This story was originally published by ArtsATL.
Atlanta Ballet with the Atlanta Ballet Orchestra opened “Midwinter Dreams,” the second of three mixed-repertory programs in the company’s 2022-23 season, at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre on Friday. Comprising two company premieres and two previously performed ballets, “Midwinter Dreams” showcased the polished, brilliant neoclassical technique that has been dazzling audiences this season. It also revealed the dancers’ blossoming confidence with more contemporary and emotionally complex narrative work.
The evening’s two premieres were Helgi Tomasson’s “Concerto Grosso” and Cathy Marston’s 30-minute “Snowblind,” based on Edith Wharton’s novella “Ethan Frome.” Of the two, “Snowblind,” created for San Francisco Ballet in 2018, was both a standout and the outlier on the bill.
The stage lights came up on a stunning embodiment of the story’s unforgivably cold and stormy setting: a mixed ensemble of 13 dancers, dressed alike in flowing costumes of swirling gray, cream and brown chiffon. They swooped and swayed downstage in front of a scrim painted to evoke a snowstorm.
Within the larger context of their fluid motion, Marston’s choreography had the dancers repeating smaller, angular gesturesc— a sharply bent elbow here, a flexed foot or sudden halt in the flow of steps there — that referenced the cutting, biting cold contained within the deceptively picturesque dance of snow and wind.
Credit: Kim Kenney
Credit: Kim Kenney
The dancers’ eloquent articulation of Marston’s uncanny choreographic simulation of the weather also helped bring the ballet to its wrenching climax as they grabbed and tossed the two stumbling, snowblind lovers, Ethan and Mattie, as they attempted to elope into the night, leaving Ethan’s wife, Zeena Frome, behind.
Sujin Han embodied Zeena’s nagging insecurity and desperate hypochondria with tragic pathos. She transformed herself into a shambling wreck of a woman, only seeming to stumble through Marston’s challenging deconstructed pointe work with barely contained hysteria, alternately clutching her abdomen and clinging to Ethan or Mattie. She never stepped over the line into melodrama, however. She was grotesque, sad, pathetic, but never laughable, and at the end of “Snowblind,” as Han walked among the watching chorus of dancers, turning them away one by one from the spectacle of her husband and his lover, the audience felt her shame and pain.
Mikaela Santos inhabited the role of Mattie Silver with physical exuberance and emotional gravity. Marston gave the character a vocabulary of sinuous leg and arm extensions into arabesque and écarté lines that exhibited powerful control as well as sensuality. The audience saw Santos, as Mattie, mature from a girl making snow angels with her peers into an increasingly isolated young woman dragged into a domestic tragedy by desires not entirely her own. Santos portrayed Mattie as a woman who, when snared in one of the limited roles available to her, decided to go out with a roar, not a whimper.
Patric Palkens as Ethan Frome communicated the weary resignation and seething irritation of a man caught in a loveless marriage with subtlety to match Han’s portrayal of Zeena, never letting domestic tragedy collapse into situational comedy. He did, though, seem less comfortable with Marston’s contemporary vocabulary than his counterparts. He never quite relaxed into movements that required him to allow his torso to be led by gravity and the pull of his frame into a movement initiated at the elbow or wrist, for example.
A similar stiffness could be seen in the ensemble dancers in one of “Snowblind’s” early scenes, when Ethan was socializing with other men at work and at home. Their interpretation of Marston’s choreography there looked less like a dance expressing how the laborers felt the weight of their shovels and the resistance of their materials, and more like pantomime. Nevertheless, on the whole, the company, which has sometimes struggled when pushed outside a neoclassical comfort zone, delivered a solid, moving performance that brought the audience to their feet.
In a perfect world, “Snowblind” would have closed the program. Instead, it was sandwiched between Tomasson’s “Concerto Grosso” and Yuri Possokhov’s tour de force, “Classical Symphony,” and paired structurally and thematically on the mixed bill with Ricardo Amarante’s “Love Fear Loss,” with which it had almost nothing in common. Consequently, “Snowblind’s” striking emotional power and distinctive vocabulary were partially occluded by what was otherwise an evening of gorgeous but familiar neoclassical ballets.
Credit: Kim Kenney
Credit: Kim Kenney
First performed in 2003 by San Francisco Ballet, “Concerto Grosso” remains one of the relatively few canonical neoclassical works for an all-male ensemble. The piece began with the five dancers in shadow, dressed in unitards, still as Greek statues. Through Tomasson’s choreography, Angel Ramírez, Miguel Angel Montoya, Jordan Leeper, Carraig New and Spencer Wetherington brought that ideal of masculine grace and athleticism to life. They leaped through astounding grand allegro sequences. They also promenaded and pirouetted through controlled adagio, harnessing power within the slow unfolding of extended poses.
The evening began with “Love Fear Loss,” first performed by the company in 2019, in which the dancers were accompanied onstage by Western-Li Summerton on piano. The three couples — Jessica He and Thomas Davidoff, Emily Carrico and Denys Nedak, and Airi Igarashi and Sergio Masero — turned in flawless performances. Amarante’s choreography was full of spiraling lifts and adagio, and sequences in which the dancers breezed across the floor and along the diagonal in intricately braided patterns. The love, fear and loss of the title, however, were momentary gestures, rather than recurring motifs, and there was little difference in tempo, vocabulary, costuming or lighting to create contrast among the three vignettes. It was a pretty dance, but it failed to deliver the promised emotional gravity.
Possokhov’s “Classical Symphony,” choreographed in 2012, with an Atlanta Ballet premiere in 2015, closed the show. Here, too, the ordering and composition of the program may have compromised the performance. Even Possokhov admitted in the video introducing the piece that, although the dancers love him and his work, they are “swearing on the inside” when dancing Classical Symphony because it is so physically demanding.
Credit: Kim Kenney
Credit: Kim Kenney
The cast demonstrated admirable precision and stamina throughout, but they were visibly tired — understandably, inevitably so — by the time the curtain came down. The program order was no doubt dictated by logistics and Artistic Director Gennadi Nedvigin’s desire to give the audience an ending of “fireworks,” but closing with “Classical Symphony” seemed a missed opportunity to show the company in its best form and highlight its artistic growth in “Snowblind.”
Nonetheless, “Midwinter Dreams” offered a resplendent evening of world-class ballet.
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Robin Wharton studied dance at the School of American Ballet and the Pacific Northwest Ballet School. As an undergraduate at Tulane University in New Orleans, she was a member of the Newcomb Dance Company. In addition to a Bachelor of Arts in English from Tulane, Robin holds a law degree and a Ph.D. in English, both from the University of Georgia.
Credit: ArtsATL
Credit: ArtsATL
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