Word: deux
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...piece, the merits of the performance rest more on the superb choreography and the technical success of the dancers than on any plot. Beautifully danced by three couples with the women dressed as Greek nymphs and the men as the lecherous mythical satyrs, the dance stresses the pas de deux structure, with the different pairs alternating on stage. Although their movements and gestures are based on ballet, the overall quality is much more free and unrestrained and possesses a fluid, electric energy. Orange, yellow and pink gowns, bare feet and a haunting set of tall, dark trees looming over...
Taylor, 51, has taken the rich vocabulary of dance, from the spine-straight balletic pas de deux to the earthbound dynamics of Martha Graham, and shaped it into a shifting and special language. He is the J.R.R. Tolkien of his form, and like the fabulist creates works too elaborate to please the avant-garde and too impudent for purists. In short, Taylor remains one of the most accessible of choreographers...
FIRST STAGED in 1970 with the Australian Ballet, Nureyev's production is unexceptional but pleasing. Hardly stylistically daring, it contains the usual number of street scenes with crowd entertainment, pas de deux, dream sequences, and principal solos. The only departure from traditional ballet is the augmented role of the male lead. Nureyev has complained repeatedly that classical roles afford male principals too small a role, and his Don Quixote represents and attempt to make Basilio more than what critic John Lombard calls "a forklift for ballerinas...
...first orchestral flourish, the corps strikes a series of sassy poses, which melt away at Maria Calegari's bluesy, ruminative entrance. During an extended first-movement pas de deux, Kistler and Christopher d'Amboise follow the music's every twist and unexpected turn, illustrating its ripples with flowing figurations of their own. The third movement's bold, thrusting opening is similarly reflected in the dance, which includes some rapid-fire footwork for D'Amboise inspired by the rat-a-tat-tat of the piano. Paradoxically, Robbins is most, and least, successful with his extended bagatelle...
...play is occasionally shrill and familiar; and the ending, in which the protagonist cries "Give me a chance to find some intrinsic value" and is whisked away by a deux ex machina, lacks the delicacy of the play's best moments. But at least it points to a kind of theatre beyond the blank, muddy "reality" that the rest of these plays have a foot in. Mark Milliken has staged Fits and Starts with merry rambunctiousness, and the piece is fetchingly danced by Julia Newton, an utterly charming waif. Annette Miller and John Adair, though, as mother and dog respectively...