Founded in 2004 by choreographer Miro Magloire, New Chamber Ballet is an organization dedicated to the creation of new ballets performed to chamber music. Joined by violinist Madeline Hocking and pianist Melody Fader on Valentine’s Day weekend, the all-female company of dancers presented a delightful and at times frankly stunning merging of music and Magloire’s choreography. Performed in the round at Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn, the setup invited the audience into a uniquely intimate experience.
The program began with The Distance Between Bones, a short pas de deux featuring dancers Kayla Schmitt and Amber Neff. Composer Ya-Lan Chan wrote in her program notes that “the distance between bones is constantly changing, stretching, contracting, creating tension,” and Magloire’s choreography proved to be a searingly exquisite representation of the work’s title, pairing these two dancers in such a way that their limbs combined and aligned at myriad angles throughout the ballet.
The music began slow and restless, with glissandi sul pont double stops in the violin and pointillistic gestures in the piano. Schmitt entered the stage, walking with somber reverence in a straight line and holding Neff, who was wrapped around her torso like armor, a breastplate made from an extra chest. Upon reaching the middle of the stage, the two dancers began to crawl along each other’s bodies, holding hands and bending and melding together such that the two were a symmetry of limbs in a perpetual state of untangle. The utter strength, teamwork, and grace on display in these demanding steps proved a visually stunning feat. Miro’s choreographic aesthetic showcases leverage as an artistic medium, and the dancers took turns carrying, climbing, holding each other, their bodies balancing together in impossible ways, their combined bodies a different sculpture in each moment.
With music by Elizabeth Gartman, Vox was made of five dancers – Anabel Alpert, Megan Foley, Nicole McGinnis, Amber Neff, and Rachele Perla – in a multi-layered series of workshopping techniques that included the dancers improvising movements based on the sounds of their own names, on the idea of their own voice.
The mauve costumes by Sarah Thea were reminiscent of Greek togas with their single shoulder and trailing skirt. Magloire’s kinesthetic structures expanded in this work, with dancers most often grouped in a set of two and a set of three, holding hands and weaving bodies and limbs so as to become a collective, new shape altogether. The bulk of the work involved each dancer in her own solo (gleaned from the early workshopping process) as the other four remained low on the floor, moving in a constantly undulating, subtle, and insect-like manner, often reacting in some way to the solo like a Greek chorus displaying a symbiotic relationship with its host.
The music for each solo saw Gartman exploring different sound spaces, often utilizing discrete, sparse lines. One section featured Hocking in an extended violin solo, a fresh spring eruption of double stops and arpeggios performed with lyrical energy. Another saw the piano and violin trading pizzicatos and inside-the-piano plucking. Fader’s deft performance gave resonance to the work even in its smallest moments. At times the music and choreography were overtly matched, with grand, dramatic movements from the dancers arriving with the piano’s sforzando clusterchord, or a high scratchy tremolo in the violin accompanied by all five dancers circling the floor in different directions like excited molecules. Towards the end, the dancers took turns speaking soft lines about their own process of communicating through body and voice alike.
Miro’s choreography is extraordinarily athletic; rarely does a movement come back in much the same way, the majority of these steps demanding and producing elegant feats of strength. This company of dancers is a remarkably capable group, and the pairing of chamber music with this type of dance experience results in yet another layer of disparate parts well-balanced. With the two scores showcasing a wide range of minimalist sonic landscapes, the overall contemplative, earnest energy, and the eye-popping grace of these dancers, New Chamber Ballet invites audiences to relish a bounty of tensile beauty that the intimate-upcloseness of a small format allows.
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