American Ballet Theater: New Choreography at Kennedy Center

Blain Hoven and Daniil Simkin, Serenade after Plato's Symposium, American Ballet Theater (photo by Rosalie Connor)
American Ballet Theater has taken over the Kennedy Center Opera House this week, offering a smorgasbord of new ballets. The first program, seen on Wednesday night, was a combination of three choreographies from the last decade, plus a Jerome Robbins classic from 1976. The second night cast included some of the company's best dancers -- meaning that the usual vocal group of Misty Copeland followers was in the audience -- and some new discoveries.

The best part of the Leonard Bernstein anniversary celebrations, otherwise a seemingly endless sequence of celebrated mediocrities, arrived unexpectedly with Serenade after Plato's Symposium, perhaps Alexei Ratmansky's most important work to date, premiered by ABT in 2016. The music is Bernstein's, a rather gorgeous five-movement violin concerto premiered in Venice in 1954, setting to music the seven speakers of Plato's Symposium, invited to extol the virtues of love. Seven men, mostly from the group of rising soloists, brought this evening of conversation and intense philosophical argument to life, with Hee Seo taking the startling single female role, entering in a starkly lit rectangular opening in the rear curtain. Violin soloist Kobi Malkin struggled with intonation on the numerous double-stops of the solo part, but the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra supported him ably.

The Robbins piece, Other Dances, was originally a vehicle for Mikhail Baryshnikov, but it was the woman of the pairing, Sarah Lane, who most stood out for the grace and buoyancy of her movements. Emily Wong played the selection of Chopin pieces, four mazurkas and a concluding, spirited waltz, at a piano on stage.

Other Reviews: Alastair Macaulay, Review: In Gala, American Ballet Theater Is Open to Debate (New York Times, May 17, 2016) ---, A Big House, Big Names, New Twists (New York Times, May 25, 2011) Gia Kourlas, Review: At American Ballet Theater, Mostly Millepied (New York Times, October 26, 2017)

The most recent piece, premiered just last fall, was the spirited I Feel the Earth Move, with choreography by Benjamin Millepied set to music by Philip Glass. Stage hands cleared away all of the curtains and scrims from the stage, revealing the catwalks and bare walls, as well as the lighting instruments above. Danced to a rather loud recording, this ballet was hyperactive, seemingly in constant motion, perhaps an expression of individual freedom against repression, represented by the female corps, which appeared marching in step, bandannas over some of their faces.

Christopher Wheeldon's story ballets have not been my cup of tea for the most part, but this more abstract short choreography had greater appeal. Barbara Bilach took the solo part of Benjamin Britten's Diversions for Piano (left hand) and Orchestra, again conducted with abundant energy by Ormsby Wilkins. It was another beautiful score to discover, brought to life by dance, made better by it as the Bernstein had been earlier. The variations form worked elegantly for dance, as Wheeldon has crafted pairs, solos, and group numbers for each brief movement. Misty Copeland finally appeared on stage, for a time-stopping solo in the fourth variation ("Rubato"). Her pairing in the exquisite pas de deux for the tenth variation ("Adagio"), with Cory Stearns stepping in for Gray Davis, was the highlight of the evening, muscularity merged with poetry.

American Ballet Theater performs Whipped Cream, with a forgotten ballet score by Richard Strauss, tonight through February 4.

New York City Ballet, Part 2

Lydia Wellington and Andrew Scordato in The Four Temperaments, New York City Ballet (photo by Paul Kolnik)
The second program of the New York City Ballet's visit to the Kennedy Center Opera House was not as marvelous as the first. The formula was the same as the first program: classic Balanchine paired with new works by the company's best young choreographers.

The Balanchine was a choreography long on my wish list, The Four Temperaments, the best known of the ballet scores composed by Paul Hindemith. The composer is not one most people think of as a dance composer, but his music worked exceptionally well in this collaboration with Balanchine from 1946. The music is in the form of a theme and variations, perhaps the musical structure best suited to ballet dancing because it provides variety in discrete sections. Balanchine created dances, mostly pairings and small groups costumed in domino-like black and white on a bare stage, that went with each of the temperaments in the score.

In the theme, Lydia Wellington and Andrew Scordato set the tone in a stiff and formal way, a vocabulary of movements that seemed mostly geometric but coordinated with and inspired by the music in the most natural way. The second pairing (Lauren King and Devin Alberda) entered with the piano solo, played expressively by Stephen Gosling in the pit, with King's foot kicks accenting flourishes from the keyboard. The third pair of the theme section (Ashley Laracey and Aaron Sanz) entered in a more deliberate set of movements that went with a fine violin solo section, one of the highlights of the choreography, with gorgeous form from Laracey, ending on her being carried off with her legs at a right angle.

