris Pasles, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
May 1, 2008

(extract)

The West Coast premiere of a Twyla Tharp collaboration with rock star composer Elvis Costello, "Nightspot," and the return of the Kirov Ballet will highlight the 2008-09 series.


"Nightspot," to be danced by Edward Villella's Miami City Ballet, will open the season Oct. 24. The work is the most recent creation by the innovative choreographer, whose Broadway hit "Movin' Out" was set to music by rocker Billy Joel. Also part of the company's engagement, which will run through Oct. 26, will be George Balanchine's "Tarantella" (music by Louis Moreau Gottschalk) and "Symphony in Three Movements" (Igor Stravinsky) and Christopher Wheeldon's "Liturgy" (Arvo Pärt).
johnfoyle
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Re: 'Nightspot' - Elvis/Twyla Tharp ballet, Los Angeles, Oct '08

Post by johnfoyle »

This extract from Elvis' journal is relevant to this -

http://www.elviscostello.com/web/guest/ ... urce=27665

I spent a week in Miami at the end of March. It was the first time that I had been in that city for more than a day or two. It's quite the place.

Much of my time, through the summer and autumn of '07, was taken up writing and orchestrating NIGHTSPOT, collaboration with the choreographer, Twyla Tharp for the Miami City Ballet.

Now that the piece was in rehearsal, I finally got to hear, what had previously been going around in my head, played by real musicians.

The score calls for a ten-piece dance band, performing at the back of stage, while the dancers enter a swinging NIGHTSPOT. A modest-sized orchestra plays in the pit. They combine at times into one big ensemble while at other moments they play in dialogue.

When enquiring about songs, people often ask, "When comes first? Words or music?" I suppose a similar question might be asked about ballet music only with regard to movement and music.

Ms. Tharp's method was to listen to a number of my existing songs and then ask me to write something new that departed from one or other station,

Although the writing doesn't have a verse-chorus structure and music is played continuously, none of the individual cues are very much longer than the average song. Once I had some knowledge of Twyla's intentions for the dance, I could proceed.

I made an early decision to make passing reference to some of those existing songs; a handful of changes here, a melody completely re-harmonized there or a background motif, brought to fore and fastened to an entirely new rhythm and melody.

Words and ideas attached these fleeting musical fragments plotted a line through the score while I was writing it, though it isn't necessary for anyone in the audience to recognize or follow them in order to understand or enjoy NIGHTSPOT.

NIGHTSPOT portrays many forms of nightlife and a series of couples as they go through various temptations, flirtations, betrayals and transformations. There was plenty of opportunity for waltzes, a Spanish guitar ballad, some satirical striptease music, a little ragtime tune, a cockeyed tango or two and a show business hymn.

On three occasions in the score, I used processed loops to augment the on-stage rhythm section. This was the first time I'd employed this sound since the album, "When I Was Cruel".

In fact the "dummy" name of one cue was actually "When I Was Cruel No.5", as it was a more expansive version of the ideas contained in the song of that name, "No.2".

There is no immediate plan to record the score in the studio but it is not entirely impossible to imagine a performance of the entire 38-minute work being recorded for DVD, some time in the future. That way you would be able take in the entire scene as it was intended.


The dancers of the Miami City Ballet are a wonder to behold at work. Even physical preparations that they undertake in order to begin to dance would kill a small stable of horses. I am no expert on dance technique but to my eye they gave a wonderful performance of the material.

The premiere was a fairly swish affair. People were dressed up to the nines and really raised the roof at end of the night.

The performance went without any obvious catastrophes" but even as you are taking your bow and accepting bouquets, the mind is bound to stray to changes that occur, now that the music been heard in the heat of battle.

I will make a number of small but crucial revisions in time for the Los Angeles performances in October 2008.

Miami City Ballet could not have been more gracious hosts but for most of the time I was in their city, there seemed to be a 700ft. motorbike approaching from several streets away. This turned out to be the low, dull rumble of an electronic music festival that was dominating the aural and social landscape.

