“Dancers are flexible people,” says Atlanta Ballet Artistic Director Gennadi Nedvigin, and I know what he means. As a professor of dance who taught virtual classes from my cramped living room and produced online performances for more than a year, I am well aware of the myriad ways in which dancers and choreographers have had to adapt. Often aiming at a moving target, we have all tapped into deep reserves of resourcefulness, learned new technology, and sometimes scrapped the whole idea and started over.
So it will be time to celebrate when Atlanta Ballet performs again live at Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre Feb. 11-13.
The company went two-dimensional last year with “Silver Linings,” a virtual concert produced by Rialto Center for the Arts in February. Nedvigin offered company dancers the opportunity to choreograph on their peers for performance, a rare open call for any ballet company pre-pandemic.
Eight dancers produced new works for “Silver Linings,” and all were performed live as part of Georgia Tech’s Skyline Series three months later, including Anderson Souza’s “Touchline” and Darian Kane’s “Dr. Rainbow’s Infinity Mirror.” Kane’s piece was the last Atlanta Ballet work performed by veteran standout dancer Jackie Nash before she left the company for Terminus Modern Ballet Theatre.
Impressed by their creativity, Nedvigin “wanted to know what else they had to say” and asked Kane and Souza to present work as part of “Firebird,” the title of the company’s upcoming mixed bill. Kane brought back “Dr. Rainbow’s Infinity Mirror,” and Souza created a new work, “Inherited.” Both will be presented alongside Yuri Possokhov’s “Firebird” and “Fauna,” a world premiere by choreographer-in-residence Claudia Schreier.
Nedvigin chose these four ballets in direct response to the pandemic. They reflect the company’s efforts to honor tradition while looking to the future.
Nedvigin says the art form cannot move forward without a balance: New voices and new perspectives push ballet forward, but audiences (and dancers alike) must also understand its history and aesthetic roots. This represents a change in philosophy, given the company’s public shift to focus on classical, traditionally “balletic” works when Nedvigin took over directorship of the company in 2016.
It is a promising move and one that challenges the antiquated notion of ballet dancers as blank slates — bodies to be molded to fit the choreographer’s vision. “Dancers are often asked to fit into certain categories to meet the requirements of a role,” says Kane, whose “Dr. Rainbow’s Infinity Mirror” pulls from a wide range of inspiration including her own drawings and the magical worlds of film directors Tim Burton and Wes Anderson.
In rehearsal with her dancers, she wanted to facilitate escapism as a means of personal reflection and authenticity of self-expression. She describes her style as “indie pop contemporary” with “lots of stiff, small gestures that alternate between moments of softness and expansion.” Like cartoons, most of her movement is “either exaggerated or understated with little in between.”
Souza’s “Inherited” is part familial tribute, part therapeutic response to his mother’s recent death. Because of COVID-related travel restrictions, Souza was unable to attend her funeral in his native Brazil.
“Many of the movements in this piece are pulled directly from moments, photographs and intimate experiences that were a part of my family’s story,” he says. One is an image of dancers standing together, arranged to represent a family portrait taken in front of his grandmother’s house in Brazil.
With this new work, Souza wants “to develop my own understanding of movement by mixing contemporary elements with classical techniques” and, in doing so, tell a story of family dynamics. “Inherited” also features an original score by cellist and Atlanta native Khari Joyner, who will perform live.
Both Kane and Souza express deep gratitude for the choreographic mentorship they received from Atlanta Ballet. Kane says choreographer-in-residence Schreier “handled me at my ‘I have no idea where to start’ panic phase with advice that is still relevant months later.”
She also credits ballet master Rory Hohenstein with facilitating a safe and open creative environment for her to explore. Of the dancers in his work, Souza says, “I was thankful to lean into their individual strengths to create something that was ours.”
Schreier’s “Fauna” — her first premiere with Atlanta Ballet following the richly detailed “Pleiades Dances,” a “Silver Linings” standout — and Possokhov’s headliner round out the ambitious program.
Atlanta Ballet first performed Possokhov’s “Firebird” in 2017 (the title role danced brilliantly by Nash). It was scheduled for the 2020 season but canceled before rehearsals began. The Atlanta Ballet Orchestra will play Stravinsky’s iconic orchestral score live, a treat for audiences who have gone without the sound of live music for too long. The sheer fantasy of classically executed ballet — the costumes, the absurd lightness, the virtuosic feats — is a welcome antidote to the drudgery of life in a pandemic.
Kane says her creative process facilitated an escape from the reality we live in. After the events of the last two years, bring on the escape hatch.
DANCE PREVIEW
Atlanta Ballet: Firebird
Feb. 11-13. $25-$139. Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, 2800 Cobb Galleria Parkway, Atlanta. 770-916-2800, atlantaballet.com.
Credit: ArtsATL
Credit: ArtsATL
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