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- What the bleep do we know!?A William Arntz, Betsy Chasse, Mark Vicente film. For anyone interested in quantum fysics. A real eye-opener!
May 05, 2012
Review in the Telegraph
A Streetcar Named Desire, Scottish Ballet, Theatre Royal Glasgow, review
Mark Brown reviews Scottish Ballet's A Streetcar Named Desire in Glasgow.
Tennessee Williams’s great play A Streetcar Named Desire is, like Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, beautifully suited to the requirements of ballet (indeed, there have been at least two dance versions of Streetcar prior to this new production by Scottish Ballet). Like Romeo and Juliet, Williams’s play – in which fallen southern belle Blanche DuBois finds herself in a small New Orleans apartment that is home to her sister, Stella, and her macho brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski – is constructed of scenes of tragic conflict, physical passion and dangerous tribalism (in Williams’s case the distinctive tribes are men and women).
Typically of outgoing Scottish Ballet director Ashley Page’s leadership, the piece is the consequence of an audacious experiment. He invited Nancy Meckler (best known as co-artistic director of the Oxford-based theatre company Shared Experience) to direct her first ballet in collaboration with the Belgian-Colombian choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa (for whom this is a first foray into narrative dance). The result is a brilliantly bold and sensitive ballet which is full of memorable set pieces.
From the opening, in which we see a delicate Blanche fluttering under a naked light bulb, to the conclusion, in which Williams’s symbol of death (a Mexican flower-seller who offers blooms in memory of the departed) is stunningly multiplied, the particular skills of Meckler and Lopez Ochoa complement each other gorgeously.
At the level of the narrative, they seize upon the visual possibilities of dance to represent elements – such as the suicide of Blanche’s young husband some decades past, or Stella and Blanche’s trip to a show – which are only alluded to in the play.
The scene in which we witness the strongly gendered rituals of the bowling alley, where Stanley and the other men strut their stuff like puffed-up cockerels, is especially ingenious. Set to the appropriately jazzy sounds of Peter Salem’s excellent new score (which veers, when required, into modernist discordance), the brilliantly choreographed contrasts and combinations of the sexes are akin to the best moments of West Side Story or Guys and Dolls.
Danced with real power on opening night by Eve Mutso (Blanche), Tama Barry (Stanley) and Sophie Martin (Stella), this is (not least in its brilliant and horrifying portrayal of sexual violence) a new ballet of truly tragic proportions.
Reviews of Streetcar Named Desire for the Scottish Ballet
A Streetcar Named Desire, Sadler's Wells, London
Tennessee Williams as dance? I do declare! But Scottish Ballet triumphs with a perfectly told tale
Impossible is clearly not a word Nancy Meckler chooses to hear. The theatre director who made her name compressing vast, sprawling novels for the stage with the company Shared Experience has now tackled a famously text-heavy play for Scottish Ballet.
Attempting to replicate the experience of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire without recourse to the sweaty New Orleans drawl of its language might seem like trying to open a bottle of bourbon in boxing gloves. But with the collaboration of choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa (a novice to full-length narrative dance despite an impressive list of credits) and composer Peter Salem (originator of the music for TV's Call the Midwife and an aficionado of 1940s jazz), this danced version is thrillingly persuasive.
Not only does it crackle with Southern heat and sexual tension, but it's a model of storytelling. No need to have seen the play or the film: everything is here, from the big themes of masculine-feminine, earth and air, to the smallest detail. Even Blanche DuBois' la-di-da way of speaking finds its way into a mincing step and a ladylike twitch of the skirt. You see the veins stiffen in irritation on her brother-in-law's neck every time she does it.
That bare space is neessary for dancing in, but it's constantly redefined. Packing crates, stacked and restacked by members of the chorus to create the high-rise of New Orleans, are sat upon to suggest the jostling trolleybus of the title, or rearranged as cinema seats, or a living-room couch. Bare-boards theatre has been doing this sort of thing for 30 years. Amazing that it's taken this long – and Scottish Ballet's outgoing director, Ashley Page – to bring it to dance.
Tennessee Williams had toyed with calling his play The Moth, and this becomes Meckler's key image: the faded, fluttering Southern belle and the harsh bare lightbulb she is so intent on covering with a fancy Japanese shade. How clever of composer Peter Salem to have the popular song "It's Only a Paper Moon" issuing from the wireless when Stanley loses his rag at the disruption to his card game and throws the set out of the window. When there is violence, it feels horribly real.
The score, most of it live from a band in the pit, some of it recorded atmospheric noise, is the chief motor of this Streetcar. Drawing on a range of styles, from polite wedding waltzes to juicy New Orleans jazz to Philip Glass-ish noodling, it doesn't just underpin the action but offers emotional pointers ahead of the game. A blind man would know where he was in the story. The climax, where the "Paper Moon" theme shatters into a pile-up of discordant shards, isn't just a stirring aural metaphor for the chaos in Blanche's head, you can imagine it really is the sound in her head.
Scottish Ballet's principals prove first-rate, with Eve Mutso a mercurial and dangerously sympathetic Blanche, and Tama Barry a believably brutish Stanley, all scowl and pectorals. He even gets to roar "Stella!" like Marlon Brando. Sophie Martin's pregnant Stella is the moral touchstone, sensual and earthed. Her conciliatory duet with Stanley is not only startlingly gymnastic; it's almost certainly the most erotic thing on any stage right now.
