Women's Work

Dance Review

by Deni Kasrel

BalletX concluded its first season as the resident dance company of the Wilma Theater with a program titled All-Female Choreographers Project. This is a handy hook on which to hang a dance production, when you consider that while women outnumber men in terms of ballet performers, it's largely a man's world when it comes to who creates the choreography. The inequity bugged BalletX co-director Christine Cox enough that she decided it was high time to highlight fellow women dance-makers.

Still, you may wonder if it is worth making a fuss about such an event. After all, from the audience's point of view, it's what's presented onstage that matters. The art needs to stand on its own merit regardless of the gender of its creator.

On that count this program is certainly worth celebrating. The choreographers — Helen Pickett, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa and Cox — share a classical ballet-based foundation merged with a contemporary sensibility, but otherwise, each presented an individual aesthetic.

Pickett's Union contemplated ways that we may unite, devolve and then recombine, or maybe not. The dance featured vigorous yet elegant movement with torsos often torquing in off-center postures. At times the duets here looked like human mating dances, with each dancer giving a performance for his or her intended partner, using exaggerated gestures as if to proclaim, "Hey, look what I can do." In other instances Union offered dynamic evocations of fluctuating fortitude and support.

Cox's Numb Roads presented a trio of duets that examined the ambivalent nature of relationships. Packing an emotional punch, Cox's inventive use of pas de deux offered multiple striking moments, such as when a woman scissors her legs while wrapped around her mate who swings her upside down, or when a woman does a standing split smack along the side of her partner. This frequently intricate dance is clear evidence that Cox is developing sharp and ever-deeper choreographic chops within the context of the now-four-year-old BalletX.

The program concluded with Ochoa's Still@Life, a vibrant fantasyscape that imagines what might happen if the religious paintings of Michelangelo were to come alive. The cast, first dressed all in black and later in multicolored outfits, alternated between hyperbolic posed stillness and frolicsome dance that featured green apples as playful props. Lighthearted in tone, it was nonetheless complex and intriguing in composition.

(deni.kasrel@citypaper.net)

BalletX | All-Female Choreographers Project, July 23, Wilma Theater