Word: ballets
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...this really be the stodgy old Washington Ballet? None other. Fluctuating Hemlines, a sharply observed portrait of a group of young people who peel off their outer garments and expose their inner selves, is the work of Septime Webre, the new artistic director. Since arriving in the nation's capital last fall, he has transformed this unadventurous company into a lively laboratory for his pop-flavored style of classical dancemaking and brought an equally unusual approach to company management, which seeks to make perhaps the whitest of art forms relevant to a racially fissured community...
...multicultural mongrel," he says, alluding to the fact that he is the son of a Cuban mother and a French-American father. Webre took his first dance lesson as an undergraduate at the University of Texas. At 29, he became head of the New Jersey-based American Repertory Ballet, turning an obscure regional troupe into a forward-looking ensemble with a reputation for unpredictability. The lackluster Washington Ballet was no less in need of new thinking, not least because it had failed to attract a racially diverse audience, an invitation to trouble in a city whose political establishment is overwhelmingly...
...juxtaposing blue-chip masterpieces by George Balanchine, Paul Taylor and Antony Tudor with new works by such younger choreographers as Nacho Duato and Dwight Rhoden. And his aggressive outreach efforts include Dance D.C., an ambitious pilot program of inner-city public school dance classes, and low-priced "Beer and Ballet" previews held at the company's studios in northwest Washington...
...most significant of Webre's innovations, though, is his choreography, which crossbreeds the time-tested language of ballet with the high energy and cool irony of pop culture. The results, though sometimes too glibly "accessible," are more often bracingly individual. This season, for example, has seen company premieres of Fluctuating Hemlines, inspired by Camille Paglia's iconoclastic Sexual Personae; Carmina Burana, an unabashedly sexy dance pageant accompanied by Carl Orff's thunderous choral settings of medieval poems about love and lust; and Juanita y Alicia, a "family album" set to Buena Vista Social Club-type music performed live...
Similarly heterodox notions are percolating in other cities where ethnic minorities are fast becoming demographic majorities. In New York City, Eliot Feld choreographs his edgily urban dances for a colorful troupe drawn from the classrooms of Ballet Tech, a public school devoted to dance; the equally diverse Miami City Ballet recently premiered Mambo No. 2 A.M., a collaboration between Balanchine acolyte Edward Villella and '50s mambo king Pedro ("Cuban Pete") Aguilar...