I suspect that a few of the company left the post-show gala to dance the night away in an actual nightspot but I shall not pretend that I was among their number.
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Re: 'Nightspot' - Elvis/Twyla Tharp ballet, Los Angeles, Oct '08

Post by johnfoyle »

Uh oh -

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/d ... _acocella/

Dancing
Guy Stuff

Twyla Tharp at American Ballet Theatre.

by Joan Acocella

New Yorker
June 30, 2008

(extract)

For the past two decades or so, Twyla Tharp has tended, in her new dances, to recycle features of her earlier successes, but in “Rabbit and Rogue,” which just had its première at American Ballet Theatre, she seems to repeat every single thing that has worked for her before. It’s as if she had made a list and then checked off each strategy as she reused it. Tharp’s last two projects have been failures. Her Bob Dylan musical, “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” (2006), closed after just a few weeks on Broadway. Then, earlier this year, she made a piece for Miami City Ballet—“Nightspot,” about Miami club life—that, while it was warmly applauded by the Florida audience I saw it with (it had an Elvis Costello score and lots of red costumes), was actually a desperate-looking mess: a fact that she was probably aware of. In both pieces, Tharp explored a territory relatively new to her—dream, hallucination. It is therefore no surprise that, having had so little luck there, she chose, in her next ballet, to do nothing new to her.
johnfoyle
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Re: 'Nightspot' - Elvis/Twyla Tharp ballet, Los Angeles, Oct '08

Post by johnfoyle »

I really should keep up with the Miami press-

http://www.socialmiami.com/faces_and_places.asp

Image

Miami City Ballet, the internationally acclaimed dance company under the artistic direction of Edward Villella, hosted a World Premiere Celebration recently at Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County. The event commemorated the first performance of a brand new work NIGHTSPOT created for Miami City Ballet’s dancers by world renowned modern dance choreographer Twyla Tharp, set to music by singer-songwriter Elvis Costello, with costumes designed by Isaac Mizrahi. Pictured: Edward Villella, Twyla Tharp, Elvis Costello & Linda Villella


Details of the L.A. Nightspot shows , Oct.24-26 -

http://www.musiccenter.org/cal/events/i ... 8&month=10

http://www.ticketmaster.com/event/0B004 ... orcatid=12

PREMIER ORCHESTRA, MAIN FLOOR
US $120.00

ORCHESTRA IS THE MAIN FLOOR, GROUND LEVEL
US $30.00 - US $100.00

FOUNDER'S CIRCLE, 1ST LEVEL ABOVE MAIN FLOOR
US $100.00

ORCHESTRA RING
US $65.00

LOGE, 2 LEVELS ABOVE MAIN FLOOR
US $65.00

BALCONY, 3 LEVELS ABOVE THE MAIN FLOOR
US $30.00 - US $40.00

BALCONY, 3 LEVELS ABOVE THE MAIN FLOOR
US $30.00 - US $40.00
johnfoyle
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Re: 'Nightspot' - Elvis/Twyla Tharp ballet, Los Angeles, Oct '08

Post by johnfoyle »

See a photo slideshow of "Nightspot" -

http://www.miamiherald.com/multimedia/s ... index.html
johnfoyle
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Re: 'Nightspot' - Elvis/Twyla Tharp ballet, Los Angeles, Oct '08

Post by johnfoyle »

johnfoyle
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Re: 'Nightspot' - Elvis/Twyla Tharp ballet, Los Angeles, Oct '08

Post by johnfoyle »

More preview-

http://broadwayworld.com/viewcolumn.cfm?colid=33854

Is anyone here going to this?
johnfoyle
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Re: 'Nightspot' - Elvis/Twyla Tharp ballet, Los Angeles, Oct '08

Post by johnfoyle »

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/vill ... lideshow=1


Friday, October 17, 2008

Choreographer Edward Villella still energized at 72

His Miami City Ballet brings a new work by Twyla Tharp to Los Angeles.

