While spring serves as a welcoming prelude to summer, it is also ripe with wonderful symbolism: rebirth, fertility and growth. Thus Festival Ballet Providence is opening the spring portion of their season with the popular Up Close On Hope dance series.
This latest installment consists of 10 pieces, six world premieres, and features many of the company’s new and younger dancers, showcasing the company’s continuing growth. The program opens with the premiere of guest choreographer Thomas Vacanti’s Enroulement, a simple, yet beautifully danced number. Four dancers, through a series of pas de trois and solos, nicely capture the musicality of the choreography. Next, company trainee Louisa Chapman kicks up her pointe shoes in a fun and playful romp, The First Thirty Years (world premiere). Set to the twanging guitar of Eric Clapton’s Mean Old World, Chapman is wonderful while teasingly gesturing for one to come hither only to quickly turn away, at one point lifting her long white gown and flipping up her backside to her overmatched suitor.
The second half opens with Pieta (world premiere). Pieta is actually a famous sculpture by Michelangelo depicting Mary holding Jesus after the Crucifixion. Set to a soaring operatic musical score by Handel, this piece projects a certain religious theme, but it comes across as multilayered and unclear. In the end, the lights fade on a single dancer with arms outstretched and palms turned upward.
Grand Pas Classique once again highlights the mastery of Vilia Putrius and Mindaugus Bauzys. Putrius beautifully smiles while making the difficult look easy, hopping for 32 counts on one pointe shoe while slowly extending the opposite leg. Bauzy completes a series – a perfectly executed double tour en l’airs or circling the studio in grand jete with his front leg perfectly extended. Over the years, FBP audiences have become spoiled by their near perfection.
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Leap Into Spring with Ballet
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