Best Innovator in Tights
Best of Seattle —
Seattle Weekly, August 2008
Sandra Kurtz
After a decade with the Pacific Northwest Ballet, Olivier Wevers is still looking for new variations on the traditions. "I try to find a twist," he says. "I'm sick of seeing the same basic ballet steps, just in a new sequence." One of the ways he's branched out is with a new hobby: skydiving. The other is by creating new choreography for his PNB colleagues, as well as for modern dance troupes in town. Right now, Wevers' choreographic life is on a roll, fueled by curiosity and enthusiasm.
A dancer's education typically involves mentoring by a succession of teachers and coaches (in Olivier's case, in his native Belgium), but choreography is generally self-taught. All your errors are made in public, right in front of the audience. Wevers has made very few of those during a year in which his work has been seen all over the dance community.
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Best Innovator in Tights
Best of Seattle —
Seattle Weekly, August 2008
Sandra Kurtz
As a performer, he excels at assignments that combine technical skill with dramatic ability, and it's no surprise his choreography displays that same dual nature. Still One, made for the Seattle Dance Project's inaugural show, was a collection of solos designed around the specific skills of SDP's mature artists, and his FRAGMENTS for Spectrum Dance Theater made deft use of familiar arias from Mozart operas, drawing out their expressive potential.
"I'm a Mozart freak, I have my Mozart playlist all the time," he says. Of the work this innovator has made recently, some of the best has been set to Mozart. "I think classical music is so beautiful, and you can give it new life. I think people forget about it, you get all this modern, electronic work—I like to use some of that, too, but the classical music is so rich and deep."
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Seattle P-I
R.M. Campbell
Olivier Wevers, one of PNB's most engaging dancers, is in the early stages of a second career as a choreographer. He contributed the world premiere, Shindig, a potpourri or suite, if you like, set to bits of music from famous composers: Leroy Anderson to Igor Stravinsky, with stops at Rimsky-Korsakov, Schubert and Mozart, along the way. Wevers can be very playful as a dancer, and that attribute carries over in this piece. And as his sense of timing rarely fails him as a dancer, it rarely fails him as a choreographer.
Shindig is all over the map. It has flair, satire and moments of beauty and is a showcase for PNB dancers. They do not fail him. Chalnessa Eames and Jonathan Porretta open with a dandy little duet, followed by the many splendors of Louise Nadeau. Kaori Nakamura and Lucien Postlewaite get the big duet to which they brought good humor, bold technique and flowing lyricism. Carrie Imler has the final word, which she delivered with bravura feet and a radiant style.
Seattle Weekly
Sandra Kurtz
With Shindig, PNB dancer (and here, choreographer) Olivier Wevers also sends up his own art form, dissecting a single extension into multiple parts and then overlapping the edges. The piece packs three different movements into the space a single one usually takes, literally turning the performers' backs on the audience and allowing us to see exasperation and failure. Wevers' was one of two works created specifically for the festival that tried hardest to actually "make funny dancing."
Arts Watch
The always-creative Olivier Wevers (who debuts another piece, Shindig, at next week's Laugh Out Loud festival) possibly had the most ambitious idea of the evening with his solo Moi Je Dis Que... Wevers both choreographed and danced the work, which was accompanied onstage by pianist Dianne Chilgren playing variations on Mozart's "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" tune. There is no doubt that Wevers has a unique style of movement, so it was a treat to see him interpret the music through the twisting of his wrists and undulations of his torso. Though the musical variations stretched on, Wevers kept a playful smile on his face the whole time, as he alternated meditative sections with humorous snippets. The whole thing had a cheerfully anecdotal feel, with each part being linked by the "Twinkle" melody. It'll certainly be interesting to see, then, what next week's Shindig involves.
European Weekly
Rosie Gaynor
On September 3, Wevers' most recent work was performed at Bumbershoot. It's a pretty piece that stays with you. Vivid blue-green and bronze...it begins and ends with two dancers in silhouette. It takes as its starting point Degas' statue "La petite Danseuse de quatorze ans" and gets going with a personality-laden call-and-response. This short piece was choreographed on two PNB students, who danced it charmingly—with nice form and with personality—in June at PNB's Choreographers Showcase.
At Bumbershoot it was danced by Kaori Nakamura and Lucien Postlewaite. The piece took on a new name with its new dancers: Liora and Andrew became Kaori and Lucien. Its shape is a little clearer with these strong, witty professional dancers who both have excellent phrasing and who know Wevers' own dancing so well. What was nice in June, was surprising in September. The slow, unraveling turns became suspenseful. The outbreak of jumps suddenly made sense and was thrilling.
