Review: Atlanta Ballet’s three world premieres were an exciting but mixed bag

Calling Atlanta Ballet’s recent mixed bill Firebird may have been good marketing strategy, but it was a misnomer for the company’s performances at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre over the weekend. The most interesting part of the program was the three world premieres, two by Atlanta Ballet dancers and one by choreographer-in-residence Claudia Schreier. Yuri Possokhov’s Firebird, which the company first performed in 2017, closed the evening.

Schreier’s new work Fauna is short — just 13 minutes — and features only four dancers, unlike the large ensemble in her Pleiades Dances, a stand out from the company’s Silver Linings program last year. Still, her sculptural style and musicality were both in evidence. She set Pleiades to excerpts from Takashi Yoshimatsu’s impressionistic piano compositions. Here, too, piano predominated in Judith Weir’s The Sweet Primroses, Paul Creston’s Saxophone Sonata (for saxophone and piano) and excerpts from Claude Debussy’s haunting Six Epigraphes Antiques, L. 131 for two pianos.

It’s worth mentioning the music before the movement, because that’s how Schreier creates — by allowing the score to lead. That might seem obvious for a ballet choreographer, but Schreier is more musical than most and her apparent love of scores with shifting, uneven rhythms lends her work a compelling architectural texture. The two couples, Darian Kane with Carraig New and Sujin Han with Sergio Masero, exhibited lean and clean technique throughout.

Schreier isn’t afraid to pause the action and place her dancers in sculpted tableaus. There is shape, then there is movement emerging from that shape, including her signature little hip bumps, changes in direction and pacing, and lifts that are not necessarily pretty but exciting to watch, such as one where the women lay on the floor and the men lifted them horizontally. The dancers performed it with gorgeous ease.

A rectangular red panel hung high up on the left of the stage, and the dancers’ sleek grey leotards featured a red splash on the chest. For some reason it all reminded me of a Rothko painting.

Kane and Anderson Souza were among the eight dancers who took artistic director Gennadi Nedvigin’s challenge to choreograph during the Covid shutdown. Their ballets premiered on the company’s Silver Linings livestream in February 2021. On Friday, we saw an expanded version of Kane’s quirky Dr. Rainbow’s Infinity Mirror and a new ballet by Souza, Inherited, inspired by his mother’s recent death.

The new Dr. Rainbow featured eight dancers instead of the original three and the result was a mixed bag. The exhaustive page of program notes comprised excerpts from the book The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig. Kane chose five of these fabricated sorrows, with Koenig’s invented names like “Altschmerz” and “Kairosclerosis,” as the titles of five of the work’s six sections. But these sorrows, while delightfully complex and even funny, worked much better on the page than on stage. Some of the most enchanting parts of Dr. Rainbow were those I recognized from the original Silver Linings version.

One section, for all eight dancers and a large red table, seemed weighed down with complexity. The mime was difficult to understand, and the frenetic activity was, well, frenetic. There were many fun moments, however, and rapid-fire entrances and exits. Was that a parody of the little cygnets from Swan Lake?

Kane’s unique movement vocabulary, considered piece by piece, is a joy. Quirky little runs in parallel, with the dancers hunched forward, looking down at their bright colored socks. Bouncy polkas, whimsical runs, hops and hand shimmies, flat-footed lifts. None of the phrases last long; they shift quickly to something else equally off beat. Han inhabited Kane’s style to a tee in her solos and multi-colored lighting and unisex black tunics added to the playful mood.

Kudos to Nedvigin for supporting Kane’s choreographic ambitions and to Kane for tackling a 27-minute ballet. It was a crowd-pleaser.

The program opened with Souza’s Inherited. The elegiac score was composed and performed tenderly on stage by Atlanta cellist Khari Joyner. Fuki Takahashi’s lyrical opening solo featured deeply expressive, rounded bends forward at the waist. In the ensemble sections, the eight dancers held hands, weaving around each other, and posed as if in a family photo.

Souza made good use of vertical space — from soaring lifts to floor work, which gave the work dimension — and the solemn tone was just right. The ending, however, felt overly literal; a group lifted Takahashi and carried her off stage as she lay horizontal and motionless.

The evening ended with Possokhov’s Firebird, based on the Russian folk tale and set to the Stravinsky score, played by the Atlanta Ballet Orchestra. It’s always a treat to experience ballet to live music. The long-limbed Jessica Assef was delicate and other worldly in the title role. Denys Nedak was a buoyant and boyish Ivan, with super soft landings to his jumps, and Jessica He was perfect as the smiling and confident Princess.

The dancers looked strong on Friday. The Russian training that Nedvigin introduced when he became artistic director in 2016 has given the dancers elegant classical lines and a strong center that serves them well in both classical and contemporary work. And it was great to see the company showcase two of its dancer-choreographers. Covid, it seems, pushed Atlanta Ballet into taking a risk. It made for an uneven but truly exciting evening.

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Gillian Anne Renault has been an ArtsATL contributor since 2012 and was named Senior Editor for Art+Design and Dance in 2021. She has written about dance for the Los Angeles Daily News and Herald Examiner, California Magazine and Ballet News, and was dance critic on radio stations such as KCRW, the NPR affiliate in Santa Monica, California.