When the Vero Beach Museum of Art invited Ballet Vero Beach to create dances inspired by works of moving sculpture, few expected the exercise in cross-media exchange to be more than an enjoyable experiment.
Instead, those lucky enough to grab a seat in the sold-out 240-person Leonhardt Auditorium got a gem of a show, a polished performance of impressive choreography, pulled off with Zen-like assuredness.
Each of the three pieces was introduced by a video explanation of the sculpture that inspired it. Set to music, the kinetic pieces moved miraculously in time, as if dancing as part of the company.
The production included only one professional dancer – Camilo Rodriguez, the young company’s ballet master, who danced in and choreographed two of the three works. Artistic director Adam Schnell choreographed the third piece, a solo, for Rodriguez.
The two other dancers were apprentices at the most recent Riverside Dance Festival. Zachary Tudor, 22, a film major at the University of Central Florida who previously came to Vero from Sarasota to swim for Indian River State College’s renowned team; and Shannon Maloney, 21, an accounting major who studied dance under Schnell at Riverside and at IRSC.
It is to Rodriguez’s credit that he gave these novice dancers movements they could execute so well. And it is to their credit that the pieces held together so perfectly, despite demanding mechanics and synchronization.
As in the videos, the music accompanying the dancers evoked the moving sculptures: Anne Lilly’s highly engineered linear forms prompted Schnell to use Vivaldi’s “Violin Concerto in E Minor” for his work of classical ballet choreography, danced with steely precision by Rodriguez.
Rodriguez the choreographer saw an Asian inflection in Lin Emery’s sculpture and used fluid Japanese music for the duet he danced with Maloney, using minimalist unisex costumes of tank tops and stretch samurai pants in gunmetal grey and black.
For the final dance, Rodriguez was inspired by the more approachable petal shapes and gliding curves of Pedro S. de Movellan’s sculptures to set his trio of dancers to Tchaikovsky’s “Souvenir de Florence.” He and Maloney, who are close to the same height, wittily played off Tudor’s rod-like frame nearly twice as tall. They peered out from behind him, swapped places repetitively, and lay on their backs with legs up and feet twitching in unison. Once the two were scooped up on each of Tudor’s swimmer’s arms and propelled to the front of the stage as if on castors.
Brief as it was, this was the most sophisticated of the fledgling company’s performances – there have only been four to date, and the second season officially opens on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 2015.
Would that this sweet spot found in an hour on a weekday afternoon on a small stage with a cast of three, be easy to find again in the cavernous Performing Arts Center at Vero Beach High School, with all the velvet-curtain expectations that go along with a weekend evening performance, pricey tickets, and a full complement of dancers.
Who knows but that that audience, rapturous when the mid-week, late afternoon performance ended, may never be surprised again.
