Vail – The Vail International Dance Festival has been racking up several firsts this season: the only U.S. performances of the Inaki Ballet Concierto from Argentina; the debut of the Trey McIntyre Project, a new company; and, Wednesday night at the Vilar Center in Beaver Creek, the world premiere of Jessica Lang’s “From Foreign Lands and People,” a commission by the festival.
Featuring the Colorado Ballet, the new work proposes a kind of meditation on the meaning of music. It is for eight dancers, representing the octave of a scale, according to Lang, together with a set of black long boxes, suggestive (again, according to Lang) of the accidental notes of a keyboard. The music is Robert Schumann’s “Kinderszenen” (“Scenes of Childhood”) – a series of independent pieces recalling childhood games, musings and stories.
As realized by Lang, this is a highly varied, moody whole. The eight dancers function as soloists and ensemble – and stage crew, too, as they shift the “black notes” about stage, piling them up like play blocks or arranging them like prehistoric dolmans.
What I liked particularly about Lang’s choreography was her willingness to use these blocks, for dancers to jump on, or over, to lie down on, hang from and in general capture the experimentation childhood holds.
This is a smooth-flowing work, rather constricted in its propulsive accents. For those who enjoy poetry as a flow of emotions, Lang has succeeded with subtle art and deft surprises. It was curious to see Chauncey Parsons jump without looking atop a “key.” Just as it was surprising to see an arch formed from which tumbled Jesse Marks into waiting arms. Heather Holmes and James Mills had a splendid section all their own.
A drawback, though: black costumes, black backdrop, black set – too funereal for words and unintentional, I think. Nor does the title have much to do with the dance itself. Still, Lang is working on an idea involving only white keys on a piano keyboard so that the two works will function individually or as a diptych.
As it happened, the whole of the Colorado Ballet’s program comprised new works: Konstantin Uralsky’s “Rachmaninov Second,” which the company debuted last fall, and Andrew Thompson’s “Just Dreamin”‘ a lively piece of choreography commissioned by the Denver Ballet Guild this year (and something of a tribute to Hollywood musical numbers).
That the Colorado Ballet was the vehicle for the Vail International Dance Festival’s commission marks a major advance in the company’s reputation. And the company has a winner in Jessica Lang.
Now retired, Glenn Giffin was The Post’s dance critic for 32 years.
