ARTS . Dance

Style and Substance

REVIEW: Pennsylvania Ballet's Carmina Burana


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Published: Mar 9, 2010

For decades, Pennsylvania Ballet considered Carmina Burana its signature work, but by 2007 the somber John Butler ballet looked a bit tired. That's when Matthew Neenan revamped the dance, his dynamic new version using new staging, dazzling color and costumes to celebrate the throb of Carl Orff's ecstatic score.

Three years later, Neenan's Carmina is just as exciting. Scenic designer Mimi Lien's colored scrims shift spatial conceptions at the Academy: Performers clamber around an elegant pyramid covered with sheer fabric as a disc looms above, transforming into the moon and disappearing.

In this abstract setting, Oana Botez-Ban's colorful costumes explode, occasionally overshadowing the dancing. Dancers wear nude unitards, which are tugged at or extended as fluttering appendages. These pale figures sharply contrast the rest of the dancers, who are decked out in black lace, bustles of white ruffles, ribbons, feathers and animal print. This is an ensemble piece where everyone looks good, but some performers stand out even amid all the commotion — particularly Zachary Hench, Arantxa Ochoa, Jermel Johnson, Ian Hussey, Julie Diana and Gabriella Yudenich.

George Balanchine's masterpiece The Four Temperaments shares the program with Carmina; if the latter is emotion, color and speed, then the former is formality, precision and balance, suffused with elegance and abstraction in movement. The cast is superb, including Ochoa and Sergio Torrado in "Sanguinic," Alexander Iziliaev in "Melancholic," an astonishing Johnson in "Phlegmatic" and an extremely poised Amy Aldridge in "Choleric."

Neenan's Carmina may last another 40 years, but no one will ever surpass Balanchine's elegant simplicity.

Through March 13, $24-$129, Academy of Music, 1420 Locust St., 215-893-1999, paballet.org.