Firebird in a Different Hue, and Other Inventions at Dance Theatre of Harlem
Last Spring, an unusual phenomenon took place. All three major NYC-based ballet companies (American Ballet Theatre, Dance Theatre of Harlem, and the New York City Ballet) all programmed their own productions of Firebird to run within the same month span. On this side of the country, Pacific Northwest Ballet joined the nation’s Firebird fever with the return of Kent Stowell’s Firebird after a 21-year absence from the repertory. It was no surprise then to see the Paramount Theater packed to witness an entirely different shaping of the Russian tale during Dance Theatre of Harlem’s brief tour stop in Seattle. Firebird fever still reigns.
Lately it has felt like we’re watching humanity slip away through our fingers. To the point that when the company’s artistic director, Robert Garland, stepped before the velvet curtain to tell the extensive history of the company and its founder, it felt like a part of the performance itself. Or rather, just some much-needed human connection to prelude the curtain’s rise.
Robert Garland has a knack for creating work that establishes an entirely new category of ballet. By seamlessly interweaving neoclassical ballet vocabulary with an “urban physical sensibility”, Garland declares the voice of Dance Theatre of Harlem in an instant. He reminds us that ballet really can fill any music, and that at the intersection of popular dance and ballet, a whirlwind of energy arises. Where swayed hips greet proper pas de bourrées, a double tour en l’air lands right into the splits, where a la seconde turns and body rolls coexist, there Garland creates a world where ballet belongs to the people, where the voices of James Brown, Alfred Ellis, Aretha Franklin, and Carolyn Franklin fill the work with real life and soul, lifting us somewhere brighter, somewhere entirely unrestrained.
Two shorter works at the center of the program show the range of DTH’s repertoire. Robert Bondara’s Take Me With You, originally choreographed for the Polish National Ballet, finds its foothold in the persistent throb of Radiohead’s “Reckoner”. The clapping of two dancers begins in silence, until they are jolted to life in an instant by the rhythm overtakes them. In the dim light, what unfolds is a deeply intimate scene. Spiraling, turning always towards the other, swayed and stretched, their motion is a potent thing, spurred on by the score’s insistence. There’s a cleanliness to their movement too, an urban nonchalance that finds her patting the beat upon his chest before they return to their clapping and are gone.
Passage of Being is, from the start, a tender grace through dim light. Footsteps spurred on by a rising pace, silken port de bras sweeping through the darkness. A shift in score lets the work grow electrified, and there we are reminded, for a moment, just to feel. To let the image of a body swung through space to ripple through us, to let wildened limbs and a daze of motion wash over and linger. The end grows unraveled, novel musicality filled by beats and flickers, flurried lifts and a growing rage that leaves one dancer's vocal exclamations echoing in the silence as the curtain falls upon her distraught being.
In 1909, Sergei Diaghilev declared that he needed “a ballet, and a Russian one– the first Russian ballet, since there is no such thing.” With Stravinsky’s score solidifying the Russian sound, it became a major success for the Ballet Russes, and later, for George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet. It has been restaged, choreographed, but never as far removed from its origins as John Taras’ 1982 production for the Dance Theatre of Harlem.
Reset in the Caribbean, the ballet gains a lush, tropical air without losing the essential nature of the folktale, or its mood. What a beautiful gesture, to reimagine a ballet to better fit the dancers bringing it to life, and find that this simple change of setting gives it an entirely new hue. It is a hue of authenticity, for the Firebird is at home amidst the tropical foliage and costumes as vivid as her own feathers. After two decades, the company revived the ballet last spring, and as it tours across the nation, has quickly proven why it continues to be a landmark success for the organization.
Despite how removed Taras’ production feels from the original setting, essential elements of choreography, phrasing, and the physical interpretations of this fiery bird have not wandered far from their roots. Even amidst the maiden’s dance, the Russian folk elements gleam, and then disappear beneath the tender folds of their vibrant finery. Yet this bird’s flickers of gaze, fluttering feather tips, sharpened gesture, and rippling nature are her own in their intensity. With daring elements that fill the first pas de deux, and an authority that never grazes on vulnerability as it does in so many productions, she immediately reveals that she is a different kind of firebird than we’ve seen before. The lingering image, however, is the soulful sarabande, where bourrées quiver through her until they overwhelm the physical image, reminding us that Dance Theatre of Harlem will always push artistry beyond expectation.
And then of course, that finale: a flying firebird lifted above a sea of orange, magenta, and yellow; a swell of the Caribbean in the air…perhaps the Firebird was never solely Russian after all.
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