By PAUL HODGINS
The Orange County Register

(extract)

Tharp's "NIGHTSPOT" will receive its West Coast premiere during Miami's three-day stop in Los Angeles. It's a collaboration between Tharp and Elvis Costello – the latest in an impressive list of popular musicians, including David Byrne and Danny Elfman, with whom the Southern California-born choreographer has worked.

"It's basically a Miami ballet," Villella said of Tharp's choreography, which was created for his company -- its first major commission. "The point of departure is the city's clubs. It's very different from the rest of her repertoire, needless to say."

Villella admires Tharp's ability to bring a wider audience to his world.

"She's accessible. She's very brilliant, of course, and she creates things that you have to think about and figure out. But she gave us something that would also appeal to a younger audience.

"Elvis has a wonderful following and such a broad background in terms of his interests. He's done everything, from his own group to string quartets and symphonies. He's a very sophisticated guy who appeals to the kind of people that we want to attract."



http://www.downtownlascene.com/index.ph ... tem/32316/

(extract)

Letting Tharp immerse herself in Miami’s club culture to create the piece, which has a Latin flair, was part of that. So was the addition of Costello.

“I thought that with his extended background, plus with his sophisticated approach to popular culture, that this might be a good fit for us with someone such as Twyla Tharp, who is always seeking the cutting edge, fresh and new,” said Villella.
johnfoyle
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Re: 'Nightspot' - Elvis/Twyla Tharp ballet, LA, Oct Oct.24-26'08

Post by johnfoyle »

johnfoyle
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Re: 'Nightspot' - Elvis/Twyla Tharp ballet, LA, Oct Oct.24-26'08

Post by johnfoyle »

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/bala ... -movements


Saturday, October 25, 2008

Miami City Ballet brings brilliance and mediocrity to the Music Center

Two Balanchine classics and a new work by Twyla Tharp are a stark lesson in the difference between the timeless and the terrible.

By PAUL HODGINS
The Orange County Register


Miami City Ballet's performance on Friday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion showed us how great choreography can electrify and inspire less-than-perfect performers. Miami's promising program, which launched Dance at the Music Center's sixth season, also demonstrated how mediocre choreography can defeat the best efforts and noblest intentions.

Founded in 1986 by Edward Villella, whose incendiary dancing inspired choreographic giant George Balanchine, the company has flourished under Villella's leadership and remains one of the country's best guardians of the Balanchine legacy.

We saw two Balanchine works on Friday, both of them worth keeping forever.

The evening opened with "Symphony in Three Movements," choreographed by Balanchine to the music of his friend and longtime artistic partner, Igor Stravinsky. Although the two men collaborated to produce some of the 20th century's greatest ballets – "Apollo" and "Agon," to name but two – this piece was created for the 1972 Stravinsky Festival as an homage to the composer, who had died the year before. Stravinsky's score was composed in 1945, and it's a fine example of his astringent, mid-career Neoclassical style.

"Symphony" is a plotless, texturally dense work for more than 30 dancers and its sheer complexity can overwhelm at times, but as a demonstration of Balanchine's singular genius and fascinating eccentricities it has few equals.

The first and third movements highlight the corps de ballet, and the look of this ensemble can be a little disconcerting. Many companies strive for uniformity of body type; not Miami. There's a surprising diversity of shapes and sizes in this corps, which can interfere with Balanchine's big architectural shapes such as the long diagonal line that begins "Symphony." At a moment when the slightest discrepancy jumps out, physiological differences are most noticeable. And once they start moving there are, unfortunately, some weak links.

The soloists, too, offered differing levels of capability. Jennifer Carlynn Kronenberg and Jeremy Cox were precise and lyrical in the second act pas de deux, and she made Balanchine's famous "un-balletic" movements – turned-in legs, for example – seem elegant and intrinsic.

Others were less memorable, although Alex Wong, a small but dynamic dancer, thrilled with his coiled-spring leaps.

Visually, the work is marred by Karinska's costumes. They certainly capture the spirit of the early '70s, but the principal women's colors – pink, rose and salmon – clash like teen rivals at a prom.

