Tag: Pascal Rioult

RIOULT @ The Joyce ~ June 2016

Wednesday June 22nd, 2016 – RIOULT at The Joyce, offering a very pleasing evening of dance from Pascal Rioult’s excellent troupe, with exceptional dancing from both established Company members and relative newcomers. The program was well-varied musically, and the evening was enhanced throughout by fine lighting and canny use of visual effects.

Tchaikovsky’s Orchestral Suite #2 in C-major is the setting for Dream Suite which opened the program; this coloristic ballet – with gorgeously distinctive lighting by Jim French – is a visual treat. The inimitable Charis Haines is the Dreamer, and her dreams veer from lyrical to witty to mystical.

Against a backdrop which shifts from pumpkin-coloured to vivid red, ten dancers move thru Charis’s dreamworld in quirky combinations, sometimes stopping to strike amusingly ironic poses. Masked characters appear: a bull, and ancient reptilian birds. Undercurrents of sexual fantasy are woven in and, as is often the case in dreams, things seem disjointed at times.

The choreography overall is disarmingly simple – when the dancers simply form a circle, the effect is stunning – and Charis Haines excels in her solo passages. Colour – radiant and saturated – is everything. The striking image of a woman stretched out in a flat plank and borne aloft by her partner across the upstage space seems to signal a magical end to the ballet, but there’s another movement to come; that image, though, remains fixed in the memory.

Selected Preludes and Fugues from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (seemingly the Glenn Gould recordings, as there is much extraneous vocalism along the way) are the basis of Polymorphous, a stylized dancework which opened before a gridwork backdrop against neutral colours, with costumes of the same visual texture. Four dancers – Brian Flynn, Charis Haines, Jere Hunt, and Sara Elizabeth Seger – move in sync, almost like automatons. In two duets that follow, the first is accompanied by a ghostly negative-image film of the dancers projected above while during the second, multiple shadow images appear as echoes of the choreography.

Duets, Sacred and Profane opened the evening’s second half; here we meet pairs of the RIOULT dancers in more personalized settings. In the first duet, from Kansas City Orfeo (1996), Sabatino A Verlezza as Orfeo attempts to revive his dead wife, Euridice (Catherine Cooch), to the appropriate music from the Gluck opera; this put me very much in mind of David Grenke’s powerful duet, Vespers.

One of the Company’s newest members, Corinna Nicholson, made a really lovely impression dancing a duet from The Great Mass (2009) with Sara Elizabeth Seger. The girls wear gossamer ‘Baroque’ dresses, and they bring an air of courtliness to this charming piece.

Two of RIOULT‘s most vivid dancers, Jere Hunt and Michael Spencer Phillips, were magnificent in a pas de deux from Te Deum (1995). To the music of Arvo Pärt, Michael – in a dark suit and white shirt – partners Jere, clad in black briefs, in an intimate duet. Though devoid of erotic overtones, the dance is both sensual and spiritual. Various imagined scenarios might be applied – two lovers, two brothers, a father and son, a guardian angel and his charge. Jere Hunt’s muscular physique speaks powerfully in its own right; a vein of poetic vulnerability which runs thru his work as a dancer gives his performances a deeply personal resonance. Michael’s handsomeness and the strength of his movement are captivating to behold: this is a dancer who can express both courage and tenderness. Together, the two men thrilled the audience.

Something special needed to follow this male duet, and we found it the charismatic pairing of Charis Haines and Holt Walborn in a sublime Bach duet from Views of the Fleeting World (2008). Their expressiveness and their sense of the mutual devotion of this couple created a beautiful atmosphere.

For a remarkable finale, Pascal Rioult’s unique setting of Ravel’s Bolero sparked an eruption of cheers from the mesmerized crowd at its end. Against a backdrop by Harry Feiner – a fanciful rendering of architecture à l‘espagnole – eight dancers perform endless repetitions of gestural motifs while periodically moving from one formation to another. Woven into these geometric configurations are illuminated solos which are luxuriantly slow and sometimes self-caressive. The dancers – Mlles. Cooch, Haines, Nicholson, and Seger with Mssrs. Flynn, Hunt, Phillips, and Verlezza – went thru their hypnotic paces with machine-like precision, whilst basking in the more voluptuous solo moments. Brilliant!

June 22, 2016
RIOULT: Martha, May and Me @ The Joyce

Above: Charis Haines of RIOULT; photo by Paul B Goode

Saturday June 21st, 2014 matinee – Celebrating twenty years of dance, RIOULT– named for their founder/choreographer Pascal Rioult – offered two programmes at The Joyce. My over-stuffed, end-of-season calendar only showed space for a single performance, and it was a great afternoon of dance.

May O’Donnell was only a name to me, and one that I honestly had heard only in passing. I knew nothing of her work beyond the fact that she had danced for Martha Graham. RIOULT have revived O’Donnell’s 1943 work, SUSPENSION, set to a score by Ray Green. This ‘blue ballet’ made an absolutely stunning effect as the opening work on today’s programme at The Joyce – a programme in which Pascal Rioult honored the creative influence of two women for whom he danced: Ms. O’Donnell and Martha Graham. In a brief film shown before the O’Donnell was performed, Pascal Rioult spoke of the deep impression made on him when he first saw SUSPENSION; the piece had the same powerful effect on me today.

