Real ballerinas glide and twirl across stages in pink satin pointe shoes. James Sewell’s employees clunk around a black platform in ski boots.
Ballet is an art form. A classical dancer’s form flows through aesthetically glorious lines and silhouettes, connected by graceful motions to communicate love and fear, joy and sadness.
The James Sewell Ballet claims by its very name to share in this art form. It shares the same title as world-class companies such as the Royal Ballet in London and the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow, evoking the same level of artistic genius.
Ballet is a strong word, and Sewell’s company — which performed his contemporary dance creations last weekend — doesn’t deserve it.
King Louis XIV of France invented classical ballet in the 17th century. Refined and perfected over 100 years, ballet hit its golden age when French choreographer Marius Petipa — the father of classical ballet — paired with composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in St. Petersburg to create the greatest classical balletic masterworks of all time.
Done well, the great classical ballets are feats of beauty, strength, and drama that utterly edify the beholder. When in “Swan Lake” a bewitched Prince Siegfried falls for the seductive Princess Odile, who can help but feel devastated at the triumph of evil? And when the two lovers Basilio and Kitri dance their wedding pas de deux in the third act of Petipa’s “Don Quixote,” who can resist partaking in the joy?
Ballet doesn’t just celebrate the beauty of the human form, but also its strength. In Petipa’s choreography, the ballerinas dancing the roles both of Odile and Kitri must perform a series of 32 turns on one toe — one of the most difficult feats of choreography a ballerina must master.
British choreographer Kenneth MacMillan’s choreography for the ballet “Romeo and Juliet” is a challenge of both strength and endurance, incorporating intense battle sequences with classical ballet choreography in one of the longest classical ballets.
As an art form, classical ballet is vastly underappreciated and underperformed in today’s culture. When Sewell’s advertisements promised ballet, I anticipated greatness a la Bolshoi.
But the company performed almost exclusively contemporary dance — original pieces choreographed by Sewell which were devoid of any semblance of beauty.
While the performance was a helpful exhibition of the contemporary dance style, it was not in accordance with the company name.
Instead of the beautiful lines and graceful silhouettes of classical ballet, Sewell’s works featured series of gymnastic movements fused with mime and set to angsty piano music.
Such is the genre of contemporary dance.
Sewell takes pride in creating “relevant, modern-day ballets.” The company’s website boasts that Sewell’s groundbreaking works “explore contemporary issues like male and female psyches, immigration, and other difficult topics unusual in the world of ballet.”
Contemporary dance is a legitimate art form to understand, but it is not correct to refer to it as ballet. It’s experimental. It’s often not meant to be beautiful. Its purpose, like all forms of contemporary art, is expression at any cost.
Sewell’s company performed contemporary choreography — not ballet — on campus last Friday.
The choreography featured dancers disjointedly imitating the actions of children playing, and speed skaters zipping across ice. It may have been an attempt at art, but it distinctly lacked beauty.
At best, Sewell’s contemporary works are experiments in aerobic motion without plot. At worst, they are scenes of awkward shufflings around the stage that rely on zombie costumes for any meaning whatsoever.
Only one act of the performance lived up to the title that the James Sewell Ballet claims. To open the concert, dancers Laurie Nielsen and Jordan Lefton performed the pas de deux from “Le Corsaire” — a classical ballet masterwork based on its namesake poem by Lord Byron. Nielsen and Lefton performed Petipa’s original choreography.
Nielsen’s summers of training with the Bolshoi Ballet flickered through in her performance as Medora. While the execution was somewhat stiff, the act brought the glory of a professional classical ballet performance to Hillsdale’s stage for the first time in at least four years.
The pas de deux did its best to redeem the performance and the company’s name — and only just barely succeeded
Classical ballet is an art form, and deserves to be seen and appreciated. With its nearly-exclusive performance of contemporary dance, the James Sewell Ballet company is misleading viewers as to the identity of classical ballet.
The company should either live up to its name or change it.
