Smuin company shows growing pains in season opener
The opening weekend of Smuin Ballet’s 23rd season found the company undergoing a name change (it’s now Smuin Contemporary American Ballet), engaging five new dancers and producing a couple of problematic additions to the company’s repertoire, one a misguided world premiere, the other a curious, unnecessary import from Houston.
If you believe that Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Viola and Orchestra, K. 364 is one of the composer’s more sublime utterances, be wary of the joke fest Garrett Ammon has made of it in his new “Madness, Rack, and Honey” (title from poet Mary Ruefle).
The new venture regales us with five women in short pouf skirts and bare legs and five men dressed like members of a road company of “Newsies” cavorting in ungainly routines, many floor-bound, that are calculated to look clumsy.
Mozart’s gorgeous slow movement, the sound of heartbreak, here yields an awkward duet for Warner and Erica Felsch.
Granted that the choreographer evinces a modicum of craft in the superior timing, matching the busy movement to Mozart.
[...] it really takes a kind of perverse talent to reduce Mozart to baggy pants farce.
The choreographer, who is the artistic director of the Houston Ballet, veers between unisons for the women (in filmy skirts and bare midriffs) and duets that all end with lifts, without building on the material or the Vivaldi cello music.