Classical ballet has always celebrated the feminine; however, it historically has been driven by male choreographers.
Celebrated choreographer and founder of New York City Ballet, known as the father of American ballet, George Balanchine, wrote in 1965, “The ballet is a purely female thing; it is a woman, a garden of beautiful flowers, and man is the gardener.”
Deos Contemporary Ballet’s EMBER Series 25 presents ballet as “a purely female thing” but with woman as the gardener. This two-hour dance performance in two acts opened Friday with a program featuring choreography by three women and an all-female company as a tribute to celebrate Women’s History Month.
Act I included two reprised works and two new dances, all impressionistic pieces that centered on beauty and sameness of movement rather than storytelling or expressivity.
But as Mr. B said, “When you have a garden full of pretty flowers, you don’t demand of them, ‘What do you mean? What is your significance?’ Dancers are just flowers, and flowers grow without any literal meaning, they are just beautiful. We’re like flowers. A flower doesn’t tell you a story. It’s in itself a beautiful thing.”
The beautiful things here are Artistic Director Tess Sinke’s “Martha”, the most modern of the pieces, an homage to an inspiring friend with a corps of four women and a soloist dressed in red and lit in pink. Grace Sinke’s “Regency Belles” is more classical in nature, an elegant pas de trois of women wearing long pastel dresses, opera-length white gloves, and rhinestone necklaces.
The two new pieces are also by Tess Sinke, and she said in a curtain speech that “Cry, Carry” “feels like coming home”, that the movement represents her “sweet spot” as a choreographer. In this mournful pas de trois set to a vaguely Celtic melding of a cappella voices, deep pliés in wide second give way to forward folds and gravity takes the dancers to their knees before they glide and slide on the floor then miraculously transition from sitting to leaping.
The only piece danced en pointe is “Night Fall”, a dance in three movements made up of very classical, academic movement, though it also brought a sense of jubilance to the first act.
Act II brought Summer Odell-Ovies’ “Edge of Belonging” a world premiere ballet in six sections created in collaboration with the cast, which, in addition to the primary company members included guest artists Darrell Haggard, Katie Brown, Carly Slack, and Antonio Jaimes, as well as 13 children, all students of the Michigan Ballet Academy.
This part of the program involved much more acting and deliberate storytelling than the first act, though it’s largely a symbolic exploration of energy, mood, and different relationships—from that between audience and performer to friendship to romance to the hierarchy of group dynamics.
A women’s ritual with a fearsome central leader in which six women dance and fight with six-foot sticks becomes a celebration of freedom and sisterhood once they lay their weapons down. But the loveliest and most evocative sections of the ballet are the pas de deux, and the ways they show how an outsider can find connection.
Ember Series 25 indeed celebrates a young ballet company of women in lifting up terrifically skillful dancers. Though their technique and professionalism as dancers is excellent, this performance felt more like a high-quality recital for family and friends of the company than a professional performance for the public, in part due to the limitations of the performance space. St. Cecilia Music Center is an exquisite space designed for sound; though Deos rolls out a Marley floor and does the best they can with the 27 lights embedded in the sloped ceiling, much is lost without side lighting or wings through which dancers might enter and exit the stage—and the white sound-proof walls (without a cyclorama) become an unintentional character in each piece.
However, it’s a wonderful step forward for a company that several years ago was performing in a photography studio, and the work they present is top-notch in terms of execution of movement. Deos Contemporary Ballet consistently offers new, original choreography that truly reclaims woman at the center of ballet, a wonderful achievement and positive political statement well worth celebrating. And the dancing is so strong, one can’t help but want more for the beauty of what they’re doing in their performance.
Ember Series 25
Deos Contemporary Ballet
March 14-16
https://www.deosballet.com/performances/ember-series-25