Gonzalo Garcia flung himself around in the Melancholic variation, followed by two women who flitted around him in agitation. When joined by four more dancers, the moves became slower and heavier, with repeated gestures weighing down the movement in the style of the music. The Sanguinic variation was marked by enthusiastic high kicks in the entrance of Sara Mearns and Jared Angle. When four women joined Mearns in an active, decisive dance, the black one-piece costumes made them look almost like a synchronized swim team. Solo dancer Ask La Cour was measured and balanced in the Phlegmatic variation, each advance forward matched by a solemn retreat, later shadowed by four women in one of the other highlights of the ballet. Teresa Reichlen, her tall and lithe form all points and edges, led the Choleric section through Balanchine's calculated addition of dancers to involve the whole cast in a climactic final scene.

Other Reviews: Sarah L. Kaufman, From New York City Ballet: Big music, big dancing (mostly) (Washington Post, June 9) Alastair Macaulay, Sign of the Times: City Ballet’s Ashly Isaacs Laces Up Her Sneakers (New York Times, May 10) ---, New York City Ballet Opens a Spring Gala, and Some Umbrellas (New York Times, May 5) ---, New York City Ballet’s Very 21st-Century Steps (New York Times, January 27)

The two more recent works on either side of The Four Temperaments could not really measure up to it. Christopher Wheeldon's story-length ballets have not been among my favorites, but in shorter formats he can be intriguing. Sadly his new work American Rhapsody never really seems to connect to its music, Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, played with gusto by the NYCB Orchestra and pianist Elaine Chelton. Here was the first set backdrop of the entire run, a starburst on a midnight-blue backdrop encircling the dancers (design by Leslie Sardinias). The costumes, also purple-blue with red and white highlights, recalled the vivacious era of the 1920s when the music was composed. The movements never seemed to have come from the music, indeed had little in common with it, and the central duo dance (Lauren Lovette and Unity Phelan) came not as a result of dramatic growth or with any sense of who the pairing was or why we should care about them.

Justin Peck's The Times Are Racing, premiered this past January, is a mixture of ballet and many other dance forms, including tap, breakdancing, hip-hop, Broadway, and tap. A mass of dancers, dressed in tennis shoes, T-shirts (some marked with the word "DEFY"), jeans, and other street clothes (costumes by Humberto Leon) pulsated to the recorded electronic music of Dan Deacon (the last four tracks from his album America), played through the theater's speakers at ear-piercing volume. The choreography is a tour de force of frenetic action and irrepressible energy, never seeming to slacken its pace for over twenty minutes, and it captures the seething rage, mostly about political realities in the United States, of the music.

The performance also offered another chance to see the choreographer in action as a dancer, because he stepped in to replace Ashly Isaacs in the second pairing of this ballet. Peck's dances with Taylor Stanley were a highlight, but in the closing sections of the ballet Peck's choreography began to repeat itself a lot, as if filling out the time of the final track. It is a brash, bracing work that captures the bristling anger and frustration of the country at this moment, but it felt uneven.

This program repeats this afternoon in the Kennedy Center Opera House.

Wheeldon makes 'Cinderella' theatrical

Maria Kochetkova in Christopher Wheeldon’s Cinderella, San Francisco Ballet (photo © Erik Tomasson)
Christopher Wheeldon is a choreographer who misses more than he hits. The works reviewed at Ionarts show he has a flair for the dramatic, favoring striking visual effects through lighting, costumes, stagecraft, and puppetry. In few cases, however, has his ballet choreography stood out as striking. His take on The Winter's Tale was the strongest in this regard, and his Alice in Wonderland particularly weak. Wheeldon's new version of Cinderella, presented by San Francisco Ballet in 2013 and using the delightful Prokofiev score, makes its local debut at the Kennedy Center Opera House this week. As seen at opening night on Wednesday, it falls on the Alice side of things.

This Cinderella is more an evening of wordless, pantomimed theater than a ballet in the true sense. It abounds in childish slapstick humor that still drew loud chortles, and the fairy tale visual storytelling will keep children wide-eyed, including one down the row from us who talked throughout the whole, three-hour evening. Anyone looking for the hallmarks of classical ballet will be disappointed. There are no memorable solo dances, no great pas de deux, and no lush use of the corps as anything but colorful backdrop. One does not expect to see a corps de ballet asked to sashay in place; countless other movements given by Wheeldon would not be out of place in a Broadway chorus scene. From a ballet point of view, this was one of the most boring evenings I have experienced in the theater.

