The Reassuring Effects (Of Form and Poetry), for four men and four women, the ladies in toe shoes, is supposed to be McIntyre’s serious salute to (ballet) dancing, but it’s merely dull, starting with the music, Antonín Dvorák’s Serenade for Strings in E minor, a poor cousin of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings in C. Cirio leads it off with the four men, who lift and spread-eagle and generally manhandle her (the ballerina stripped bare by her bachelors — but costume jewelry alongside the similar section in Balanchine’s Rubies). The rest of the half-hour work is done mostly in couples (and mostly the same couples), with the odd “Hey, we can do tours à la seconde and piqué-chaîné sequences and everything!” — which they can, but to no gratifying end. Cirio and Schert got the slow duet; Schert, who’s danced with Alonzo King and ABT, looks to be the company’s best male dancer, but he doesn’t have much to do here beyond presenting Cirio. And though Cirio evinced a lyric line that I didn’t always observe during her four years with Boston Ballet, she, like the program, left me wanting more.
Related:
Rite of darkness, Modern romantics, States of unrest, More 
- Rite of darkness
Le Sacre du Printemps , with 14 dancers hailing from Senegal, Togo, Benin, Mali, Nigeria, and Mozambique, takes on black-on-black violence .
- Modern romantics
Romeo & Juliet, On Motifs of Shakespeare is less of a statement than a supposition: what if we did it a different way?
- States of unrest
“Dance is a tool to look at other things,” choreographer Hofesh Shechter told an interviewer, but during the company’s US debut at Jacob’s Pillow last weekend you’d be forgiven for just looking at the fantastically virile dancing.
- Funny bones
It was the darkly comic offerings of Mats Ek in the middle, and the personable interpretations that gave the evening its distinction.
- Dainty cabaret
Larry Keigwin’s genial take on the perennially popular theme of the four elements (water, fire, earth, air) didn’t add anything profound to the cosmic intelligence.
- Legs plus
Aspen Santa Fe Ballet’s program at Jacob’s Pillow last week sampled four choreographers while showing off the dynamic 11-member company.
- Lambarena redux
All summer long I’ve had the phrase “Do the Lambarena” running through my head, as if it were a dance craze, like the la-dee-dah or the lambada.
- The reign in Spain
If only the company could return to the local appreciation its international achievement deserves.
- L’Allegro, fuss and feathers, and the ICA blues
This year we were looking forward to dance performances at the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater in the new ICA.
- Whither Wilder?
This past week, the Australian Ballet announced that it has hired Wilder to be its new executive director.
- Dark victory
It’s a good pairing: together, Serenade and La Sylphide write an essay on doomed love
- Less
Topics:
Dance
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