In the Doris Duke Studio, Choreftes, a troupe from Athens founded in 1993, presented the “evening-length” (one-hour) Behind Her Eyes, which company co-founder Aliki Kazouri choreographed in 2004 to a melodic-industrial score by Stathis Ioannou. The cast: four boys and four girls in various stages of gender bonding and coupledom; a woman in a white dress acting as a chorus; a woman in a black dress singing live on stage and channeling Björk. Boys and girls size each other up; boys talk and whistle; boys inspect girls, interminably, with desk lamps. Boys do a goofy line dance; girls dance with one another. Girl rolls around with black plastic bag on head. Couples emerge in spotlight dances, one Fred & Ginger–inspired, one troubled and violent, one with mouths glued together. Boys in black T-shirts have various kinds of bad days as they spell out E-P-O-S and other Greek words. Boys and girls all put fishnet stockings over their faces. Girl peels off purple dress to reveal red hooker outfit underneath; boys flash money and manhandle her while two other girls make out. Girl in white leotard stands downstage right while a dancer — in fœtal position to start out — is projected on her womb. Curtain. About a third of the way through I found myself wishing I could see some old-fashioned Greek dancing, the kind the chorus did in the ancient dramas.
DUO CONCERTANT II: Back in 2004, Melanie Atkins and Sabi Varga showed how it’s done.
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Boston Ballet has announced its roster for 2006–2007, and it includes one new principal, Argentine dancer Erica Cornejo, who since 2003 has been a soloist at American Ballet Theatre, alongside her brother Herman. Last January she married Carlos Molina, who’s also a former ABT soloist and current Boston Ballet principal, and this season she’ll be moving to Boston to join her husband. The 10 principals from 2005–2006 are all staying on: Romi Beppu, Lorna Feijóo, Tai Jiménez, Larissa Ponomarenko, Karine Seneca, Nelson Madrigal, Molina, Reyneris Reyes, Roman Rykine, and Yury Yanowsky. First soloist Chris Budzynski and his wife, corps member Alexandra Kochis, are leaving to join Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre (“Partners pirouette to Pittsburgh” was the Herald headline); first soloist Sacha Wakelin has also left the company. Sabi Varga and Rie Ichikawa have been promoted to first soloist, Lia Cirio, John Lam, and James Whiteside to second.
These last three have been getting soloist roles for some time, so their advancement is no surprise. Ichikawa made a splash as Lise in Fille, having loosened up in both her face and her acting; she deserves her promotion, but some will wonder whether second soloists Kathleen Breen Combes and Misa Kuranaga didn’t have an equal claim. Sabi Varga had some injury problems this past season before exploding onto the stage in May as Escamillo in Jorma Elo’s Carmen. It was he and Melanie Atkins (they’re now married) who back in 2004 did Duo Concertant with the Balanchine sensibility that was missing in Wevers and Nadeau.
But Budzynski and Kochis are a real loss. Kochis was the last corps member from the pre–Valerie Wilder/Mikko Nissinen era; she gave grace and personality to everything she did, and she could make a tiny role like Little Red Riding Hood in The Sleeping Beauty into a showstopper. And Budzynski was one of the few men at Boston Ballet with the technique to make audiences — and critics — sit up and take notice. His round, good-natured face kept him out of the leading-man spotlight, but no one could miss him in Fille, where in different performances he played doltish Alain (as something more than doltish), Lise’s mother in drag, and a macho rooster. And when the company included in its “Russian” evening a set of “bravura” party pieces, his Gopak supplied the only bravura.
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LA FILLE MAL GARDÉE: Not the Ashton ballet, and not as good, but there’s a surprise inside.
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Speaking of Boston Ballet: a new DVD of La Fille Mal Gardée has a company connection. The performance, by the Basel Ballet, isn’t actually new: it was filmed on a Cologne soundstage in 1986 for European television and has just now been issued stateside by Deutsche Grammophon. And it’s not the cuddly 1960 Frederick Ashton version of the 1789 Jean Dauberval original that Boston Ballet staged in 2003 and again last March but a “new version” devised by Heinz Spoerli and Jean-Michel Damase to a score that conflates the music by Ferdinand Hérold (1791–1833) that Ashton used with music by Peter Ludwig Hertel (1817–1899).