Wheeldon and his scenarist, Craig Lucas, fill in the backstory, opening with the death of Cinderella's mother. As in The Winter's Tale he inserts a strong male friendship, between Prince Guillaume (Joseph Walsh) and his pal Benjamin (Taras Domitro), also both shown as children in the opening scenes. Benjamin initiates his own romance with the nicer of the two stepsisters (apprentice Ellen Rose Hummel, matched with the more vicious Sasha De Sola), to no great advantage for the ballet. Four Fates, male dancers who repeatedly lifted the inert Cinderella (otherwise beautiful and charming Maria Kochetova) around the stage, were a needless distraction. The stereotypes of Russians (made with Prokofiev's music), Spaniards, and Balinese in the divertissement were at the edge of appalling. The visual coups are the only achievement, with especially memorable sequences involving a growing tree and Cinderella's carriage (overseen by Basil Twist).

Worst of all, Wheeldon is not a choreographer driven by music. When he works with a new composition, he turns to a composer who does not write great music. Here, working with one of the great scores of the 20th century -- not played to perfection by the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra, under Martin West -- too many of his gestures seemed mostly or entirely disconnected from the musical gestures. It was the same feeling elicited by Wheeldon's This Bitter Earth, but that was with a musical trifle by comparison. Then again, most versions of Cinderella do not not quite please: Ashton (too saccharine), Ratmansky (too caustic), and others. The way to make the score work with the choreography, though, would seem to be to take one's cue from the music.

Performances continue through October 30, in the Kennedy Center Opera House.

Modern Program from NYCB

New York City Ballet, Company in Justin Peck’s The Most Incredible Thing (photo by Paul Kolnik)
Ballet has a long history of divertissements that have no dramatic coherence. The flimsiest of excuses can justify a series of pretty entrées, going all the way back to the foundation of the genre in French courtly dance. That is essentially what Justin Peck has created in his new choreography, The Most Incredible Thing, given its local premiere by the New York City Ballet on Tuesday evening at the Kennedy Center Opera House. It is an act-length ballet driven more by its quirky, colorful costumes than by dancing or story-telling.

Peck drew the story of The Most Incredible Thing from the Hans Christian Andersen tale of the same name (Det Utroligste). It concerns a contest for the hand of a princess, won by an inventor, whom Peck calls (somewhat ponderously) the Creator. His invention is a miraculous clock that produces twelve automated scenes, one for each of the hours, providing the excuse for the twelve colorful entrées that dominate the ballet. A menacing figure, the Destroyer, challenges the Creator's victory by laying waste to the clock and claiming the princess for himself. Not to worry, because the figures from the clock come back to life and save the day. Peck has softened some of the religious overtones of the clock figures, changing Moses at One o'Clock into a Cuckoo Bird, danced by the energetic Tiler Peck (no relation to the choreographer), with movements recalling the Firebird at times, and changing the Three Kings (Three o'Clock) from the Biblical Magi into sword-wielding warrior-kings.

Other Reviews: Sarah L. Kaufman, New York City Ballet injects incredible zing into new Peck ballet and other works (Washington Post, March 2) Joan Acocella, Stepping Up: The precocious rise of Justin Peck (The New Yorker, February 29) Alastair Macaulay, At New York City Ballet, Works That Tell Stories and Don’t (New York Times, February 22) ---, ‘The Most Incredible Thing’ Brings Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tale to Life (New York Times, February 3) Brian Seibert, Justin Peck Calmly Creates a Kingdom at City Ballet (New York Times, January 29)

Sadly, though, these entrées do not advance the story in any way, and they are effectively performed twice because the dancers all come back to life at the ballet's conclusion. In fact, one remembers neither the story nor the movements of the dancers, but the eclectic, brightly colored costumes (designed by Marcel Dzama, supervised by Marc Happel): the grey hoops of the Five Senses, the pointed hats of the Eight Monks, or the black-white spirals of the Nine Muses. Taylor Stanley was an earnest Creator, overshadowed by the skull-capped Destroyer of Andrew Veyette, who danced a tense pas de deux with the Princess of Sterling Hyltin. The pop-minimalist score by Bryce Dessner, guitarist of the indie rock band The National, is repetitive and, while it does not offend, it goes in one ear and out the other.