SUSPENSION opens with a marvelous solo danced today by Sara E. Seger. In deep blue body tights, her hair in a ponytail, Ms. Seger is perched upon a pair of powder-blue boxes set stage left. This solo has the feel of an Olympic balance-beam ‘routine’ and was performed with a combination of athleticism and grace by the dancer. Her colleagues, in vari-hued blue body tights then assemble: Jane Sato, Anastasia Soroczynski, Catherine Cooch, Jere Hunt, Holt Walborn, and Sabatino A Verlezza. In stylized movement, they display deep arabesques and open wingspans, striking sustained poses with great control. Their communal rituals are at once stripped-down and ornate; SUSPENSION is as clear as a pristine Summer sky.

Pascal Rioult’s BLACK DIAMOND (2003) shows O’Donnell’s influence in the gestural language. This duet for two women is set to Igor Stravinsky’s ‘Duo Concertant‘, a work familiar to ballet-goers thru George Balanchine’s ballet of the same name. The curtain rises on a black space pierced by David Finley’s shafts of light. In a smoky atmosphere, dancers Charis Haines and Jane Sato – each atop a large black box – begin to move in parallel solos, sometimes in-sync and sometimes echoing one another. Later they descend to stage level and the dancing becomes more spacious. They return to the heights for the final moments of the ballet, with a breath-taking lighting coup as the curtain falls.

Earlier this month, photographer Matt Murphy and I watched Charis and Jane rehearsing BLACK DIAMOND – a memorable hour in Pascal’s studio. Read about that experience here, with Matt’s striking images.

Martha Graham’s 1940 work EL PENITENTE employs a specially-written score by Graham’s ‘dear indispensability’ Louis Horst. Inspired by the simple penitential morality plays presented by traveling players in the American Southwest, we see the self-inflicted torture of flagellation, the temptation of Adam by Eve, repentance, crucifixtion, and redemption all played out with naive simplicity. Michael S Phillips is the Christ figure and Charis Haines plays all the female roles, from virgin to temptress. With his god-like physique and powerful dancing, Jere Hunt’s Penitent was a perfect portrayal.

For the afternoon’s closing work, VIEWS OF THE FLEETING WORLD, master-choreographer Pascal Rioult turns to the music of Bach – from ‘The Art of the Fugue‘ – for this seven-part dancework interpersed with empty-stage interludes which create a pensive atmosphere. The ensemble passages, with the dancers sometimes clad in long red skirts, give way to three duets in which the couples appear in evocative vignettes: Marianna Tsartolia and Michael S Phillips in Dusk, Charis Haines and Jere Hunt in Summer Wind, and Sara E Seger and Brian Flynn in Moonlight. Here – and throughout the afternoon – the technical prowess and personal allure of the RIOULT dancers set the choreography in high relief; their commitment and artistry are wonderfully satsfying to behold.

June 21, 2014
RIOULT Studio Showing

Above: Charis Haines and Brian Flynn in Pascal Rioult’s ON DISTANT SHORES; photo by Sofia Negron

Monday April 29, 2013 – For me, there are few choreographers currently creating who can rival Pascal Rioult for musicality, structure and dramatic nuance. This evening at the Paul Taylor Studios an invited audience watched an excerpt from one of Pascal’s most perfect works, ON DISTANT SHORES; and we were then treated to a preview of his current work-in-progress, set to a score by Michael Torke. Both ballets draw their inspiration from the stories of legendary women: Helen of Troy for DISTANT SHORES and Iphigenia for the new creation.

The except from ON DISTANT SHORES was danced this evening by Charis Haines, a charismatic and mysterious beauty; seeing her as the iconic Helen seems like a providential case of type-casting, for her presence is as mesmerizing as her face. She is surrounded by the spirits of four warriors, Greek or Trojan, with the torsos of demi-gods and each with his own indivdual allure: Jere Hunt, Brian Flynn, Holt Wilbourn and Josiah Guitian. The ballet is set to an ethereal and evocative score by Aaron Jay Kernis.

The dancers have been up at Katsbaan preparing IPHIGENIA; the Michael Torke score for this ballet will be performed live when it premieres at The Joyce in June. This new work is something of a fresh departure for Pascal Rioult in that it takes on the aspects of a dance-drama; there will be a spoken narrative, and the dancers’ acting skills will be to the fore. In this evening’s preview-showing the four principal roles were danced by Jane Sato, Marianna Tsartolia, Brian Flynn and Jere Hunt – all looking splendid, and vibrantly committed – while the other dancers of the Company take on the classic duties of the Greek chorus.

RIOULT will be at The Joyce June 9th thru 14th, 2013. Information here. Ah, and they are doing BOLERO…yet another of Pascal’s masterpieces.

April 29, 2013