Word: kellers
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Produced by Valentine N. Quadrat ’09, the show integrates ballet, modern dance, vocal artists, and a live orchestra into a massive artistic endeavor. Directors Raymond W. Keller III ’08 and Sarah C. Kenney ’08 of the Harvard Ballet Company have coordinated with music director Shira R. Brettman ’08 to produce one of the most ambitious dance performances at Harvard in recent memory. In most of its pieces, “American Grace” more than meets these ambitions...
...show finds its center in the ironically titled “Who Cares?,” a piece choreographed by George Balanchine, perhaps the single greatest and most iconic choreographer of American ballet. Keller and Kenney strike the right chords in each of the four excerpts from the ballet. Their direction gives the classical origins and distinctly American flavor of Balanchine’s work full expression, and the dancers do justice to those complex themes...
...final piece ends “American Grace” on a whimsical note with Mark Morris’s “Polka.” The dancers execute Morris’s visually exciting choreography with enthusiasm, and the image that Keller and Kenney leave us with—one of all the performers united in a circle, evoking a primal sense of community in their movements—elegantly describes the unity of the show they have bound together thematically...
...most intriguing aspects of “American Grace” is the order of its tremendous variety of pieces. Brettman, Keller and Kenney juxtapose the classics of dance with radically modern pieces that have transformed and reinvented these influences. The unusual sequencing of the show is rarely jarring, and creates interesting connections between the pieces and their themes—connections that hint at the fundamental contradictions within American history itself...
...Keller agrees. “We’ve had obstacles, and people have really come together,” he says. “I think the cast is really excited about the show, and they’re ready to do what it will take...