Spark, the last of the four pieces on May’s Third Degree program, was performed by five dancers (Tory Peil, Andrew Bartee, Mia Monteabaro, Lara Seefeldt and Sergey Kheylik) against a background of Olivier’s voice incorporated into music by Brian Lawlor.
As Michael Upchurch commented in the Seattle Times, “‘Spark’ neatly sidesteps being a navel-gazing exercise, thanks to the Wevers/Lawlor score which works atmospherically as music (both its sound effects and its actual musical notes) even as it’s filled with Wevers’ disclosures about ‘creative process, insecurities, wishes, pet peeves.‘”

Rachel Gallaher in City Arts found the choreography “gorgeous—effortless lifts, strong group work, a weightless moment when Peil is dragged around the stage on demi-pointe. Despite the specific theme, Wevers has returned to a more original ‘Whim W’Him’ look. He is not trying to follow a storyline, or make the choreography fit into predetermined lines—it is him at his barest, his using the dance as a lens into his life—and that is when he is at his most brilliant.” The nearest thing to a reservation was expressed in Anna Waller‘s  for the most part highly positive review for Seattle Dances: “The text was interesting, but sometimes overpowered the dancing, partially because it was so loud against the music. The elements of dance, text, and music did not fully work in concert with one another yet. Furthermore, a work that deals so overtly with artistic process risks toeing the line of pretension. Spark managed to remain on the other side, but only just. It would be fascinating to see it after another round of editing.”

Despite the many hours I have spent watching Olivier work and listening to him talk about dance, I was quite astounded at how elegantly and honestly he dealt with complex, contradictory and very personal themes in this new piece. Olivier’s quintessential characteristics—his passion, training and experience in dance; his well-honed instinct for collaborating with dancers, costumers, lighting and set designers in creating a desired theatrical impact; his self-deprecation (though not self-contempt) and his humor—all fuel and are transformed by a singular choreographic gift.

Instead of leaving the impression of having spilled his own private guts on the floor for his viewers to clean up, Olivier disarms with matter-of-fact candor. “Of course,” says the text in his voice that is integrated into Brian’s score, “I’m totally insecure. I had no idea what it’s going to look like. I didn’t know if it was going to be good or not. I didn’t know if it was going to work. I had to believe that that’s the process that I had to go through.” Yet he somehow does know what good artists do know: how to take the particulars of raw, unattenuated personal experience and convert them, via the tools of his chosen art, into something that touches people, makes them smile, wince, or sigh.

“The more tools you have,” the voice-over remarks, “the more prepared you are.” Nevertheless, it’s a tricky business to pull off, to end up with art and not mere artifice,
to use metaphors without overdoing them, and to admit, as Olivier does at a particularly poignant and candid moment in the text, that “I’m putting myself out there but not really being out there. People are not really looking at me.  They’re looking at an image of me, and that’s the image that I want them to see.”

And he makes a great deal of the centrality of the dancers’ marvelous abilities, through a long list of descriptive nouns ending in trust. The dancers “are also judging you,” he says, “And they’re not fully trusting you until they really trust… We have to trust each other.”

In responding to the unheard and unnamed interviewer in the text, Olivier speaks directly, but the dance itself is indirect, open to interpretation. There is a recognition that this is a different art, a different experience than putting things into words. There are amusing visual puns, as when the voice-over says, “I know the mood that I want it to be – what to portray – and then I figure out how to make it fit on my music. Look up at the sky…it’s like finding shapes in the clouds“…

…and correspondences here and there, where something spoken is illustrated by images onstage, as in the section that accompanies the words “There’s moments when you get to the dark side of things.  Being angry, jealous, frustrated. Those are the things that you can work on.  You also have to accept that is part of being human. It’s part of us. The monster is part of us“…

…or a jittery little teasing of Olivier’s own tendency to preface sentences in rehearsal with “Um” and “You know.”

But there is never just one “meaning” which it is the audience’s job to decipher.
An audience member commenting to the Times review wrote: “[Olivier's] pieces are loaded with symbolism. Every movement counts and nothing is wasted. Even the non-movement means something. I appreciate that. I find myself wanting to ‘get it’ and never feeling like I do. Which leaves me coming back for more.” It’s that sense of there being a wide range of possibilities for interpretation that makes this exciting dance.”

As Olivier says in the script, “That’s my baggage.” We all bring our own baggage with us to the theater, and who knows what is in those suitcases?