Interview for Soluciones Magazine
Interview with Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, Choreographer of “Noche Latina”, her Washington Ballet Debut
By: Eduardo Carrasco. Photos by Gregory Batardon
Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, is young and beautiful, speaks five languages, but none of these languages perfectly expresses her state of mind. “With dance I always seem to get to the point”, says Lopez Ochoa, one of the choreographers that created ¡Noche Latina!, a new program celebrating Latin music and dance. The three movement program includes world premieres by Lopez Ochoa and Edwaard Liang . The ballets include music by singers, songwriters, and musicians of Spanish, Argentinian, Costa Rican and Mexican descent. Together with Trey McIntyre’s Like a Samba, their choreography will interpret stories of passion, romance, love and life in Spain and Latin America. Perform by The Washington Ballet at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC.
The Colombian and Belgian Lopez Ochoa completed her dance studies at the Royal Ballet School of Antwerp, Belgium. After a 12-year career in various European dance companies, Ms. Ochoa decided in 2003 to focus solely on choreography. She has created works for numerous companies around the world. These performances mark Ochoa’s Washington Ballet debut.
Here are same of her comments about her work in “Noche Latina” to SOLUCIONES magazine.
SOLUCIONES: How did you created the choreography of “Noche Latina”?
Annabelle Lopez Ochoa: The first thing I look for is music that touches me, for this particular piece that would be part of the program Noche Latina it had to be from an Hispanic range. Personally I’m huge fan of Maria Dolores Pradera as I grew up with her music. It’s therefore not the first time that I use her music for a ballet.
As I was discussing costumes and colors with my costume designer I realized that for the Hispanic look we tend to reach out to the same color range. So for a change I decided step away from the cliché and have all the costumes white. This led me to the idea of the piece.
The piece is called “Sueño de Mármol”.
A man walks on stage and see a garden of marble statues that reminds him of the people and events of his own past. The memories are haunting him.
SOLUCIONES: What’s the message behind your choreography in this work?
Lopez Ochoa: The piece is at times quite melancholy.
It’s like looking at an old picture, which is a frozen moment in time and the recollection of that particular moment opens a drawer full of diverse memories.
We can’t change the past, we can only learn from it and move on forward. But at the same time we are a result of our past, we carry the blueprint of all that we’ve experienced.
SOLUCIONES: What dance means to you?
Lopez Ochoa: Dance for me is the language that is closest to me. I speak five languages (French, Dutch, English, Spanish, German) and I find myself in situations that none of these languages perfectly expresses my state of mind. With dance I always seem to get to the point.
Dance is a visual art form and can be very pleasant and soothing to watch but at the same time the physical aspect of it can conveys a deeper emotion to the public.
SOLUCIONES: What are your plan for the future?
Lopez Ochoa: My future plans after Washington are new creations for the following companies, Whim Whim Seattle, Ballet de Republica Dominicana, Istanbul Modern Dance Company, a new solo for ABT soloist Daniil Simkin, Atlanta Ballet and Augsburg Ballet and a revival of my piece “Requiem for a Rose” for Austin Ballet.
March 25, 2012
November 23, 2011
October 11, 2011
September 06, 2011
July 27, 2011
Review of CASTRATI
Two Ochoa world premieres highlight BalletX program
Castrati, photo credits: Alexander Iziliaev
Two impressive world premieres by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa set BalletX's summer season ablaze at the Wilma Theater on Wednesday eveninng.
Ochoa has choreographed for the company before, and Laura Feig and Adam Hundt danced her Bare with charming tenderness. In ordinary underwear, they languidly spill over each other, entwining and uncoupling as if drowsy with morning love.
Duets perpetually serve as studies of coupledom, and Amy Seiwert's It's Not a Cry explores the couple over the long haul. To Jeff Buckley's cover of Leonard Cohen's hallowed anthem to love gone bitter, "Hallelujah," Chloe Horne and Barry Kerollis appear in separate spotlights. If Kerollis pulls Horne along in a slide, she convulses in mid-glide and twists off in the other direction. It seems they'll never make it work. Yet by the final iteration of "Hallelujah," the two are coiled together, bathed in a single pool of light.
En Dedans, a short film by Gabrielle Lamb, served as an entr'acte. Voice-overs reveal the individual thoughts of the company's dancers in rehearsal, making apparent the hardships, pain, and doubt artists endure to bring us the pleasure of their company.
But it was Ochoa's morbidly sad, yet freakishly beautiful Castrati that ended the program with an unexpected concept - a study of the "last seven castrati" who endured being maimed for life in order to acquire voices that could range over three octaves.
Castrati, photo credits: Alexander Iziliaev
Along with Colby Damon, Jesse Sani, and Hundt, Ochoa smartly used four female dancers whose long, smooth limbs resemble those developed by boys after prepubescent castration.
Aviad Arik Herman's golden masks and marquisette and faux brocade costumes recalled the foppery and excess of the era. Music by Friedrich Handel and David van Bouwel wrapped this gorgeous lot in the high-pitched voice that sounds as dismembered as the body. Various tics and exaggeratedly grotesque gestures expressed how damaged these performers were. Damon's overly courteous bows drew laughter. Hundt, extracting his voice from his yawning mouth as if it were a long silken scarf, drew pity. Tara Keating, lying leopard-like off to the side, surveyed the audience as if all this were our fault.
Castrati, photo credits: Alexander Iziliaev
