The opening program of Terminus Modern Ballet Theatre’s 2024 spring season delivered a promise of delights to come but ultimately felt more like a tantalizing foray into new territory than a fully-realized body of work. With the notable exception of Nadine Barton’s world premiere, Ode, Saturday’s one-hour program hinted at emotional and thematic depths but left them unexplored.
In the darkly atmospheric Ode, Barton created a mesmerizing maze of time and memory to showcase the artistry of three performers. The approximately 20-minute piece for Amalie Chase, Elizabeth Labovitz and Darvensky Louis was a gothically groovy highlight of the evening.
The curtain opened on a dark stage, sounds of heavy rainfall and distant thunder filling the theater, and magnified images of raindrops projected on panel screens lining the walls on both sides of the seating area. Labovitz appeared suddenly from the darkness, in a spotlight at the right front corner of the stage, her back to the audience and wearing a dark gray hooded cloak.
Labovitz slowly walked upstage toward a projection of shadowy foliage on the backdrop. Removing her cloak, she revealed her pointe shoes and a deconstructed full-length evening gown of ruched navy mesh that alternately concealed and revealed her pale arms, legs and shoulders as she moved. Slowly she lay down and rolled onto her back as the lighting shifted into the pre-dawn spectrum. The perspective on the backdrop shifted, too, showing the treetops as though from Labovitz’ point of view.
The sound of rain ended, replaced by a morning chorus of birdsong. As a piano melody from Dutch composer Joep Beving faded in, Labovitz began floor work that combined the strong abdominal focus of Graham technique with arachnid angularity in her shoulders, elbows and wrists. From supine to seated, into a side split, then a contraction that released into a backbend and up and over into a penché en arabesque (standing front split), she climbed from floor to standing like a spider.
Chase and Louis, in ballet slippers and deconstructed evening suits of charcoal silk-like material, joined Labovitz onstage, and the lighting dimmed to suggest a sparse interior. The rest of the opening movement comprised a duet for Louis and Labovitz and a solo by Chase, performed mostly simultaneously, both of which echoed and expanded upon the floor work and modern ballet vocabulary established in Labovitz’ initial sequence.
The use of spotlighting to demarcate areas of influence for Louis and Chase, representing the present and past, with Labovitz, as life mediating between them — Barton’s concept for the work — was an effective device. Unfortunately, the lighting did more to obscure than limn the dancers.
The second movement’s score began with a complex rhythm of pure percussion, the long intro to a swinging, jazzy selection from the Kronos Quartet. The lighting warmed; the three dancers reconfigured as a trio. A new energy transformed the initial echoing damp of a Frank Gehry-inspired version of the mansion in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House into a postmodern, vampire speakeasy.
The third movement of Ode belonged to Louis; the fourth to Chase. Both included tender duets of reconciliation between the soloist and Labovitz. As different as the two are technically, Louis and Chase share a quicksilver grace and magnetic intensity; Barton drew upon their respective strengths to juxtapose temporality through dance technique.
With Louis, she created an inventive, seamless fusion of neoclassical theatrical dance and the acrobatics and articulate isolations of break dancing. With Chase, Barton grafted onto the same neoclassical foundation a fluid modern vocabulary, grounded in breath and working with gravity and centrifugal force.
The nuanced setting in Ode contrasted starkly with Frank Chaves’ If Only, set in the pandemic lockdown’s disorienting limbo. Where Barton’s choreography liberated the performers, Chaves deliberately restrained Christian Clark and Georgia Dalton in a seven-minute duet in which they danced as partners without touching for much of the piece. Lacking support, most of their extensions, turns and leaps were truncated. It was like watching escape artists with one hand tied behind their back.
Unfulfilled potential was arguably the point in If Only, but the movement lacked the yearning implied by the title and described in the program. The dancers’ gazes rarely tracked the directional reach of their fingers or one another. Even in moments of the supported adagio in the middle and the kiss at the end, they projected resignation rather than desire. At one point, these strong partners also appeared to fumble the transfer of hand grips during a complex turn sequence.
After intermission, looking like totally different dancers, Dalton and Clark performed with the rest of the ensemble in the closing work, Tara Lee’s Under the Olive Tree. Originally choreographed for New Orleans Ballet Theatre in 2016, this expanded version had its Terminus premiere in Atlanta just before the pandemic shutdown in March of 2020.
Here, a standout cast of guest artists and protegés accompanied the Terminus company dancers. In particular, protegé Johanna Wu exhibited a beautiful line and sparkling stage presence, and guest artists Scott Wheet and Elias Re joined Clark and Alexandre Gonzaga with brilliant grand allegro in the dynamic battle-inspired section.
Under the Olive Tree opened and closed with a truly stunning image: The entire cast grouped together in the shape of a graceful tree. The audience gasped as the curtain came up.
In between, rather than concrete scenes drawn from any particular mythology or belief system, Under the Olive Tree gave the audience a fast-forward montage of the fall from grace, the rise of human civilization, the flood, death and rebirth. It left the audience with only flickering impressions of the source of life, paradise, a dusty savanna, a moonlit clearing, a deadly tempest and the depths of the underworld.
The work featured the beautiful, supported adagio sequences and neoclassical technique for which Lee is known, but at times it lacked the narrative and aesthetic cohesion of her more recent work.
The evening was shorter and less immersive than some may have liked, but it was a crowd-pleaser and brought the audience to its feet. It demonstrated that Terminus has a deep roster of technically accomplished and versatile dancers and that Ode is a solid addition to the repertoire, testament to the company’s practice of commissioning new work from nationally emerging choreographers.
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Robin Wharton studied dance at the School of American Ballet and the Pacific Northwest Ballet School. As an undergraduate at Tulane University in New Orleans, she was a member of the Newcomb Dance Company. In addition to a bachelor of arts in English from Tulane, Robin holds a law degree and a Ph.D. in English, both from the University of Georgia.
