Fresh, challenging new Seiwert work highlights Smuin opening

[...] Seiwert’s dancers inundate the stage with 25 minutes of non-stop action, patrons must content themselves with what looks like a fragment of a new ballet by company dancer Ben Needham-Wood, as well as revivals of Ma Cong’s cartoon-influenced “French Twist” and Michael Smuin’s bland romantic excursion, “Bouquet.”

Yet, wisely, she introduces the entire ensemble only twice, once near the beginning and at the very end, and on both occasions, there’s more going on than any single pair of eyes can catch.

The ensemble vanishes and the six sections abound in rapid exchanges for small groups who enter and exit from the wings and the back of the stage with relentless inevitability.

For music, Seiwert has found assorted scores by Canadian Julia Kent, who flirts with lush textures, minimalist tropes and a constant trajectory, all of which seems to penetrate the dancers’ limbs.

Arms cleaved air, legs etched ronds de jambe, squiggly bodies sank to the floor, dancers slithered down the backs of their colleagues and the occasional air flips seemed like kinetic punctuation.

In “Maslow,” Needham-Wood casts Robert Kretz as psychologist Abraham Maslow seated in a leather chair, as a pair of female hands (belonging to Terez Dean) reach around to embrace him, a replication of a famous James Thurber cartoon.

Smuin’s 1981 “Bouquet” consists of a quartet (the three men and single women seems influenced by Petipa’s “Rose Adagio”) and a duet that involves much lifting and little lyricism, all set to Shostakovich.

Could it be that the Smuin style no longer “speaks” to these young dancers in the company that bears the choreographer’s name?