Ryan and Debi Cragun’s Blog

Saturday we went to the final ballet of Cincinnati Ballet’s 2005-2006 season.  It was called the “Mother’s Day Festival” as it fell the week before mother’s day.  The ballet included three separate pieces.  The first, “Quattro a Verdi,” involved just four dancers from the company but was amazing.  They basically took the four most technically adept dancers and gave them dances that pushed them to the limits of their ability.  Happily, the four dancers - Kristi Capps, Mishic Marie Corn, Anthony Krutzkamp, and Dmitri Trubchanov - were up to the task.  It was a short piece, with variations for each dancer, but it was spell binding.  I don’t know that the rest of the audience appreciated it as much as Debi and I did as the piece didn’t include a lot of flashy movement but was technically about as challenging as ballet can be.  It is for pieces like this that Debi and I go to the ballet.

The second piece, Fingerprints, was a modern ballet with ethnic African themed movements (the music was kind of New Age African music).  Debi really liked it, claiming it was the best modern ballet piece she had ever seen.  I thought it was okay, but about twice as long as it needed to be.  The movement became repetitive about halfway through and started to lose my interest.  Another way the piece could have been improved would have been to make the outfits the dancers were wearing uniform for both the men and the women.  The men, there were 4 of them, came out wearing skirts with African designs on them.  They had no tops on - they were bare chested.  The women, also 4 of them, came out with the same skirts on, but, being in Cincinnati and all, they had on black sports bras.  In a traditional African dance, the women wouldn’t have had on tops and the modern looking black sports bras didn’t add to the performance but actually distracted from the ambience of the piece.  Debi, of course, didn’t agree that the women should have danced topless, but she had to admit that the black sports bras just didn’t go very well with the rest of the dance.  When asked what she would have replaced them with, her response was, “A bra that matched their skirts,” but she wouldn’t specify a color.  She insisted that topless would not have been better than the black sports bras… but I think deep down she knows it would be.

The final piece was called “Who Cares?” and was a Balanchine choreographed medley of pieces set to Gershwin’s movie scores.  This piece included most of the company, but featured Anthony Krutzkamp again (wow was he in a lot of pieces this time around).  There were a few variations in this piece that were pretty good, in particular a solo by one of the female dancers near the end (I’m not sure which one) that was lightening fast and really impressive.  But, for the most part, the choreography just wasn’t very exciting.  It wasn’t the worst ballet I’ve ever seen, but neither was it the best.

Anyway, we’re debating now whether we should get season tickets for next year or not given the fact that we only made it to two of the five performances we paid for this year.  We will, however, be going to at least one of the performances - Giselle - as that was the first piece Debi and I did together.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 10th, 2006 at 4:19 pm and is filed under reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.