In the middle of the evening came Balanchine's classic choreography to Tchaikovsky's second piano concerto, rounding out the Balanchine-Tchaikovsky set from the company's 2013 visit. The cadenzas and solo moments played by soloist Susan Walters corresponded with beautiful solos and duets featuring the tall, lithe Teresa Reichlen. Her partner, Tyler Angle, had a charming scene in the slow movement with five women on either side, like fanned-out shadows, accompanied by a gorgeous duet of solo violin and cello.

The first act featured two short choreographies by Peter Martins, the company's Ballet Master-in-Chief. In The Infernal Machine, the movements of the dancers, Ashley Laracey and Amar Ramasar, on the darkened stage seemed to have little to do with the antic passage through countless sound worlds found in the score of the same name by Christopher Rouse. A snippet quoted from Beethoven's op. 130 string quartet flies by, half unnoticed near the piece's halfway point. Likewise in Ash, Michael Torke's often disjointed score inspired contrapuntal movements for the dancers, often separated only by a beat. It is a shame that we did not have the chance to hear the company's own orchestra, which conductor Andrew Litton now leads. His work here with the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra left some details to be desired.

The highlight was an excerpt of Christopher Wheeldon's After the Rain. The evening's best-matched couple, Tiler Peck and Jared Angle, took turns moving one another along, in a slow-moving, longing-drenched choreography that goes a long way to make Arvo Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel, a piece I find hard to tolerate in concert performance, a more complete work. Violinist Arturo Delmoni and pianist Nancy McDill provided the steady pulse of the music, with the section-ending "ping" notes corresponding to flicks of arms or feet on the stage.

This program repeats Friday evening, with a second program centered on Bournonville's La Sylphide presented in the rest of the run.

'The Winter's Tale' from National Ballet of Canada

Hannah Fischer (Hermione) and Piotr Stanczyk (Leontes), with artists of the National Ballet of Canada
in The Winter's Tale (photo by Daniel Neuhaus)
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Not many new full-length story ballets get produced these days, when it is safer to create new choreographies for already successful scores or short works that showcase new choreographers. Thanks to a co-commission of the Royal Ballet in London and the National Ballet of Canada, British choreographer Christopher Wheeldon had the chance to do it. The new work, an adaptation of Shakespeare's late romance The Winter's Tale, was premiered in London in 2014. After its first production in Toronto last fall, the ballet had its American premiere at the Kennedy Center Opera House on Tuesday night.

Shakespeare's play needs trimming, and Wheeldon's streamlining, assisted by his composer Joby Talbot, gets at the heart of the story. The bromance between Kings Leontes and Polixenes is put on the rocks by the former's sudden jealousy of the latter, whom he believes has slept with his wife. Leontes torments his wife with his rage, putting her on trial and causing the death of his young son, who perishes with his mother. Servants take the king's newborn daughter to a faraway land, where she grows up and falls in love with Polixenes' son. Driven by his father's rage, the couple ends up back in Leontes's kingdom, where all is somehow put right.

Piotr Stanczyk brought the jealous despair of Leontes to disturbing life, his spider-like hand showing the birth of hatred and his twitching, writhing movements making him more beast than human. Second soloist Hannah Fischer had a breakout performance as Hermione, the long lines and angles of her body framed by her white dress. Jillian Vanstone was a pretty but somewhat featureless Perdita, matched beautifully by the more elegant Florizel of Naoya Ebe. In the supporting cast, Xiao Nan Yu stood out as a particularly dignified and tragic Head of Queen Hermione's household, serving as the conscience of the devastated king and overseeing his atonement.

Other Articles: Alastair Macaulay, Dark Suspicions in Jumps and Gestures in ‘The Winter’s Tale’ (New York Times, January 21) Sarah Kaufman, ‘The Winter’s Tale’ dazzles with its visual drama, choreography (Washington Post, January 20) Rebecca Ritzel, ‘The Winter’s Tale’: The blockbuster ballet that almost wasn’t (Washington Post, January 16) Martha Schabas, The Winter’s Tale draws warm reception (The Globe and Mail, November 16, 2015) Clement Crisp, The Winter’s Tale, Royal Opera House, London – review (The Financial Times, April 13, 2014) Luke Jennings, The Winter's Tale review – 'a ballet to keep' (The Guardian, April 12, 2014) Judith Mackrell, Royal Ballet: The Winter's Tale review – 'A game-changer for Wheeldon' (The Guardian, April 11, 2014)