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European Weekly
Rosie Gaynor
And the music was more exciting. Dominic Frasca's "Forced Entry" is relentlessly repetitive, a sort of tangled tango. To keep us from getting lost in it, the dancers needed exquisite precision—very French—and they delivered. Just when you think the piece is going to get mired in the music, it doesn't. At times, Wevers allows the dancers to transcend the rush, creating little kensho moments for us all. At other times, the dancers just power on through the music, squaring the corners of the stage at their own pace, momentarily wonderfully out of phase in such a way that the music needs to catch up with them.
This duet, whichever name you give it, is definitely ballet. The Degas statue Wevers saw at the Met inspired it. "It's such a wonderful image," said Wevers, "and I thought, why not? But I wanted to twist it... A lot of people get stuck with what ballet is supposed to be; you get stuck with that rule book of what you're supposed to have, even in the structure of the ballet." Wevers' structure for this duet contains a few fun surprises. My favorite is when one dancer goes off stage and you expect the other dancer to start the bravura solo demanded by formula. She leaves too, and for a moment the stage is empty.
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Seattle Weekly
Sandra Kurtz
Wevers' 2006 crowded murmurs...thoughts for Spectrum was a chamber-sized dance that made charming use of its Mozart score. FRAGMENTS does the same, playing on our familiarity with some well-known arias from The Marriage of Figaro and The Magic Flute. The dancers lip-synch in grand operatic style, scratch their itches like puppies, and adjust their costumes. Here, ballet technique is about freedom, not power, and it seems that Kelly Ann Barton and Hannah Lagerway are set to burble their way around the stage for the duration of the work, until the score shifts to Mozart's Ave Verum. Lagerway strips off her flirty skirt and proceeds to turn herself inside out and upside down in an extended adagio that's all bent joints, like a colt learning to stand. Probably the most effective part of the work has the least amount of movement, as Lagerway pauses for several breaths, upside down and all splayed out.
Seattle Times
Mary Murfin Bayley
You should trek down to Spectrum's cozy performance space at Madrona Dance Center today to see crowded murmurs...thoughts by choreographer Olivier Wevers — an emotionally vibrant work set to a Mozart violin concerto.
Seattle Weekly
Sandra Kurtz
The lovely ensemble piece crowded murmur...thoughts, by Olivier Wevers, combines the ease and facility of classical dance with a playful twistiness. The three sections are laced together by an ongoing motif—quieting someone with a hand in front of the mouth and whispering in their ear. Wevers' movement invention is charming and his skill at manipulating structure and pattern—the traffic cop aspect of choreography—is very assured. He makes the Spectrum performers look every bit as good as they are, and gives the company a delicious valentine of a dance.
Seattle P-I
Alice Kaderlan
It's no wonder that a Wevers work was recently featured at the New York City Ballet's prestigious Choreographic Institute and that Spectrum will present another new Wevers piece during its studio series in December.
Friday evening featured a section of Wevers' striking X stasis, which was the hit of PNB's 2006 Choreographers' Showcase. The excerpted pas de deux was performed by two of PNB's most charismatic male dancers, Jonathan Porretta and Lucien Postlewaite. They completely embodied the quick-fire yet elongated style of X stasis, with its jagged edges and blazing theatricality.
Wevers' flair for drama, which infuses his own dancing, carries over to his creations for others, and it is very exciting to see him continue to develop as a maker of dances.
Seattle Times
Mary Murfin Bayley
Olivier Wevers' witty ballet X stasis, set to the music of Thomas Adès, was as original as its title, and had elements of ecstasy and zero stasis. The five duets included Chalnessa Eames' amusing flirtation with a dressmaker's dummy and a riveting tango of power and intimacy between two men, Porretta and Postlewaite. Louise Nadeau and Jordan Pacitti were crisp and demur. Ariana Lallone's cage-like skirt seemed to have a life of its own.
Wevers' choreography is full of the unexpected, the theatrical and imaginative. Dancers use their hands in hypnotic ways, turning back at the wrist, plucking or tickling up an arm.
Wevers continued playing with his inventive movement vocabulary in the solo pigment, set to a traditional Japanese folk song. Lallone moved with the sliding short steps of a woman walking in a kimono, sometimes breaking out into the expansive reach of full ballet arabesque turns.
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