Art Feature

Big Apple crowd gives its approval to Kansas City Ballet’s 50th anniversary show
by Karen McDonough

New York audiences got to see the Kansas City Ballet at its finest last week performing at the famed Joyce Theater.

The company came to town with a three-ballet program; two new works, one by artistic director William Whitener and a commissioned piece by famed choreographer Donald McKayle, along with a Twyla Tharp modern classic that hasn’t been seen in years. The Big Apple performances (March 11–16) followed the debut at Kansas City’s Lyric Theater in celebration of the company’s 50th anniversary season.

Kansas City Ballet dancer Logan Pachciarz (photo by Kenny Johnson)

And judging by the audiences’ enthusiasm during Friday night’s performance, the anticipated Tharp piece proved quite satisfying.

The opening ballet, “First Position (A Reminiscence),” was created by Whitener and set to the music of Glazunov for its rich texture and beautiful melody line. In it, he tries to capture “the awe and wonder that occurs when a young person first enters the world of ballet,” he said in a previous interview.

Matthew Powell is the young male dancer who moves silently in and around the dancers performing classical ballet. The costume design by Lisa Choules and the lighting (by Kirk Bookman on all three ballets) are kept simple to focus on the dreamy, elegant quality of the choreography. The piece was dedicated to KC Ballet founder Tatiana Dokoudovska and Todd Bolender, the company’s previous director.

Twyla Tharp’s “Brahms Paganini” hadn’t been performed much since its debut 1980. The modern dance starts with an astonishing 12-minute solo for a male dancer that Whitener originally performed while in Tharp’s company for more than a decade. Logan Pachciarz gave a memorable performance, the result of learning Book 1 directly from Whitener. In rehearsal, he tapped Shelley Freydont, who also danced in the original troupe performance, to teach the second part, Book 2, a fiercely fast and swinging couples dance for four (performed by Deanna Hodges and Paris Wilcox, and Caitlin Cooney and Lateef Williams.) and a female dancer (performed by Stayce Camparo) who moves about them with a dream-like quality.

The company has performed several of Tharp’s works in the last few years and they have “a strong comprehension” of how to approach the modern dances, Whitener said. And the audience, who applauded the loudest for this ballet, certainly seemed to agree.

Rounding out the evening was “Hey-Hay, Going to Kansas City,” created by the legendary choreographer Donald McKayle. Inspired by the city’s deep jazz roots and vintage recordings by Mary Lou Williams, Charlie Parker, Count Basie and others, McKayle crafted a smartly engaging era-specific showpiece for the company’s 22 dancers. Recreating the smooth glitz of the 1930s with costumes by Melanie Watnick, the suite of dances captured different segments of the decade. Particularly fun to watch was Nadia Iozzo, Christopher Barksdale and Matthew Pawlicki-Sinclair in the playful King Alcohol set to Buster Smith.

McKayle listened to more than 200 recordings housed in the Marr Sound Archives at the University of Missouri at Kansas City before settling on the score for his 20-minute piece.

Karen McDonough is a Texas-based freelance arts writer.