New Venue, II – (9/20/13)

Friday evening found me in the Bohemian National Hall at Czech Center NY for a New Chamber Ballet program, Miro Magloire, choreographer and director, with live music provided by The Argento Ensemble, Michel Galante, conductor. I got my free ticket through the auspices of the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, so even though there was not a lot of information available ahead of time, I was fairly sure that the music, at least, would lean toward the avant-garde. I was right. The choreography was very much of the avant-garde, as well.

Composers included Georg Friedrich Haas, Anton Webern, Nina C. Young, Michel Galante, Arthur Kampela, and Beat Furrer; three of the composers were at the performance. The ballets/dances themselves, for five female dancers in various combinations of three, two, five, and one solo (though that was more like a duet, as it included a soprano who only started singing after she had shadowed the dance soloist for a while), were Broken Chains, Echoes, Come Closer, Synch, Fiesta, and Between Us the Night. Not that I made any huge connections between the titles and the pieces themselves.

All five of the dancers were just fine and seemed to have a pretty good grasp of
Mr. Magloire’s style, which looked to me like poses, contortions, unison movements, contrasting movements, etc. They performed barefoot in some pieces, and en pointe in some others. In Echoes, set to Webern’s Four Pieces for Violin and Piano op. 7, all of the dancing occurred in silence, with the four short pieces in between. The choreographer actually commented on that, but it still did not make a lot of sense to me.

In a strange bit of stage management and planning, there was often “dead air” between the pieces. But that led to an interesting backstory to Ms. Young’s composition, Tethered Within (the music for Come Closer). She was commissioned to write a piece for eight musicians, with the imposed restriction that she had to write it in just two weeks. I liked the piece. She also commented on what it was like to see her vision of her own piece reinterpreted by a choreographer. As one of our hosts said, “You just can’t get that from Mozart or Beethoven!”

I’m certainly glad I went, and I do like the idea of hearing live music by living composers, but I’ll be sure to pick and choose carefully just how much avant-garde programming I’ll follow in the future. For me, a little goes a long way. Still, it was one more new venue for the new season—a ballroom in the Czech Center in the East 70s.

ConcertMeister