¿ Que pasa?

I was in Mexico recently with my mom and stepdad and happened to see what appeared to be the Spanish (as in, it comes from Spain) equivalent of Dancing With The Stars, titled ¡Mira Quién Baila!. Beware the website; it plays noisy music: http://www.rtve.es/tve/b/miraquienbaila/ It was hard to tell what the rules were or how people were judged since the hostess talked at approximately 1000 words per minute. We saw a few couples where it was clear that only one of them was being judged and another, elderly couple who performed the great feat of being off the music in their Viennese Waltz withing two measures of music. At that point I believe we gave up on the show.

Houston Ballet, June 2, 2006, Wortham Center's Brown Theater

This mixed-rep program consisted of two works by HB Artistic Director Stanton Welch and one by Sir Kenneth MacMillan. For me, the juxtaposition solidified my belief that Mr. Welch is a good, but not great, choreographer. First, though, let me say what a pleasure it was to see the Houston Ballet dancers again. After seeing Atlanta Ballet's charming but shaky performance in May, the Houston Ballet dancers could have done just about anything and I would have been happy to just sit there and watch them move.

The program was titled "Moby in Motion" and started out with Mr. Welch's Play (2004), set to music from Moby's album of the same name. Interestingly, while Mr. Welch did not use all of the tracks from the album, those he did use stayed in the same order as they appear on the album. The "set" was the stage with legs and the back curtain removed, highlighted by a TV set sitting upstage center. As I was in the Grand Tier, I couldn't see the TV very well and never figured out how it fit into the piece. The dancers wore casual street clothes and (supposedly) captured the rhythm of today's urban lifestyle. It appeared that all of the HB dancers were in this piece, often waiting on the sides. There was a lot of jerky motion and strained relationships. The strongest section was for the men and set to "Run On." There was a section for the women, too, but I didn't realize it was only women until the very end of that section, maybe because the action on the sidelines was too intrusive.

The second piece was Velocity (2003), also by Mr. Welch. Dancing to orchestral music by Michael Torke, the women wore white tutus and the men wore black unitards. There was some virtuosic dancing in this piece, but the audience was oddly silent in moments that would normally evoke ovations. The lighting included stark contrasts between black and white and sometimes included a triangle of white light on the floor. The movement was not bad, but it struck me as uniformly staccato throughout the piece. That's OK for 10 minutes, but gets old after 20.

The last piece on the program was Sir Kenneth MacMillan's Gloria, a powerful rendition of the effects of warfare on the soul. The set, designed along with the costumes by Andy Klunder, was a "hill" about 8 feet high that ran across the back of the stage and was divided by periodic metal poles, sort of an expanded jungle gym. The dance began with several dancers walking up from the gloom behind the hill and down onto the stage. Combined with the unitard costumes and WWI helmets, the effect was rather like a 1950's film about aliens. Fortunately, the similarities ended there. Brigett Zehr, Carl Coomer, and Zdenek Konvalina gave moving performances while also showing off the beautiful shapes in the choreography.