Miami City Ballet closes its season this month with a powerhouse program of masterpieces from two 20th-century geniuses, an only-in-Miami update of a sparkling classic and the company premiere of a seldom performed gem. Ranging from sweeping power to sensual simplicity, joyful virtuosity to enigmatic intimacy, the program, “Entradas,” shows off the spectrum of the company’s talent in some of the greatest ballets by George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, who are foundational to MCB.
Balanchine was the founder and choreographer of New York City Ballet who transformed classical dance in the 20th century. He shaped and inspired both MCB artistic founder Edward Villella – a Balanchine star who made his ballets intrinsic to the Miami troupe – and current artistic director Lourdes Lopez, a former NYCB soloist who joined the troupe as a young teen. Robbins, though best known as the brilliant choreographer of “West Side Story” and other Broadway classics, was also a supremely talented ballet maker at NYCB with many pieces in MCB’s repertoire.
The Miami troupe presents “Entradas” May 19-21 at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts.
Renan Cerdeiro in “Square Dance.”
“Square Dance”
The update is to Balanchine’s “Square Dance,” an MCB staple since 1988. The dance world maestro choreographed it in 1957, when it was the first ballet that a young Villella performed with NYCB after returning from a family-enforced stint at a naval academy. The original featured an old-fashioned square dance caller onstage, calling out do-si-dos and promenades while musicians played the sparkling Vivaldi and Corelli score. Balanchine loved American pop culture, and “Square Dance” is Americana playfully layered onto ballet and courtly Baroque dance.
“It was amazing to have been part of the origination of this,” Villella told this reporter in a 2008 interview for the Miami Herald. “They had the caller and musicians onstage and a wagon wheel and candlelight, and he called us out and off we went.”
“Square Dance” was dropped from NYCB’s repertoire after a few years, then revived in 1976 without the caller, as a pure neoclassical piece with thrillingly difficult moves executed at electrifying speed. MCB has always danced it with verve and joy, and Villella included it at the company’s 2009 Manhattan debut, when it brought the New York City Center audience cheering to its feet mid-performance.
Now Lopez has taken “Square Dance” back to its roots while giving it a unique Miami update. The caller is back, but with new lyrics by Miami-raised hip-hop dancer/rapper turned Yale-educated playwright Rudi Goblen. His lyrics evoke a backyard Miami BBQ and “salsa rueda” party, calling on “two strong women” instead of “two little ladies,” evoking a breezy, Latin-inflected mood with phrases like “let loose now,” dotted with Miamisms like “sazon,” “dale” and “muevete.”
The change is the first time the Balanchine Trust, which oversees who performs Balanchine ballets, has approved a new version of “Square Dance” – a big deal in the classical dance world.
(Choreography by George Balanchine © The George Balanchine Trust/© Daniel Azoulay)
Miami City Ballet dancers Nathalia Arja and Kleber Rebello in “Symphony in Three Movements.”
“Nobody has asked to change it before,” said Victoria Simon, who has taught Balanchine ballets for the Trust around the world for decades. “This was Lourdes’ idea and it was terrific.”
Simon, who taught “Square Dance” to NYCB in 1976 and to MCB in 1988 and returned to stage this version, says the return of the caller makes the piece more intimate and engaging.
“It’s a more friendly ballet – it brings a smile to your face,” she said. “What [Goblen] added to make it relatable to Miami was so charming. I heard people at New York City Ballet say they wish they did it with a caller, this sounds like so much fun.”
“Symphony in Three Movements”
“Symphony in Three Movements” is at the opposite end of Balanchine’s creative spectrum: a massive, sweeping dance set to a dark Stravinsky score that many believe was inspired by the destruction wrought during World War II. Wheeling lines and swirling groups of dancers mesh in intricate patterns, creating a sense of relentless, machine-like power, while leaping soloists evoke desperation and hope amidst overwhelming forces.
Villella was one of the leads in the original 1972 cast and called it “probably the single most difficult neoclassical ballet ever created.”
As MCB prepared to premiere “Movements” in 2003, he explained it as “an anti-war ballet” whose message is “all in the structure, the form, the way it articulates the music. It’s musically terrifying – a grand challenge.”
(Choreography by Jerome Robbins/Christopher Duggan; courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow)
Miami City Ballet dancers Madison McDonough, Dawn Atkins and Petra Love in “Antique Epigraphs.”
MCB also danced “Movements” in its 2009 New York performances, and Lopez had the company perform it when it made its debut at Lincoln Center in 2016. Both times it was a statement to New York’s ultra-demanding ballet audiences – for whom Balanchine is hometown hero and dance deity – that MCB could master his masterpieces. Now the group is performing “Movements” for the first time since 2016, reasserting its Balanchine foundations.
Two Jerome Robbins Ballets
The two Robbins ballets in “Entradas” showcase how different he was from Balanchine. One is “Afternoon of a Faun,” one of Robbins’ most famous dances, which MCB first performed in 2005. Inspired by Robbins’s glimpse of a teenage Villella stretching in an empty studio, it’s an eerily intimate dance for a dreamily detached pair of ballet students more drawn to their own exquisite images (with the audience standing in for the mirror) than each other. Though made in 1953, “Faun” is newly relevant in an era of selfies and image obsession.
MCB already performs many of Robbins’ most acclaimed ballets. With the company premiere of “Antique Epigraphs” it adds a little-known and rarely staged gem. This 1984 ballet for eight women, set, like “Faun,” to music by Debussy, was inspired by ancient Greek statues of women.
The Robbins biography “Dance With Demons” calls it “a beautifully sensual mood piece of utmost simplicity and stillness” and quotes NYCB ballerina Jerri Kumery, from the original cast, as saying that Robbins was “blown away with the power and look” of these statues and telling dancers that “Epigraphs” was about “telling secrets … knowledge and experiences and mysteries that we were telling stories about.”
“Epigraphs” also evokes dance legacy and women’s power: the music was partly inspired by Sappho, the ancient Greek female poet and lover of women. The flowing tunics are reminiscent of the body-liberating costumes and classical Greek imagery that inspired modern dance pioneer Isadora Duncan, while the all-female cast evokes the matriarchal community of early Martha Graham, another modern dance godmother. It’s a world of dance history in a ballet – and program.