Standing in line for tickets at Vero Beach Ballet’s season finale last Saturday, I realized something remarkable had happened in the company’s brief existence: People were talking about it.
They had read articles, they had seen prior performances. They knew the names of the artistic director and the ballet master. They shared opinions about what they’d seen, and they expressed hopes for what they might see that day. In particular, one fan was rhapsodizing about company founder Adam Schnell’s choreography and wanting more after January’s stunning “Finch Concerto.”
For a town proud of its cultural offerings, Vero has long fallen short on three fronts – straight drama, youthful music, and serious dance.
On that last score, seemingly overnight, Vero Beach finds itself in the midst of a ballet bonanza. It’s been like tasting a flight of wines from different vintages: dance enthusiasts have been able to choose from among the most venerable of companies to one blossoming before our eyes: the Bolshoi, the revered Russian company founded in 1776 whose ballets have been screened at the Majestic Theatre, including live transmissions; the internationally acclaimed Miami City Ballet performing its entire season just an hour and a half away; and the astonishing efforts of Ballet Vero Beach, which, in only its second season, has presented respectably well-rendered works – including some beautifully executed – of classical, neo-classical and contemporary ballet.
In only its second season, Vero’s company gave us a work of the great choreographer George Balanchine that required the stamp of approval on the fledgling company by the Balanchine Trust. And it staged the ambitious “Paquita,” a large production of 13 dancers complete with stunning tutus.
Most impressive is the company’s effort at original choreography, and an innovative – daring even – effort to define itself so early on with works that blur gender roles within an art form that thrives on stereotypes.
January’s program, which included Balanchine’s “Valse Fantaisie,” also gave us “Finch Concerto,” an original work by Ballet Vero Beach’s founder and artistic director Adam Schnell. Featuring the company’s ballet master, Camilo Rodriguez, the dancers, both male and female, wore the same skirted tunics; roles were gender-neutral: Rodriguez’s understudy was Vivi DiMarco, who danced the role of Paquita in the March performance.
Both Schnell and Rodriguez, who trained with the Joffrey, have backgrounds with Les Ballets Trockeradero de Monte Carlo. So does Matthew Carter, ballet master of Ballet Nebraska, whose dancers Ballet Vero Beach shares. The Trocks, as they are called, stage ballet “en travesti” – in drag – and those who dance the female roles become proficient in pointe technique. Rodriguez is a beautiful ballerina.
Where his first performance with the Vero company, executed to hilarious effect, was as the feather-shedding dying swan in the famous solo set on Anna Pavlova, his dancing in March was with a straight face, in the famously challenging female role in the pas de deux “Flames of Paris” with Ryan Christopher in the male role.
Rodriguez appeared not to mock the role but embrace it, the only humorous note being a single raised finger as he counted off turns; otherwise, the audience seemed engaged by his astonishing polish, and by Christopher’s steadfast partnering (his proud father, seated in front of me, couldn’t repress a small harrumph when the introductory video noted it was Ryan’s first time partnering a man.)
Playing up the cross-gender talents of its top dancers and choreographers, it’s certainly an interesting concept that Ballet Vero Beach is toying with, and it’s one that the audience seems to have bought into without hesitation.
Though the company’s thought-provoking offerings come at a moment when minds appear open to more fluid sexual identity, the art of ballet has been espousing the concept for a century at least. The gender norms of classical ballet – the all-female corps de ballet dancing around a lead couple comprising a muscular male dancer lifting a frail ballerina on her pedestal of a pointe shoe, as feminist scholars have noted, began to erode with Nijinsky dancing in a costume of rose petals in “Le Spectre de la Rose” in 1911. At the same time, Isadora Duncan’s students were pulling off those pointe shoes and unfurling their hair. In movements both earthy and erotic, Duncan’s “Isadorables” took over the stage without support from a male dancer and gave the movements of ballet a new notion of womanhood.
While the modern dance that evolved of Duncan’s philosophy more thoroughly embraced androgyny and continues to today, ballet has been a solid step behind. Schnell and Rodriguez, should they continue in their exploration, may put Vero at something of a vanguard.
That would get the ticket line talking.
Just hours after Ballet Vero Beach’s impressive matinee, I was listening to the oohs and aahs of other balletomanes at the Kravis Center. That weekend, Miami City Ballet was premiering Justin Peck’s new work, “Heatscape.” It was another thrilling evening with a company I have followed (and written about pfreviously, for the Miami Herald) since its founding in the mid-1980s and that now ranks among the country’s biggest and brightest.
Next season will be Miami City’s 30th, and it just announced last week that it has raised $6.5 million in new support to take the company on a national tour, as well as stage “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” That work, by Balanchine, once starred Edward Villella, the company’s founding artistic director and former New York City Ballet soloist. Lourdes Lopez, also a former NYCB soloist who replaced Villella in 2012, called the infusion of funds to Miami City Ballet coffers “transformative.”
There was a time when Miami City Ballet toyed with the idea of adding Vero to its roster of homes-away-from-home (Fort Lauderdale, Naples and West Palm). There was even a performance (or two?) at Riverside, but the idea finally fizzled.
Now we have a company of our own. And we have established ballet all around us to keep that good buzz going. Let’s all realize that just as Miami City Ballet “transforms” with donations, so will our new company – and probably even more dramatically.
A reminder: Sunday at 1 p.m., the Majestic Theatre will be showing the new ballet documentary about choreographer Justin Peck, “Ballet 422.” It will be repeated Tuesday at 6 p.m. Regular pricing applies.
