San Diego ArtsBallets Jazz de Montreal
"The Best 2007 Dance Show in San Diego" There are those studies where scientists paste electrodes to your head and see how much of your brain lights up in response to different stimuli. If they'd monitored the audience at "Les Chambres de Jacques"—the yeasty dance by Aszure Barton performed by Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal at California Center for the Arts on Sunday—the brain-lights would have twinkled like crazy. Barton's piece shared the bill with "MAPA," a dance by Brazilian artist Rodrigo Pederneiras that was as sensual as a vacation in Rio. With the 15-dancer Montreal company (for whom both works were created) proving equally adept at the feel-good abandon of "MAPA" and Barton's more complex aesthetic, Ballets Jazz gave—yes, I'm going to throw caution to the wind and say it—the best dance performance in San Diego of 2007. It was also an important show, the San Diego debut of work by Barton, a Canadian in her early 30's who's gotten raves as a major choreographer on the rise. Along with directing Aszure & Artists in Montreal, Barton has made work for Mikhail Baryshnikov's Hell's Kitchen Dance and is an Artist-in-Residence at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. In "Les Chambres de Jacques" (2006), she's created a sparkling chameleon of a dance, a piece you want to see multiple times because it morphs so quickly from one idea to the next in an exhilarating 40-minute cascade of dance and musical styles. James Gregg, a disheveled hobo in an open shirt, capers to a French-Canadian folk song with instrumentation like clacking spoons; the next moment, a man takes ballet-class poses. Five men strut and prance to a klezmer tune. Shamel Pitts flings himself backward as if unburdened by joints—Pitts, a marvel, looks slumped and undancerly when he simply stands, but reveals a fabulous looseness in motion. There are occasional little stories, too, for instance, when a man sneaks up on other dancers to hipster music, or two lovers poignantly almost connect.  Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal in "Les Chambres de Jacques" Astonishingly, Barton sustains a madcap unity amid this potential chaos. She intended "Jack's Rooms" (as the title translates) to highlight the Ballet Jazz dancers' personalities, and perhaps the strongest unifying thread is a sense of community at its best, with each person able to be an idiosyncratic self yet accepted as part of the group. Group members stand respectfully as one person solos, and they play together as if they play off-stage, too. Lighting designer Daniel Ranger enhances the individual-in-community theme, framing a soloist in a box of light or angling several lights for a diffuse encircling effect. And costumer Anne-Marie Veevaete distinguishes the men with Gregg's hobo look, for example, and Pitts's loose shirt; though she does less well by the women, giving them nearly-identical Victorian-bordello underwear. Barton's music choices are insane and inspired, from Vivaldi arias to klezmer to what sounds like an old-movie score from when the sweet young thing is tied to the railroad track. And she sets up a fascinating tension between music and movement, sometimes choreographing against the score—when the music gets the wildest, the dancers resist it and move deliberately, with a sense of containment; it's another way that she flirts with chaos but doesn't tumble over the edge. Barton's push-pull between music and dance engages the intellect. Pederneiras in "MAPA" goes for sensual immersion. In this 40-minute piece by the choreographer for Brazil's Grupo Corpo, music and dance create a single irresistible current of dynamics and mood. To a rain-foresty score by Brazilian group Uakti, Pederneiras ignites a carnival of movement—insect-like creeping, shoulder-dislocating partnering, hitch kicks, ronds de jambe, wheeling turns, a leaping quick-step that would bring down the house on "Dancing with the Stars." Young dancers are known for speed and attack, and the Ballet Jazz troupe must all be kids, because they explode into this piece—especially Katherine Cowie, who whips her knees, back, and neck with the fearlessness of someone who's never had a major injury. In a riveting trio, Cowie flies in a wide-legged split into the arms of Robert Knowles and Youri de Wilde, and they flip her upside-down. Eira Glover is another striking presence, with big leg swings and samba hips. Set designer Fernando Velloso's backdrop—a checkerboard pattern torqued to suggest some kind of digitized map—covers the rear of the stage. That might have set up an intriguing tension between the high-tech background and the primal, tribal feel of the dance; the theme isn't developed, however, and "MAPA" comes up short on ideas. Still, what can be wrong with a dance so filled with movement invention and breathtaking performances, if all it's about is beauty and joy? Click for program.
 Janice Steinberg About the author: Janice Steinberg has written about dance and performance art for the San Diego Union-Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Dance Magazine, High Performance Magazine as well as sandiego.com. She was a 2004 NEA-New York Times Fellow at the Institute for Dance Criticism at the American Dance Festival and teaches Dance Aesthetics and Criticism at San Diego State University. More by this author Subscribe to Arts:
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