Grand Rapids Ballet’s 2024-2025 season finale “Be Here Now” promised to capture the spirit of the 1960s but in ways far more nuanced and complex than the audience members who show up wearing giant round pink-tinted glasses, mod floral print mini dresses, and white go-go boots expect.
Indeed, the second act is made up entirely of Trey McIntyre’s beautiful Be Here Now, an extended acid trip more than a little reminiscent of the musical Hair, full of dancers dressed as hippies moving individually and collectively as mandalas and shot through with music from The Mamas and Papas, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Sly and the Family Stone, among others. There’s so much flower power to this delightful dance created for the San Francisco Ballet and performed here for the first time anywhere else that the audience is literally showered with silk flower petals at the end of the performance.
But equally noteworthy as the message of love, peace, and understanding that drives this piece is the representation of the very real tensions and undercurrents of change that sparked the revolution of the 1960s: projected images of the A-bomb and soldiers, created by McIntyre, create a sense of dynamic conflict that grounds the spaced-out spiritedness of so much of the movement. One of the most salient parts of the dance is a pas de deux between men—that is equal parts embrace and fight, ostensibly to represent civil rights in an embodied way.
And this is why such a glorious representation of this era, an embodiment of the ‘60s revolutionary spirit, is meaningful now. It’s not just the love, peace, and understanding we need; it’s also the potent demand for change in response to the utter madness of the current Age of Aquarius.
The opening dance of Act I is literally from the 1960s and honors what a pivotal period of growth and innovation it was for ballet—largely thanks to George Balanchine, choreographer of the spectacular 1964 pas de deux Tarantella, here danced exquisitely by Julian Gan and Rena Takahashi, who are well matched and perfectly paired for this lively, playful, terrifically athletic classical dance.
The world premiere of Plume, resident choreographer Penny Saunders’ 10th work for the company, offers a wonderfully weird dance with feathers set to circus-like music from Hugues Le Bars and Stephen Stubbs, featuring 13 dancers in a circle then in parallel diagonal lines and Yuka Oba-Muschiana in a wonderfully sensual solo.
Darrell Grand Moultrie’s “Le Grand Jazz” made its world premiere in Grand Rapids Ballet’s 2023-2024 season opener “Contemporary Visions” and it remains a high energy, sophisticated, multi-layered dance of pure, unadulterated joy created for the company. It blends the most precise pointe work and flashy classical ballet moves such as grand jetés, stag leaps, and piqué and fouetté turns with freestyling, flirty jazz hands, shoulder rolls, all with a sexy swagger set to music from jazz greats such as Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Ella Fitzgerald, among others.
Full of stunning pas de deux and virtuoso performances including a final moment in which Sarah Marley, one of the night’s most dynamic performers—who will be retiring from the stage after she takes her final bow Sunday, is lifted and twirled overhead; the dance is a grand revelation, indeed, a contemporary vision of Moultrie’s hybrid work that blends classical ballet, modern, and theatrical and street dance—and in effect embodies the project of jazz itself, which underwent a period of creativity and innovation in the 1960s.
But the 1960s is just a loosely-woven theme for this marvelous program that shows off the remarkable style and range of the Grand Rapids Ballet, a company that is clearly in its own era of creativity and innovation while remaining rooted in classical technique and commitment to excellence. Though undergoing their own shifts and changes, what shines through is a celebration of all that they are as well as the revolutionary promise of this extraordinary company in what they’ll bring next season.
Be Here Now
Grand Rapids Ballet
April 25-May 4
https://grballet.com/be-here-now/