Wheeldon's star is on the rise, seen in recent works like This Bitter Earth, Aeternum, and An American in Paris, and he will choreograph the new Nutcracker for the Joffrey Ballet set to open next December. His last full-length ballet seen here, Alice in Wonderland (presented by the National Ballet of Canada in 2013), had a big commercial success but was a failure as a story ballet, in the sense that it told a story but was more about stage effects than about dancing. The Winter's Tale is more successful at using ballet to tell the story, with stage effects providing some excellent enhancements. Video projections on silk scrims were breathtaking (projections by Daniel Brodie, with silk effects by Basil Twist), showing the various ship voyages back and forth, as well as crashing surf, and most strikingly the menacing bear from the play's infamous stage direction ("Exit, pursued by a bear") after Antigonus leaves the baby Perdita on the rocky shore.

While overall better than his Alice in Wonderland, this ballet still lacks a convincing danced climax. The emotional high point of the evening occurred when Leontes recognized his wife's emerald necklace around Perdita's neck. Rather than seizing on the moment with a dance between father and daughter, during which the statue of Hermione, brought back to life, could perhaps join in, the lights faded for a transition into a separate scene with the statue, and the energy dissipated.

The other problem with this Winter's Tale is the middling score by British composer Joby Talbot, who writes in a bland sort of pop minimalism (think of the theme for Downton Abbey) that produces little sustained interest. Talbot relies on the same crutches far too often: using metallic percussion of some kind on every other phrase robs that sound of its potential mystery. Here a group of onstage folk musicians (bansuri, dulcimer, accordion, and percussion), which have to be amplified, do not mix well with the orchestra. Good ballets have been made with mediocre scores -- Ludwig Minkus made a career out of it -- but a great full-length ballet needs much better music.

This production continues through January 24, in the Kennedy Center Opera House.

New York City Ballet, New and Newer

Pictures at an Exhibition, choreography by Alexei Ratmansky, New York City Ballet
The New York City Ballet is back at the Kennedy Center Opera House, in alternating programs this week featuring the giant of its past, George Balanchine, and its current choreographers. When you are dealing with new works of any kind, some will hit and some will miss, which was exactly the feeling experienced at the end of the selection billed as "21st-Century Choreographers" on Wednesday evening. It was a bit of a marathon, with four works adding up to almost three hours, and some of the works tried one's patience to the extreme.

The program opened with Symphonic Dances, by the company's current ballet master-in-chief, Peter Martins. Actually premiered in 1994, the work is set to Rachmaninoff's superb score of that name, op. 45, the composer's final work and a notable exception to my general aversion to Rachmaninoff's instrumental music. The Martins choreography is visually pleasing, but little about it stood out as remarkable over the course of forty minutes: without a story, the elegant vocabulary wears thin too quickly. In the solo female role, Teresa Reichlen, who hails from Fairfax County, was a wispy and altogether lovely presence, all long legs and lightness. The general appeal of the choreography was not helped by the mediocrity of the orchestral performance, here given by the company's own orchestra under interim music director Andrews Sill. The orchestra has been through a bit of a rocky period in the last few years, which the new tenure of conductor Andrew Litton, a Washington favorite with the National Symphony Orchestra, will hopefully help to stabilize, starting next season.

The undisputed high point of the evening was the delightful new choreography to Musorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, created last year by Alexei Ratmansky. The setting of an art museum is suggested by projections (designed by Wendell K. Harrington), based on Wassily Kandinsky's Color Study: Squares with Concentric Circles, dating from 1913, abstract shapes in bright colors that are reflected in movement by the dancers' costumes (designed by Adeline Andre). Although the music runs almost as long as the Rachmaninoff, played capably here in Musorgsky's original piano version by Cameron Grant, Ratmansky's choreography is so varied, brimming with originality, that it never tired. Sterling Hyltin was raised by the strong Tyler Angle in soaring leaps in "The Old Castle" movement, and in a striking reversal, women playfully incarnated the heavy-footed oxen in "Bydlo" and men the antic birds in the "Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks." The "Catacomb" movement, for the entire cast, was bathed in shadows of red light.