We all know what a difference interpretation makes to dance works. Indeed it’s one of the characteristics of good choreography that it can be danced and viewed from multiple perspectives. Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s L’Effleuré, the third piece in Whim W’Him’s Third Degree program last month, is a perfect case in point. My favorite dance critic, the New York Times’ Alastair Macauley, wrote a disgruntled review of the Jacoby and Pronk program at Jacob’s Pillow (2010) in which L’Effleuré premiered. “Here,” he sniped, referring to the entire program, “the flashy surfaces of the dances are all that’s going on in terms of serious expression.” Macauley was much put off by what he saw as a combination of “the drop-dead cool of supermodels” and audience manipulation. He concluded, “The mind has nothing to retain but good looks and wow effects.”

In watching and re-watching a video of Rubinald Pronk dancing L’Effleuré—well before reading the above review—I have to admit to being put off by what came across to me as the preening exaggerations of the dancer in this solo.

Rubinald Pronk in L’Effleuré

I remained a little uncomfortable with the piece even after reading Annabelle’s words about it. “Rubinald is an artist known for his strength and forceful dancing. I’ve known Rubi since he was 14 years old and I have watched him develop into this forceful artist. We have worked together once before and this time I wanted to make a piece that would show his softer, tender side. Like the king of roses.”

When I spoke with Annabelle in person later, while she was in Seattle teaching the part to Andrew Bartee, L’Effleuré began to make more sense. She talked about a king, like Louis XIV, so separated out by power and the etiquette associated with his exalted position that he has no normal life. This solo catches him in a rare moment where his loneliness, insecurities and vulnerability war with his deeply imbued imperiousness and self-regard.

As I observed Andrew learn the technically demanding role, the piece took a new dimension. Andrew is a versatile, as well as thoroughly modest and non-flamboyant person, choreographer, and dancer. He can convey seriousness of purpose (in the subtle and complex relationships of This is real., the piece he choreographed for the same Whim W’Him program) or carry off broad-brush comedy (as in his portrayal of Gamache in Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Don Quixote). Low-key humor (as in Whim W’Him artistic director Olivier Wever‘s Flower Festival) is a central Andrew characteristic, in work and life, and in performance it serves beautifully to defuse any hint of personal grandiosity or narcissism in his portrayal of the rose king in L’Effleuré.

At first, with little time to rehearse, Andrew struggled after the fluidity and assurance the role required. And then it was as if, in watching him master the tricky movements of the ballet, I observed him grow into the lonely ceremonial role of a king in a highly structured and artificial court. Rather than feeling like an exercise in swagger or preen, it was a journey of discovery by a young king, of both his dignity and his limitations.

The results wowed all the critics who saw it. Michael Upchurch of the Seattle Times  captures the nuanced layers, as well as the humor in Andrew’s performance: “L’Effleuré opens with Bartee in gleaming half-silhouette… The variety, control and detail of his actions, as he unspools himself in response to the music, are truly mesmerizing. There’s a latent violence in his eddying elegance, too, that lends the piece a stinging edge. The crowning touch: he performs the whole thing with a red rose clenched in his mouth (let’s hope someone trimmed the thorns beforehand).” 

In the words of Seattle Dances‘ Anna Waller, “L’Effleuré, a solemn, noble solo, featured Bartee in red velvet pants and a deep red flower in his mouth and in each palm. The choreography demanded much clarity from Bartee, and he certainly delivered, deftly interspersing subtle, sinuous body ripples with clean balletic jumps and turns. Many times, he posed standing or in grand plié with his palms facing outward, so that all three flowers were visible: a pared-down vision of splendor…”

City Arts‘ Rachel Gallaher noted: “This piece mixes slow elongated movements of extension with small, quick footwork and transitions. With a rose in each hand (and one in the mouth), Bartee is mesmerizing—the continual return to a deep grand plie centers the piece, bringing it back to a place he can once again expand from, renewed with a new energy.“

Meanwhile, Michael van Baker had this to say:
“The light seems to drip down planes that are the front and back of Andrew Bartee, at the outset of L’Effleuré. Lighting designer Michael Mazzola catches Bartee from all angles throughout the course of Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s dance piece, whether ‘elastic technician’ Bartee is soaring in a leap or sinking to his haunches in a grand plié, pulsing slightly to a rhythm like breathing or heartbeat. A sinuous movement travels slowly through his core, a leg extends skyward, he pirouettes — all with the gravitas of someone not simply at home in his skin, but almost too-exquisitely aware of it (with his back to the audience, Bartee manipulates his shoulder blades, and skin transmits the subcutaneous movement).

