Houston Ballet’s latest mixed-rep opened Thursday night with a world premiere by Stanton Welch. His Stereo is King proved to be an exciting, against-type foray into electronic music. Mason Bates’ percussion driven score made for a lively playground for Welch’s warm-bodied, fluid style.
My favorite of Welch’s gifts as a choreographer has always been the intricacy of his ensemble work. Here his company is well-displayed with an emphasis on musicality and detailed gestures and micro-movements. Bates’ music is filled with texture, and Welch fills in every flourish with clear, crisp steps and interesting undulating shapes that create a contemporary flair. One might think of his work as the human body as filigree.
In my imagination, Welch’s best work is identified by grandeur of design and scope. In this sense, the minimal, yet, amusingly color-blocked Stereo is King reads as a minor work, but with all his best signatures, including his eye for composition. A memorable moment is when two gorgeous, supple duets are juxtaposed against one another, and the ensemble behind them. The effect is a lattice work of bodies electrified with the joy of being alive.
The program also includes a reprise of Jiri Kylian’s momentous Petite Mort. Not much more can be said about Kylian’s investigation of male and female sexuality, and the many, often combative, ways the sexes interact with one another, other than that it still packs a punch, even 35 years after its world premiere. Houston Ballet’s dancers make Kylian’s superhuman partnering look effortless. They make the interplay between male and female bodies smolder, creating dynamics of sensuality and corporeal confluence that other companies can only imitate. The company turns iconography into human experience.
But I would wager that the vast majority of the audience at the Brown Theater came for Broken Wings, the company’s premier of acclaimed choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s one-act meditation on the life and work of Frida Kahlo. It was my first time watching Ochoa’s 2016 creation, and I was mesmerized not by her reenactment of moments from Kahlo’s biography, but by her celebration of color, life, beauty, nature, and femininity, the very fibers of Frida’s essence.
Karina González is smashing as Frida, and succeeds in capturing the artist’s precociousness and imp-like charm. The scene with her first love, the young intellectual Alejando, danced by Rench Soriano, is buoyant and filled with the air of possibilities. I was moved by this scene, as Frida and Alejandro came of age when Mexico was at the beginning of its new, Modern identity. The youngsters knew they were living history, and their dancing, to me, unveiled their eagerness to be a part of their beloved nation’s progress.
Frida’s life was not to be as carefree as her spirit. A bus accident at eighteen left her a prisoner of her own body for the rest of her life. In the world that Ochoa creates, an ensemble of omnipresent skeletons illustrate the banality of death in Frida’s life. They are always near, as Frida was in a constant state of recovery from the surgeries meant to put her spine and pelvis back in order.
New energy enters Frida’s life in the form of the larger-than-life Diego Rivera. Connor Walsh is excellent in conveying the plodding, lumbering giant that was Diego. His performance, laden with a fat suit, might have been comedic in a less discerning performer’s hands, but Walsh never plays for laughs. Rather, he shows the man’s gravitas, Walsh’s weighted movements underscoring both the man’s artistic and political importance.
González is a mesmerizing actress, and is utterly convincing in portraying Frida’s trademark passion and zest for life. Here, the stage is flooded with color and the imagery of her work. A scene change consisting of leaf motifs was especially enchanting. Leaf Ladies populate Frida’s world with some of the most gorgeous movement sequences I have seen recently, and a mysterious Deer, danced by Jacquelyn Long, flirts in and around the composition. I imagine this denizen is a reference to Frida’s The Wounded Deer (1946), an anthropomorphic self-portrait which expresses the perpetual physical pain of her existence.
Even more striking is the bevy of Male Fridas that dash the space with vibrant color and the movement of their enormous skirts. Their size emphasises the birdlike smallness of Frida, but the elegant lifts their size discrepancy is able to accomplish also magnifies her resilient spirit. While their skirts are on my mind, I should say that the costumes are an art piece unto themselves. Ravishing, but also smart, especially Frida’s bodice, a visual reference to one of her most famous self-portraits, The Broken Column (1944).
Leaving the theater, Ochoa’s ballet left me thinking not so much about Frida the artist, but Frida the woman. Her self-portraits speak to her commitment to not only live life, but imbue it with all the beauty she had the power to create.
In a world of darkness, fill it with color.