Other Reviews: Sarah Kaufman, New York City Ballet’s life-affirming new works boost the spirit (Washington Post, April 10) ---, New York City Ballet sparkles and blurs in opening program (Washington Post, April 9) Alastair Macaulay, With Each Star Turn, a Feeling of a Collective Force Begins to Brew (New York Times, January 21) ---, The Art Gallery as Spinning Montage (New York Times, October 3, 2014) ---, Celebrating Old Times With New: A Premiere (New York Times, May 9, 2014) New York City Ballet on Ionarts: 2014 | 2013

Tiler Peck and Craig Hall made a beautiful pairing in Christopher Wheeldon's somewhat limited, repetitive This Bitter Earth, although it would have been just as visually pretty if it had been performed in silence, so little did it seem to have to do with the music, a recording from the soundtrack for Shutter Island. Both music and choreography felt endless in their over-repetition in Everywhere We Go, Justin Peck's abstract ballet to a suite of music by Sufjan Stevens (orchestrated by Michael P. Atkinson). Both choreographer and composer relied heavily on the copy-paste method, with some whole sections of the choreography simply repeated toward the end, not to mention a number of dancers who slipped and fell, for whatever reason.

The company's second program, seen on Thursday night but not for review, was worthwhile just to have a look at Balanchine's choreography for Agon, which was crucial in my making sense of Schoenberg's twelve-tone score for this work. Maria Kowroski was brilliant, almost superhuman, in the outrageous contortions of the Pas de Deux in the ballet's second part. Balanchine's vivacious choreography to Bizet's Symphony in C, last seen from American Ballet Theater in 2013, was also outstanding, especially the elegant extensions of Sara Mearns in the slow movement's pas de deux.

These programs are repeated through April 12, in the Kennedy Center Opera House.

Canadian 'Wonderland'

Ballet is largely about fantasy, and the suspension of disbelief required to enjoy it is perhaps the greatest among all the arts, even more than in opera. How exactly that aura of fantasy has been achieved through the centuries has changed significantly, and some companies are moving past the traditional means of frilly costumes and carefully choreographed movements to make the dancers seem lighter than air. There are all kinds of theatrical and cinematographic possibilities that remain more or less unexplored, perhaps because these things can take away from the dancing part of ballet. The best use of modern technology in a ballet, which did not take away from the dancing, that we have seen is the work of the Royal Danish Ballet and their director Nikolaj Hübbe, who has used fly wires, mechanized sets, and advanced lighting to lift his choreography beyond the ordinary. The new Alice in Wonderland from the National Ballet of Canada (co-produced with London's Royal Ballet), which opened for a run at the Kennedy Center Opera House on Friday night, went even further in this regard, but too often at the expense of the dancing.

This leaves no complaints in the entertainment department, as this three-hour extravaganza, choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon and staged by Jacquelin Barrett, goes full out in bringing Lewis Carroll's phantasmagorical world to life. Moving screens with video projections (designed by Jon Driscoll and Gemma Carrington) create the effects of the fall down the rabbit hole and the doors that grow enormous next to the shrinking Alice; ingenious set pieces (sets and costumes by Bob Crowley) provide others, like the room-shaped box Alice crawls into when she grows huge, accompanied by massive arms and legs that descend onto the stage; gigantic marionettes operated by black-clothed puppeteers form the floating and sometimes separating parts of the Cheshire Cat; there is even tap dance, in the choreography of the Mad Hatter (danced energetically by Robert Stephen). It is a multimedia production, in which ballet places a part.

Other Reviews: Sarah Kaufman, At Kennedy Center, a jubilant ‘Alice’ that doesn’t worry about ravens or writing desks (Washington Post, January 21)

Perhaps not enough of a part for some enthusiasts. Alice and the Knave of Hearts have a couple of romantic duets, neither extended enough really to qualify as a pas de deux, danced longingly by handsome dancers Jillian Vanstone and Naoya Ebe, the latter an up-and-coming dancer promoted to First Soloist last year. There are some fun comic moments, especially from the herky-jerky queen of Greta Hodgkinson, and some exotic touches like the Caterpillar-cum-Arabian dancer of Jiří Jelínek (his dance concluded with a group of en pointe dancers making up a many-legged caterpillar). Still, for all its appeal -- a series of pleasing episodes rather than a dramatic arc (this is partly due to the source material, also adapted by Septime Webre just last year) -- the work's repetitive qualities grated on my nerves after a while. Part of the fault goes to the rather pedestrian score by Joby Talbot, like the staging full of bells and whistles -- celesta! glockenspiel! synthesized voices from a keyboard! The style is what one might call cinematic quasi-minimalism, lots of percolating repetition but few memorable melodies.

This production continues through January 27, at the Kennedy Center Opera House.