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Lauren Kettner, Lucie Baker, and Mirna Victoria Gutiernez rehearsing Penny Hutchinson's "Images," part of ARC Dance's "Summer Dance at the Center."
Not that plenty of gray hairs won't like ARC's "Summer Dance at the Center" (8 p.m tonight and tomorrow at the Leo K. at Seattle Rep; tix $15-$25) fine, but let's face it: Ballet as an art form is a consumable cultural commodity. Like Shakespeare, it's something a number of people go see because they want to be cultured, and just as theatres do Shakespeare constantly to meet that demand, ballets cater to an older moneyed crowd (as well as princess-loving little girls) by trotting out the pretty Balanchine pieces with their tiaras and tutus on a regular enough basis to ensure that they don't scare off subscribers.
Now, that's not to say that we don't like PNB or Balanchine or anything like that, but it is hella refreshing to see a night of ballet that couldn't seem like it cared less about meeting those sort of expectations. In "Summer Dance at the Center," ARC Dance blasts through five dramatically different but equally creative pieces in a show that feels like it's racing by at just under two hours (including intermission).
From the pared down elegance of Betsy Cooper's "The Space Between" to the formalism and tableaux of Penny Hutchinson's "Images," ARC's artistic director Marie Chong puts her company through the works. Chong founded the company in 1999 to fill a gap in the local arts community by creating opportunities for contemporary ballet, dance that mixes the athleticism of formal training with a contemporary, even experimental approach to choreography.
What stands out first and foremost is the physicality of the performance: there's clapping and stomping onstage, which shatters the veneer of effortless grace that classical ballet seems almost desperate to preserve. And it's fast-paced: the final movement of Kirk Midtskog's "Wood, Metal, and Air" has the dancers running back and forth so much that you can hear them quietly panting when they take their bow.
Although we got the chance to see the program in rehearsal last week at ARC's North Ballard studio, it wasn't until we were sitting in the Leo K. that we started to notice break-out performances. Lucie Baker dominates the show, not only for her heart-wrenching solo dance in "Torches", which ends with her cradling a microphone stand on the stage floor like a lost lover, but for her smoldering, erotic duet with the equally impressive Aaron Loux in Marie Chong's "No Regrets."
That said, the entire company is quite talented, and Chong and the choreographers clearly know how to play to the dancers' strengths. We really can't recommend this highly enough, particularly for the sort of people who might be interested in ballet but are scarred by bad childhood experiences. ARC's pacing and the variety of the show ensures no one--not even the luckless dance hater who gets dragged there by a date--is going to be dozing off or bored.
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