"Tarantella" showed us another side of Balanchine. It's a light-hearted, energetic duet inspired by Neopolitan folk dances, and it's a showcase for the right couple; Villella's performance of it was legendary. Jeanette Delgado and Renato Penteado gave it plenty of festive energy as the choreography built from successive bravura solo turns to a final duet. Upstage, pianist Francisco Rennó played Louis Moreau Gottschalk's Grand Tarantelle with breathlessness but admirable accuracy.

The jewel of the evening was Christopher Wheeldon's "Liturgy." Villella is a huge fan of the British choreographer, and it's easy to see why.

Set to Arvo Pärt's overused "Fratres" (sloppily played by solo violinist Lisa Sutton with the otherwise competent LA Opera Orchestra), Wheeldon's choreography is a breathtakingly gorgeous pas de deux devoid of even an instant of cliché. It's full of slow, unorthodox lifts and suspensions, jagged yet beautiful tableaux, fascinating floor work and, in its last moments, a simple sequence in which we're mesmerized by the fluid and graceful unison arm movements of dancers Haiyan Wu and Carlos Quenedit. On Friday they were both exquisite.

The evening ended with the program's only major disappointment: "NIGHTSPOT" (the all-caps title raises a red flag all by itself, doesn't it?).

Choreographed by the ever-ambitious Twyla Tharp to a score by pop cult icon Elvis Costello, "NIGHTSPOT" is Miami City Ballet's first major commission; according to Villella, it was inspired by Miami's lively club dance scene. Unfortunately, the choreography is a continuation of Tharp's confused phase – it's even more muddled and pointlessly frenzied than "Rabbit and Rogue," which was presented in August at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

Dressed in various shades of red, the large ensemble appears to have raided a failing athletic wear company, combining the castoffs with Miami Beach dance fashion and old vaudeville costumes. Like Tharp, celebrity costume designer Isaac Mizrahi clearly needs an editor. The result – T-shirts and fishnet hose, top hats and canes, short shorts and cutaway coats – is a jumbled fiasco.

The same goes for Costello's score. "Eclectic" is too feeble an adjective to describe this mish-mash. It starts with a strange, James Bond meets Xavier Cugat rumble, split between pit musicians and a large onstage band, and cycles through endless style changes, from Astor Piazzolla to circus music, blaxploitation film soundtrack to sweet-voiced waltz.

Tharp's choreography reflected Costello's "throw it at all at the wall" approach. Like "Rabbit and Rogue," there was a story of male conflict, competition, and romantic frustration, but the narrative is too confusingly told to decipher. The jumbled ensemble sections offered a dispiriting contrast to Balanchine's clocklike precision and constant inventiveness.


Perhaps it's just my Balanchine bias coming through, but I have a suggestion for Villella. Keep the New York City Ballet classics. Commission worthy inheritors of the Balanchine tradition such as Wheeldon. And give Twyla a rest for a while.
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Re: 'Nightspot' - Elvis/Twyla Tharp ballet, LA, Oct Oct.24-26'08

Post by johnfoyle »

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/ne ... 4727.story

Los Angeles Times

Review: Miami City Ballet performs Twyla Tharp and Elvis Costello's 'Nightspot'

The collaboration treads over too-familiar themes and choreographic inspirations.

By Laura Bleiberg
October 27, 2008

Here's a suggestion: Let's ditch the nightclub as a setting for ballet. No more predictable tales about the trials of courtship or the ballroom as a metaphor for life.

Miami City Ballet, Edward Villella's smart and spirited South Florida company, inaugurated the '08-'09 Music Center dance season this past weekend with yet another piece staged in a dark club frequented by prowling, brawling guys and preening, teasing girls. This theme has outlived its variations. Enough already.

