PeruzeIt

Critic Lightsey Darst offers an incisive review of the premiere performance of "DEBUT" by a promising new chamber ballet company which makes its home in "the twin city less frothing with dance." Since the Chamber Ballet is directed by a choreographer and featured nothing but that choreographer's work in its debut, the quality of director Phillip Carman's dance thinking looks to be crucial to the ballet's success. It's a weight that Carman, recently of Maryland Ballet and Miami City Ballet, can carry, particularly if he sticks to the classical work that calls out his own best ideas and suits his new home city so well. Carman's also studied up on ballet history: his Nightmusic aspires to Petipa's trick of creating character in the motifs of even the briefest dances, while his L'apres-midi d'un Faune (The Afternoon of a Faun) copies the near-Egyptian gestures from photographs of Nijinsky's original Faun. I wasn't in love with the costumes - garish here, too flouncy there - but the uncredited lighting design powerfully assisted Carman, with a fantastic thorn tree looming over his "Faune" and a billow of cobalt blue smoke against a scarlet backlight beginning his modern ballet In the Moment.

Read the full story at MinnPost.com

Posted Under: Ballet