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Artistic Director Christopher Stowell's curtain-raising "Zais," to music from Jean Philippe Rameau's opera (with additions from his "Nais"), set the sophisticated tone with its precisely ordered corps de ballet and geometric floor patterns, evoking both the gardens of Versailles and the aristocratic origins of the ballet. Like the rest of the program -- Jerome Robbins' "Afternoon of a Faun," Stowell's "Pas de Deux Parisien," and Nicolo Fonte's "Bolero " -- "Zais," with its three duets, demands detailed performances from the dancers, and they delivered them. As two young dancers, working alone in a ballet studio (the audience forms the fourth wall of mirrors), Artur Sultanov and Gavin Larsen's eloquently nuanced performance was for me the evening's high point. Also about the dancers, and a specific dancer at that, Stowell's "Pas de Deux Parisien," a homage to Romantic style performed by Iino and Ronnie Underwood, is the amuse bouche of the evening.

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Posted Under: Ballet