BREATHWORDS: Triple Bill. WHISPERS FROM WITHIN | Choreography by Wubkje Kuindersma. Music: Max Richter’s re-composition of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. REMANSO | Choreography Nacho Duato. Music: Enrique Granados’ Valses Poéticos. REVERIE | Choreography by Kirsten Isenberg. Music: Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No 2 in C Minor Op 18. Pianist Gerhard Joubert. Cape Philharmonic under Brandon Phillips’ baton. Three performances by Cape Ballet Africa. Artscape Opera.
SHEILA CHISHOLM reviewed
Cape Ballet Africa’s Autumn season proved to be as much an exciting musical, costume, set, lighting, and choreographic experience as a dancing one.
Triple bills are not normally popular by Cape Town’s ballet loving public. But opening night’s audience warm reception proved that, they can, on occasion, be welcome.
The evening’s honours go to Gerhard Joubert, the CPO and Brandon Phillips for their exceptional rendering of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No 2 in C Minor Op 18, the music that accompanied Kirsten Isenberg’s classical ballet Reverie.
It is one thing for a young pianist to play this highly demanding piano concerto on a concert platform. It is quite another to play for a company of classical dancers when the on-going question of ‘who follows who’ still causes ructions. Fortunately, this time round, Phillips’s experience held his ballet baton steady. Congratulations!
Isenberg has a sound reputation as a classical ballet choreographer. And, as such, she must be commended for the resourcefulness and musicality of Rachmaninoff’s three movements: 1) Moderato. 2) Adagio Sostenuto. 3) Allegro Scherzando. The second movement provided the company with, beautiful, lyrical movements, shapes, and patterns ending as rose petals fell on the final tableau.
The costume change, and the harmoniousness of the dancers performing Isenberg’s intricate choreography closed the evening on a high note.
Enthusiasm
The evening opened with Wubkje Kuindersma’s Whispers From Within. From the Netherlands, Kuindersma suggests her item ‘delves into the tender dance of intuition, capturing the delicate strength of our inner voices and the vibrant life force that binds us all together’. Set to Richter’s reworking of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Kuindersma’s complicated synopsis is not easily understood at a first viewing. However, her choreography juxtaposes classical en pointe vocabulary with her individual interpretation of contemporary dance, which CBA members undertook with enthusiasm.
Top choreographic and artistic honours go to Spanish choreographer Nacho Duato’s Male trio Remanso.
Not often are balletomane audiences favoured by a work, specifically choreographed for athletic, technically skilled male dancers – in this instance Jan Kotze, Joshua Williams and guest artist Thomas Giugovaz.
The great Spanish poet Lorca described a remanso as “a still pool in a running stream”. To represent a pool Duato placed a large, blank, oblong screen centre back. To fabricate the running stream, Duato devised brilliant body shapes, and movement, in and around, and on top of, and behind and around the screen on which Wilhelm Disbergen’s lighting design shone vivid colour contrasts.
Costumed in briefs, tank tops, in organised chaos, subtly accented by nonsensical body contortions and exceptional technical displays, we Capetonians were awarded with a work of art danced at a level rarely gracing our stages.
CBA is a young company, who embraced these three works with pleasing joie de vivre.
Read Cape Ballet Africa’s Salt review here.
WS