“L’Effleuré is a mash-up of referents,” van Baker continues, “it’s French for lightly touched, or caressed, but the program notes mention Louis XIV, the Sun King, too. The strutted torsions are about a muscular elegance, the rose-petal palms and rose-mouth advertising an easily-bruised sensitivity. (It looks great, but Bartee confesses afterward he’s mainly trying not to drool as he bites down on the stem.) At one point, Bartee sinks forward on his knees, his palms up as if in supplicating prayer, and then they look like rose stigmata. The music is Vivaldi’s ‘Stabat mater dolorosa,’ so the stigmata may not be unintended, though here they are transformed.”

I’m very curious what Alastair Macauley would make of Andrew Bartee in L’Effleuré.

Although the reviewers for FRAGMENTS were uniformly positive in their assessments of Third Degree, their ranking of the four pieces on the program was anything but.
While Michael Upchurch of The Seattle Times found Andrew Bartee (both as dancer and choreography) was worth the price of admission and others keyed on Whim W’Him artistic director Olivier Wevers‘ I don’t remember a spark, Waller was captured by the special qualities of FRAGMENTS, which she describes in perceptive detail:

“FRAGMENTS essentially followed a pas de deux structure (duet-solo-solo-duet), but it turned ballet on its head, poking fun at the music and at ballet’s gender conventions. The dance began with Seefeldt and Sani side by side, earnestly mouthing the words to ‘Voi Che Sapete’ from The Marriage of Figaro (a particularly sly choice, given that the aria is for a mezzo soprano who portrays a male character who at one point dresses as a woman), and it turned into a witty gestural dance that integrated ballet technique with gender-neutral partnering.”

In the solo that follows, Lara combines energy and superlative comic timing in rendering her fast, delicate and intricate footwork with speed, accuracy and panache. “She is petite,” Waller notes, “but her pure, powerful dancing gives her the aura of a force of nature as she twists and jumps across the stage, her expressive face utterly deadpan.”

For Jesse’s solo, in the words of Michael van Baker of The SunBreak, “he steps out of his dress, and begins an exercise in uncorseted, slow articulations,” in an altogether different mood, a journey of self-discovery. Writes Waller, “Sani’s solo to Ave Verum was a somber portrait of vulnerability; the audience witnessed him shed his dress, explore the long lines of his own body, and then return to his costume, resigned, perhaps, to societal conventions of dress.“ 

For the coda, Waller points out, “the dancers engaged in playful competition, arching their bodies and screeching along with the coloratura passages from The Magic Flute. Wevers has filled every moment of FRAGMENTS with fascinating movement, engaging performance, and sly humor.”

In the words of van Baker, “Lara Seefeldt and Jesse Sani make a feast of a remounting of Fragments… Seefeldt [is] every inch the Mozart ingenue. They can dance prettily, as befits Mozart, but you’ll also see them bend over backward with a scream’s rictus on their faces, or seated, they beat their feet in tiny pas in a widening arc, evoking a coloratura run.” He concludes by calling Jesse’s solo a “showstopper.” That word again!

As Chris Heide in The Chosen remarks, for Olivier, “acknowledgement of the past is crucial aspect of progress. He explains, ‘In moving forward and creating an identity for Whim W’Him, it is important that we move ahead with innovation but also embrace the past from time to time. FRAGMENTS is a piece that keeps evolving, but also is a wink back to an earlier time in my career.‘”

The steps and movements of FRAGMENTS are sometimes strictly balletic—sometimes stretched our and transformed into something else. Interwoven with themes of masks and gender, formal composition and expressive quasi-improvisation, poignant somberness and high wit, this award-winning work beautifully encapsulates the trajectory of Olivier’s own choreographic career.

“The Sofa in all its life, humor, shadows and passion is like a small window into Olivier’s life.” – Patricia Barker, Artistic Director of Grand Rapids Ballet Company

To feel connected:

Numbing ourselves in a crowd, we lose our inhibitions, our doubts and insecurities.
To push boundaries:
Clubs, drugs, alcohol. Time stands still for a moment. The experi- ence is intense. Nothing can stop us. Somewhere deep inside we adore the feeling of invincibility.

To follow the lure of glamor:

Glamor is success, success is happiness.
But is it true? Does it work?
Or do we merely numb ourselves to who we are, to what we really stand and struggle for?

“Aesthetically,” writes Anna Waller in Seattle Dances, “the works in Third Degree fell into two categories: FRAGMENTS and L’Effleuré used classical music (the old stuff, at that) and played with classical vocabulary combined with gestures and a sense of weight that both belong to the contemporary world; This Is Real. and I don’t remember a spark used contemporary music and a more contemporary vocabulary that relies on the depth of precision learned from ballet training. Neither of these categories is particularly new any more, but this should not diminish their relevance in the still-new twenty-first-century (re)conception of ballet. These are some of the new models to work with in the greater ballet world, and they will take hold more and more in this country if ballet is to remain a viable art form. Seattle is lucky to have Whim W’Him not just as an extraordinary performing ensemble, but as a group that fosters new work and further develops a new mode of making ballet.”

