For their week-long season at The Joyce Theater (March 29 - April 3), Angel Corella, the newly named artistic director of Pennsylvania Ballet and past principal with American Ballet Theatre (ABT), on his first time back to New York since leaving ABT, delivered! The Company was vibrant and solid in all three New York premieres. The more classical work of the evening, Matthew Neenan’s Keep, offered up counterpoint duets in differently configured exchanges, where the women, sometimes as marionettes, were breathlessly manipulated by the men on and off stage from beginning to end. Leave the cliché closing (limp woman spinning round and round on bar stool) behind in the duet dance by Lillian DiPiazza and Arian Molina Soca, and instead remember her long yellow dress spiraling with her every turn, capturing the feel of the work. Trey McIntyre’s more contemporary The Accidental was filled with even more pairings, including a lovely duet danced by Oksana Maslove and James Ihde. Craig Wasserman finishes in a Vaslav Nijinsky-esq solo, his body coyishly hanging; a nod to L‘apres-midi d‘un faune (The Afternoon of a Faun)? Nicolo Fonte’s Grace Action, charged by large groups on stage at the same, is propelled by action after action when spot lights follow bare legs, and scantily clad bodies in asymmetrical costumes waxing of angles, shapes, daring balances, drama and keen interplay with the music.
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