ARSHT CENTER | BALLET
Exploring love's dark side
Posted on Sat, Mar. 29, 2008

BY JORDAN LEVIN
jlevin@MiamiHerald.com

Love is dark and overwhelming in Twyla Tharp's Nightspot, less emotional force than sheer force of nature. And while there's definitely some nightclub moments in the famed choreographer's new ballet, which Miami City Ballet premiered Friday night at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, it's as much about the dark place inside as any place to hit the dance floor and the opposite sex.
Like Elvis Costello's richly atmospheric score, Nightspot swells and swirls with emotion, taking audience and dancers along for a heart-snapping ride.
Tharp said that Nightspot contained her imaginary vision of Miami, and she's captured some of this city's feverish velocity and sense of anything-can-happen wildness, with blessedly few Latin clichés. And this being Tharp, the choreography is inseparable from the dancers, magnifying their personalities and their gifts. When the magnificent Cuban dancer Isanusi Garcia-Rodriguez throws down like a body-snaking, hip-hop battling, machete wielding Santeria street god, or Jennifer Kronenberg twists round Carlos Miguel Guerra like an endlessly seductive serpent, it's a moment you can only imagine in Miami and from these dancers.
There's a Broadway musical feeling to the dramatic opening, a Latin dancing crowd with three couples standing out: yearning and conflicted Guerra and Callie Manning; malevolently, carelessly seductive Garcia-Rodriguez and Kronenberg; and optimistic, impulsive Katia Carranza and Jeremy Cox. Guerra and Manning quarrel, which sends Guerra off after other women, Carranza and Cox try to bring them back together, there's lots of flirting and hand slapping. Isaac Mizrahi's crimson and purple costumes -- their color intensified by John Hall's lighting -- layer hip street and clubwear with dancer gear: Spanish lace and crinoline skirts, sexy bustiers and shrugs, hoodies and T-shirts.
Although the nine-piece band stretches across the back of the stage, you can barely see it, and it plays no more part in the onstage action than the 35-piece orchestra in the pit. Costello's splendid score has its own sense of motion, the music moving between band and orchestra, rich with color and melody and a powerful, continuous pulse. There are snatches of salsa and tango, themes for the lead couples, an impressively orchestrated musical drama of its own.
But Tharp doesn't so much tell a story as let these couples' personalities and emotions take them for a ride. As Manning and Guerra keep quarreling, Guerra is seduced by the sinuous Kronenberg, who's carried by a group of men above a rippling train of red fabric, diving and floating above it like a fish over a river of blood, wrapping round Guerra until Garcia-Rodriguez, her manipulative pimp/jealous lover, battles him down -- with Kronenberg kicking him to make sure he stays there. (The women are as fiercely aggressive as the men here -- Manning slaps and punches Guerra in a kind of mutual Apache dance).
The dancers have an edge and energy they've never had before -- Cox almost turns over in sky-high kicks, a bolt of energy. If Manning hauls Guerra back to his feet and into her arms, and everyone reconciles on the dancefloor at the end, you can still feel chaos round the corner, because Garcia-Rodriguez is whipping up madness with his flipping arms, like he can't wait for whatever craziness might happen next.

Miami New Times
Tharp and Costello's NIGHTSPOT: Shocked and Awed
Sat Mar 29, 2008 at 08:30:59 AM
It seems fitting that Miami would be the city to host the world premiere of Twyla Tharp's NIGHTSPOT, an energetic work that fit together in a discordant yet stunningly compelling way.

Splashes of classical ballet, Broadway, Cirque du Soleil, fight clubs and Latin dance percolated constant curiosity throughout this highly anticipated work.

Tharp, and musical innovator, Elvis Costello, collaborated on the piece that was Miami City Ballet's first major commission. Costello's original music, played by a nine piece onstage band along with the orchestra underlined and bolded Tharp's varied choreography, as did costumes in shades of red and fuchsia designed by Isaac Mizrahi.

Grand jetés and pirouettes gracefully transitioned into jazz and salsa steps. Tharp toyed with traditional ballet gender roles in the work as a lusty, principal female became the aggressor and the male dancer was the broken, frail one. The first male principal solo was filled with karate-like kicks that transitioned into ballet leaps, making for a spectacularly bad-ass ballet.

There were only brief moments when the work felt forced. A movement highlighting a swath of long red silk felt like an imitation of an artful circus and, at times, the multiple partner dances seemed too West Side Story. Overall, NIGHTSPOT felt refreshing, cacophonous and cohesive --very much like an evening in the Magic City.

--Janine Zeitlin

Sun Sentinel

Flirtatious pairs work well in Tharp show

By Guillermo Perez | Special Correspondent
April 1, 2008

Think what you will about Twyla Tharp's NIGHTSPOT — and in this bustling Miami City Ballet premiere, there's enough to find favor or fault with — but who can deny how wonderfully it shows off the dancers? The Arsht Center on Friday may not have shaken with a swell of groundbreaking movement, though Elvis Costello's music certainly brought thunder, yet each performer among three lead couples created an indelible profile.

By the light and dark of the moon came two pairs of lovers, one dysfunctional (Callie Manning and Carlos Guerra), the other congenial (Katia Carranza and Jeremy Cox). A third couple (Jennifer Kronenberg and Isanusi García-Rodríguez) brought a touch of naughtiness to the night. She, with wide-mesh legwear and an off-the-shoulder top, was no stranger to seduction and somewhat of a holy menace. He was a minister of mischief, jumping over the hot coals of desire and, with his top hat and tails, seemed a brother to Baron Samedi, that reveling voo doo rascal.

Welcome to Miami, where the everyday and fantasy bump together in frolic.

Manning, lanky and pale against her red skirt, bared thorns in her clash with Guerra, who put a handsome face on cravings that pushed him toward escapades. Effective if not particularly flattering, Guerra's red tights and T-shirt with a gold emblem across the chest (courtesy of costume designer Isaac Mizrahi) made him a sort of lost superhero.

Flirtations and commotion lay ahead, and as rumbas turned to rumble, firecrackers Kronenberg and García-Rodríguez lit up the fray. He strutted about with Afro-Cuban streaks, here pimping, there punching.

Then, twining sirenlike upon Guerra, Kronenberg drew him into treacherous waters, a red cloth undulating across stage not just for her to do the breast stroke. Hip-hip-hooray for the pelvic action, but all this left Guerra melted on the ground like a strawberry-popsicle puddle. It was a prelude, nonetheless, to make-up romance with Manning in a pretty nice adagio.

Not needing this extreme form of couples therapy, Cox and Carranza channeled their energies judiciously, with him shadow-kickboxing, leaping and turning, and her turning on the charm.

Despite all the superb working of joints, this night in spots seemed disjointed. A burst of movement might exhaust itself in dead air; a shift in tone could jolt rather than complement. Still, pairs work as well as hovering ensembles (another six couples joined in, including Jeanette Delgado with Daniel Baker, and Zoe Zien with Alexandre Dufaur in pumped-up duets) allowed us to relish Tharp trademarks of unexpected propulsions and sly resolutions in a sampling of pop and pure classicism.

Piano and percussion bridged the upstage band and an orchestra in the pit. The beat could scamper down to the tropics, but strings and reeds also declared their presence in suspenseful crescendos or in sweeter, almost sentimental measures.

Tango and circus music also bubbled up. The latter's pixie spirit befitted the Fellini-esque episode of a Kronenberg-García cabaret act, artifice forever fueling the arteries of the night.

Guillermo Perez is a Miami-based freelancer and writer for Dance magazine.