by Deborah Jowitt — Dance Beat
New York Theatre Ballet performs a new work and a classic at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival.
New York Theatre Ballet in Song Before Spring by Zhong-Jing Fang and Steven Melendez. Clockwise from R: Melendez, Amanda Treiber, Elena Zahlmann, Carmella Lauer, Daniel Salas, Alexis Branagan, Joshua Andino-Nieto, Mayu Oguri, Photo: Cherylynn Tsushima
Young choreographers are usually advised to start out “small.” You know, try their wings. Diana Byer, the artistic director of the fine little New York Theatre Ballet, took the opposite tack. According to an interview with Steven Melendez, a dancer in NYTB, and Zhong-Jing Fang, a member of American Ballet Theatre’s corps de ballet, Byer put them together to co-choreograph a new work and chose the music for it: Philip Glass’s Piano Etudes, Nos. 1-10, slightly re-ordered and played by New York University’s ten-person Steel Drum Ensemble (director: Josh Quillen). Running time: 48 minutes. That the resulting piece, Song Before Spring, works as well as it does is something of a triumph.
I missed the piece’s premiere at New York Live Arts in February, but saw it in Jacob’s Pillow’s Doris Duke Theatre this first August week, with its score played live. It’s a big, vivid, dramatic, occasionally perplexing piece that, toward the end, strains to fill Glass’s ongoing music. You want both to applaud it and calm it down so you can ask it a few questions.
In the effective opening, members of the Steel Drum Ensemble walk to their upstage lineup at a moderate pace, silhouetted against a blue-lit backdrop. Wearing black, even when illuminated, they take little attention away from the dancing, even as they play their steel pans (plus several drums) with terrific rhythmic acuity (no conductor) The sound is remarkable.
Elena Zahlmann in Song Before Spring. At back: Members of New York University’s Steel Drum Ensemble. Photo: Hyim Heron
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