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From safe to stormy

Posted on Sunday, June 24, 2007

By Margaret Putnam
Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

FORT WORTH – Metropolitan Classical Ballet first played it safe Friday night at Bass Hall, and then went for broke. One need not guess which direction each of the co-artistic directors – Paul Mejia and Alexander Vetrov – took.

Mr. Mejia's play-it-safe Jeux was a gauzy affair that mainly gave the company's star ballerina, Olga Pavlova, the chance to display her exquisite limbs and inviting eyes.

Set to the music of Claude Debussy's Jeux, the ballet involves three tennis players who run into each other at dusk in a garden near a tennis lawn. The first ballet version was created by Vaslav Nijinsky for the Ballets Russes in Paris in 1913, rather revolutionary at a time when tutus and fairies reigned.

The ballet begins with a ball rolling over the stage, followed by a tennis player seeking to recover it. But tennis is not nearly as captivating to the young man (Andrey Prikhodko) as a stranger (Ms. Pavlova). She is wary, but curious, unlike her jealous rival (Marina Goshko), who is as bold as Ms. Pavlova is demure.

There is not much to the ballet, other than that love is a game, and as quickly over as a match.

  

 

 


Yevgeni Anfinogenov, Olga Pavlova, Marina Goshko
Image by Sharon K. Nolan

Joaquin Murieta was another matter, bold and tempestuous. Originally a rock-opera with lyrical libretto by Pavel Grushko and music by Alexei Rybnikov – based on a cantata by Pablo Neruda – it has been turned into a ballet by Mr. Vetrov..

The action covers Mr. Murieta's life in Chile, his voyage to California gold mines and his death. This is a man's ballet, and Anatoly Emelianov (Joaquin) and Mr. Prikhodko (Death and Skipper) – along with Mr. Vetrov, Oleksandr Kryvonis, Shea Johnson, Mykhaylo Izotov and Assaf Benchetrit – tackle their roles with gusto.

Great soaring leaps and whiplash turns erupt at every turn, whether in a bar, street, ship's loading deck or graveyard.Text is spoken in Russian, with an occasional translational flashed on an overhead screen, while Mr. Vetrov's imaginative sets – rocky mountains, a barricade that turns into a wooden ship and then into a tavern, a menacing billow of red drapery that hangs overhead – all predict the impending doom.

But it's really the dancers and music's dramatic flare that make one ignore the bumpy structure, and wallow in the extravagant fantasy of it all.

Margaret Putnam is a Richardson-based writer who covers dance.

© Copyright 2007 The Dallas Morning News Co.

 
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