The half dozen reviews I’ve read and numerous comments of individual viewers overwhelmingly praise the concluding program of Whim W’Him’s fourth season.
At first I intended to write a general post on reactions to the whole show. But there is too much to cover in one go—favorites among the pieces showcased differ, viewers diverge in their interpretations, and Kim, Adam & Molly of Bamberg Fine Art Photography have taken such superlative photos this time around. So I’ve decided to devote a separate post to each piece—in the order they were performed on May 17-19, 2013.

Which brings us to Andrew Bartee, as choreographer of the first work, This is real.

When Andrew still only had a fragment of his latest creation, choreographed for an earlier program, he told me over coffee that he wanted to explore bringing out more narrative in his work. This is real. does that with clarity and subtlety. Although more than one reviewer remarks on similarities between Andrew’s choreography and other Whim W’Him works (mostly by artistic director Olivier Wevers), the overwhelming reaction is delight with the way Andrew is developing, as choreographer as well as dancer. Rachel Gallaher of CityArts calls This is Real. “a mesmerizing, slightly humorous work that investigates social interaction, confrontation, and the confusion of friendship, as well as romantic relationships… Movements range from quick and fierce (running dodging, slicing arms) to slow and sensual, with the brush of a hand against an arm or a leg setting off a graceful, undulating duet.” Likewise, Chris Heide, in Chosen Magazine, writes: “Bartee mixes gritty partnering, inventive technique, a pulsing score and modern technology to effectively weave a relatable, yet controversial tale. This is Real. encapsulates the toxic urgency of a dysfunctional friendship…”

The story-line here is simple: a friendship of two is interrupted by the incursion of a third. But the bond between the two women (danced by Mia Monteabaro and Tory Peil)—as shown in a duet early on and at other moments throughout this ±15 minute piece—is intense, complex, and ambiguous from the start. Are they friends? lovers? sisters? rivals?

This is real. starts with a solo, Mia on her own, giving the impression—to me at least—of a quiet person, not easily bowled over, but capable of strong feelings…

Then Tory Peil enters. She comes across as a more social, outgoing type, strong-minded and with a certain charisma. Their relation, is shown in intricate duets to be by turns tentatively in sync…

affectionate…

and fraught.

Thus the setup of This is real. makes the entry of the third party, danced by Sergei Kheylik, much more intriguing than if the original relationship was straightforward.

To quote Anna Waller further: “On one level, This is Real. stays in line with a certain branch of contemporary ballet aesthetics—shoulders slightly hunched (so contrary to ballet’s openness), dancers wearing socks, and a tendency toward constant movement. However, the work created a clear world for its three dancers setting out just enough narrative to add oomph to the intricate choreography…. Lighting designer Michael Mazzola’s well-timed blackouts broke the piece into sections, while Lena Simon’s score was quietly unrelenting. The relationship between dancers, light, and music suggested that the audience was glimpsing moments of an ongoing life: a relationship that changes, but never quite resolves.”

Michael Upchurch in his Seattle Times review emphasizes other aspects of This is real.
“The friends, Mia … and Tory, are happy in their tightly synchronized, slightly goofy, occasionally snippety pas-de-deux world—until Sergey Kheylik enters the picture. Kheylik (a terrific new addition to the Whim W’Him lineup) has a cocky, scrappy, alpha-male insolence about him, and both women notice him the minute he assumes his spot onstage. Peil, after a moment, goes for him — and it’s soon obvious that someone is going to end up the third wheel here. But it isn’t always predictable who it will be at any given moment. “Real” is crisply crafted, with a quirky dramatic arc, and some potent partnerwork between Peil and Kheylik as they take turns tangling and tumbling with each other.”

An online comment to the Upchurch review agrees on the value of the piece, but interprets it more gravely: “What struck me about Bartee’s piece is the transparent display of the ugly dark underpinnings of women’s power struggles for a man and for control. It also painfully demonstrated the rejection that women will dispense upon each other as the winner and loser of the power struggle. The intimate space that Mia and Tori worked with is so refreshing in this town, where women do not often dance together. I find it astounding that (in his early 20s) Bartee is so brilliantly able to confront this topic. He has made amazing leaps and bounds in his choreography…. Kudos to Wevers for sharing the spotlight. He is living up to Whim W’him’s mission statement of collaboration. “