BalletX Presents its 2024 Summer Series

They’ll need the space. According to artistic and executive producer Christine Cox, the company is growing to 16 dancers next year, and we can expect more changes fueled by a $7.4 million bequest of scholar (and company fan) Joan DeJean. Cox said DeJean wanted BalletX to use the money for their creativity—to be bold—and that means supporting more artists: “When you have a choice, live music, or not, this fund allows us to say yes, live music. Yes, composer.”

Moving to Vivaldi and Bach

For its last series at the Wilma, BalletX gives us an eclectic trio of world premieres. Amy Hall Garner, choreographer in residence for the next two years, set her Suite No. 46, Op.1 to the music of Vivaldi and Bach, performed on stage by a live quintet (Maria Im, Samantha Crawford, Kathryn Dark, Branson Yeast, and Moriah Trenk). In a film before the performance, Garner talked about her connection to the music. As a violinist herself, she said, she is intimately familiar with Vivaldi’s work, and it shows. The dancers embody the bright, quick music in an almost synesthetic embrace of sound and movement.

For all that the piece is inspired by the music, it opens in silence. Five men, in costume designer Susan Roemer’s shorts and bell-sleeved shirts in a rainbow of colors, gesture with their arms and punctuate the dance with sharp, percussive slaps to their chests, until the women, in floating skirts that match their partners’ costumes, burst onstage with the music. The piece blends classical pointe work with a contemporary sensibility: movement both low to the stage and soaring in lifts, but with a foot bent up at the ankle instead of pointed. Skyler Lubin and Ben Schwarz are gorgeous in their duet. Lubin dances with an ethereal, almost distant sensuality. Their arm positions in her arabesque turn their upper bodies into a mosaic of triangles I could have explored forever.

Love unraveled

While Suite No. 46 floats light as air on a ribbon of music, Belgian choreographer Stina Quagebeur’s Everything InBetween gives us a deep dive into a struggling relationship. It’s not the extremes, she tells us in her film preview, but everything in between. Francesca Forcella is a wonderful dancer, as you’d expect of BalletX, but I am always struck by the emotional truth in her performances. With partner Jerard Palazo, those emotions are painfully real. They sit at the front of the stage, on the couch of an unseen therapist, touch an arm, a knee, and pull away again, face each other and turn their backs, their faces maps of their struggle and, in Forcella, a kind of emotional exhaustion that felt all too recognizable.

Michael Korsch’s lighting keeps most of the stage in darkness, until spectral figures began to emerge in the background, gradually taking on substance. The company, in costume designer Benjamin Burton’s simple blue and green shirts and pants, crowds around the couple on the couch, then breaks apart. In pairs and solos they play out the stories of the couple to composer Jeremy Birchall’s mournful, minimalist music. Sharp pokes become gentle pats in the push and pull of a relationship at odds.

In a defining party scene that brightens the stage, Palazo makes himself the center of attention, dancing with everyone and doing a quick, showy solo while Forcella ghosts through the crowd on the outside, watching him. They meet, break apart again, and at the end, they remain torn between their love and their pain. Masterful.

He called it Macaroni

The evening ends on a lighter note, with Loughlan Prior’s Macaroni, a riff on the flamboyant 18th-century fashion movement. Literary maven Horace Walpole coined the term Macaroni to mock the young men who returned from their Grand Tours of Europe with the styles picked up in their travels—bright colors, tight fits, and exaggerated wigs associated with French and Italian fashion. It’s why the Yankee Doodle Dandy stuck a feather in his hat and called it Macaroni: he was styling, and the song mocks his pretentions.

Prior embraces the queerness of the movement and brings its flamboyance to his piece. Dancers in Emma Kingsbury’s acid-green perukes (a fancy kind of wig popular at the time) and snug tailcoats in black, trimmed in the same shocking green, preen and mime a tea party to exaggerated effect. They prance about the stage wagging green ostrich feathers at their backs with the sly sampling of the Macarena in the score.

The coats come off to reveal images drawn from illustrations of historic Macaroni printed in black on green bodysuits. The dancing sorts itself into duets and comes together again in a feathered tower of bodies. The Macaroni-est of them all, Jonathan Montepara, precariously balances a towering headpiece as he bends in an affected curtsey to pass under the bridged arms of the dancers above him. It’s all performed to composer Claire Cowan’s witty score cuing the action with pop-culture references and, ultimately, that Yankee Doodle himself.

These new works are both a fitting end for BalletX’s tenure on the Wilma stage and an exciting look into the future.