New Chamber Ballet

By Margaret Fuhrer

"This small troupe is so earnest that you want to root for it. Artistic director Miro Magloire's commitment to live music, and his avoidance of fussy costumes and fancy lights, means that Chamber Ballet performances are tasteful, charmingly unpretentious affairs. It's a special pleasure, too, to see Magloire's lovely dancers - former New York City Ballet and Miami City Ballet members among them - up close in studio 4's intimate space.

Headlining this program was the premiere of All the Rage by Constantine Baecher, an American dancer with the Royal Danish Ballet and a veteran Chamber Ballet collaborator. To Martin Stauning's stormy, uneasy score for piano and violin, Elizabeth Brown, Madeline Deavenport, and Lauren Toole stalked slinkily forwards and backwards on pointe, occasionally deviating from their narrow prescribed routes to wriggle through twisty, syncopated solos. With its serpentine shoulder and hip rolls, Rage was sexier than most of the Chamber Ballet's wholesome classical fare. Ultimately, however, Baecher's dreamy dance world couldn't match the intensity of the insistent, menacing score.

The program's four other short works, all by Magloire, were demurely pleasant. Most appealing was Echoes, in which Anton Webern's Four Pieces for Piano and Violin alternate with dancing so that, as Magloire explained in his brief introduction, the choreography won't overwhelm the music's subtleties. The concept proves surprisingly resilient; "echoes" of the score are, indeed, apparent in the steps, and searching for those correspondences becomes an attractive kind of parlor game. In the end, Echoes was solidly satisfying for its good craftsmanship but didn't grab us as great art can.

Bravo to Magloire for realizing that there are endless possibilities in the simplicity of a group of dancers responding to live music. (...)"

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