This suggested moratorium is provoked by "Nightspot," a talked-about premiere collaboration between choreographer Twyla Tharp and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame artist Elvis Costello that Miami Ballet introduced in March. "Nightspot" is the second new work by Tharp to make it to the West Coast since August -- the first being American Ballet Theatre's overwrought "Rabbit and Rogue" (which featured its own unusual partnership, between Tharp and another pop artist, TV and movie composer Danny Elfman).


These are different works, to be sure. But neither particularly complemented its talented cast, nor demonstrated Tharp to be the feverishly creative artist we remember from years ago.

"Nightspot" is a sleazy ditty in toe shoes, focusing on three main couples on a night crawl, nattily costumed by Isaac Mizrahi. Central pair Jennifer Carlynn Kronenberg and Rolando Sarabia have a spat, and Sarabia strays with sexpot Callie Manning. Her partner, the superb and electric Carlos Miguel Guerra, appears to encourage this tryst but then rewards Sarabia with a nasty beating. Kronenberg forgives her man, and he becomes both doting and wiser for the experience. A cheerful duo, Mary Carmen Catoya and Jeremy Cox, provide counsel to their fellow characters and some genuinely enjoyable partnering, but their encounters are too few to save this nightmarish affair.

Twelve demi-soloists and corps de ballet were used like wallpaper, decorating the background with waltzing and acrobatic leaps. Some shadow boxing guys foreshadowed the big fight. Designer John Hall's drably dark lighting made it too difficult to decipher the corps' lickety-split moves.

Costello is one of our most soulful and identifiable songwriters, but here he took a step back, trying not to upstage the dance. He touched upon the tango, breezed through some salsa, and delivered several nifty blues riffs, with the electric guitar as leader. He used an expansive array of instruments, from accordion to violin, with a band onstage and an orchestra in the pit (Tim Devine led the band, Juan Francisco La Manna was the evening's principal conductor). But the music made no definitive statement.

Composer and choreographer remained in separate bubbles. Tharp stayed in the brainy comfort zone she's inhabited for the last dozen years. There was no faulting the ballet's craftsmanship, but it was one chilly piece.

Tharp's encyclopedic dance vocabulary has become almost a hindrance. The seduction scene was uncomfortably referential to George Balanchine's "Prodigal Son," with Kronenberg carried in by the male corps, a long red shawl draping her shoulders, and flowing across the stage. Finally, the Miami City Ballet dancers, so wonderfully individualistic and expressive the rest of the evening, here were interchangeable characters from other performances of Tharp works.


Happily, the audience at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Saturday night had three other ballets to satisfy them, making for a full program. It opened with Balanchine's 1972 "Symphony in Three Movements," a still radical work to Igor Stravinsky's brilliant piece of the same name.

Kronenberg was the lead ballerina, and thank goodness "Nightspot" was not her only role, because it was near impossible to tell how special a dancer she is from that. In the Balanchine piece, she showed off a gloriously expansive and authoritative style.

Soloists Patricia Delgado and Alex Wong, dancing with different partners, were enticingly engaging -- she with fearless athleticism, and he with buoyant energy.

But the work's highlight was the crisp detailing that the entire 32-member cast brought to their performances. Villella, who was in the original cast, has coached this piece to near perfection. Every step rang with urgency, and the dancers pushed themselves to extremes.

We saw this again in "Tarantella," a bravura showpiece performed with élan and ease by Jeanette Delgado and Renato Penteado. Pianist Francisco Rennó admirably played the Gottschalk score but was positioned so far upstage that the sound was muffled. Still Delgado and Penteado danced it large and "loud" and with earthy abandon.

Finally, we were treated to Christopher Wheeldon's "Liturgy," a slight but pretty duet to Arvo Pärt's mournful "Fratres." The delicate Haiyan Wu and lyrical Carlos Quenedit formed body sculptures of Calder-like precision.

For 22 years, Villella has kept the dancing crackling and alive at Miami City Ballet. New generations have already followed upon the founding dancers for a while now -- hard to believe -- and yet Miami City Ballet manages to look young and fresh. That makes even the flawed works a little easier to swallow.

Bleiberg is a freelance writer.
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