Smuin Ballet

(Joyce Theater, 18 August 2012)

The dancers' movements lack inevitability. They convey the ambition to succeed at ballet, instead of conveying ideas that admit no means of expression other than ballet. The movements lack amplification through resonance with music, and through weight and momentum transfers between dancers. Thus emerges not a conversation but a show, deliberately choreographed, competently danced, but neither superhuman, as elite classical ballet can be, nor super human, as a ballet by a smaller company has no choice but to be.

The dancers are more comfortable using the classical ballet vocabulary in the "Medea" (an illustration for a borrowed story) than jogging through the "Oh, Inverted World," which, even though premiered in 2010, comes across as conceived in 1980s, not least because of the puerile costumes. In these two ballets, the intensity of the dancers' sexuality is curtailed by their haphazardly revealing costumes, which obfuscate the intention of the movement, instead of accentuating that intention.

The third, redeeming, romantic, piece "Soon These Two Worlds" suits the company's character, which seeks to gratify and cheer.