BWW Reviews: Les Ballets Jazz De Montreal Celebrates Brooklyn

Celebrate Brooklyn! Performing Arts Festival is happening all over Brooklyn right now, with live performances featuring artists from all over the world. For their dance portion last week, held at the Bandshell in Prospect Park, BRIC presented three works from Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal. Trudging through hot rain, unsuccessfully avoiding being splashed with gutter water by inconsiderate New York drivers, and running perpetually late on my way there, I was simply not looking forward to sitting outside to watch a two hour performance. Surely, I thought, since this performance is going up "rain or shine" there is some sort of shelter provided for performers and audience. Surely, Celebrate Brooklyn mocked, you're joking. I found my way to sopping wet preferred seating just in time for the first piece, Closer, a duet choreographed by Benjamin Millepied, formerly a principal dancer with New York City Ballet, founder of L.A. Dance Project, and the newest director of The Paris Opera Ballet.

If you ever have the chance to sit in the big dark outdoors, surrounded by whispering strangers under a curtain of soft, warm rain while Benjamin Millepied's dancers, cloaked in barely-there whites, perform a duet borne of true intimacy, I truly suggest you take advantage of the opportunity. I could never see this piece in a carpeted, air-conditioned environment again. The dance itself was a solid pas de deux, performed by two expert technicians. It was not so much a love story as a love song, complete with love tropes; it was the dance equivalent of, well, any pop song that reminds you, fondly, of your boyfriend. The pajama-wearing impassivity of the dancers provided an emotionAl Green screen for the audience's best, worst and truest loves. The performers, while obviously highly capable, lost their connection as soon as they, literally lost connection - that is, they are better suited for Kylian-level partnering than actual dancing. Luckily, Millepied is clever enough to keep the two yanking one another back and forth, shape shifting seamlessly, for the majority of the work.

The second piece, Night Box, choreographed by Wen Wei Wang, was a refreshing opposition to a love story. The darker, dangerous, deviant side of human contact was explored in his large scale group number. Dancers were pants-less, clad in mesh bodysuits, writhing in tight-knit dancer heaps, with the odd soloist, duet or trio breaking free from the group. Wang is a skilled creator of what I can only describe as "people -scapes," movement images that direct the audience's eye round the stage. Wang created smallish, unison movements, often evoking boxers, fighters, soldiers, or warriors, and they frequently served as a backdrop for the focal dancers, most notably, a trio that explored androgyny (and like the rest of the piece, sex). However, Night Box disappointingly and inexplicably ended with a boy-girl duet, the same couple from Millepied's work. This was not only odd in the same way as watching a period-piece movie and not being able to help yourself from thinking, "That's George Clooney, that's George Clooney, that's George Clooney" the entire time, but also made little sense in the context of the piece itself - why set up this entire landscape of sexual experimentation only to leave us with a pretty little heterosexual couple? It steps all over Wang's own point.

Lastly, we were treated with Harry, an epic dance work that blurs the lines of dance, theatre and performance art, as is the wont of choreographer Barak Marshall. I'd seen his work many times before, but never Harry in its entirety, and I was unabashedly anticipating great things. Let this be a lesson: always expect to be miserable, because sometimes sitting in the rain for two hours can be beautiful; never expect great things because that's how sadness happens. True to Marshall's form, the piece was colorful and bombastic in its structure, with highly musical and minutely detailed movement. I just don't think that Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal "gets" Barak Marshall. They are certainly well qualified to execute the movement with alacrity, but as far as projecting the story...owning the spirit...using their voices...their imaginations...? It simply didn't read. I wanted to care about poor Harry and his true love and the spiteful Gods and the staunch traditionalists in the village because I care about Barak Marshall, but goodness; if these dancers can't perform I'm certainly not going to. When the same dancer from the first two pieces was featured prominently in this one, with even less life than before, I was just tapped out. Something was clearly lost in translation in the setting of this work on this company, which made for an unfortunately un-special final piece for the evening.

Or maybe we were all just sick of the rain.

Photo Credit: Gregory Batardon