art – RVArt Review

Richmond Ballet: Moving Art Two

A World Premiere, A Virginia Premiere, and A Revival

A Dance Review

Program By: The Richmond Ballet

At: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Leslie Cheek Theater, on the Armstrong Family Stage in Honor of Richmond, 200 N. Arthur Ashe Boulevard, RVA 23220

Performances: May 8-18, 2025

Ticket Prices: $25 – $85 ($85 – $125 on opening night)

Info: (804) 344-0906, etix.com, or richmondballet.com

THE PROGRAM

SLUMP

Choreography by Joshua L. Peugh

Music by Klezmer Juice, Yma Sumac, Ella Fitzgerald

Costumes Provided by Richmond Ballet

Lighting Design by Nathan W. Scheuer

World Premiere: June 21, 2012 by Bruce Wood Dance Project at Booker T. Washington’s <Montgomery Arts Theater, Dallas, TX; Richmond Ballet Premiere: May 8, 2025, Leslie Cheek Theater, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA

ECHOING PAST

Choreography by Stoner Winslett

Music by Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel

Costume Design by Susan Cologne

Lighting Design by Nathan W. Scheuer

Pianist: Joanne Kong

World Premiere: May 15, 1996 by Richmond Ballet at Leslie Cheek Theater, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA

FADING CREATURES

Choreography by Yury Yanowsky

Music by Senking and Henryk Gorecki

Costumes by Christi Owen after Original Costume Design by Emily Morgan

Lighting Design by Nathan W. Scheuer

Following their March 2025 return to the VMFA’s Leslie Cheek Theater after an absence of 30 years, Richmond Ballet’s Moving Art Two program offered an audience pleasing trio of works. In order, the audience enjoyed a quirky modern Richmond premiere, a revival of a more classically themed ballet by founding artistic director Stoner Winslett, and a world premiere of a work that began as an entry in the Richmond Ballet’s 2023 New Works Festival. Interestingly, and to my surprise, most of the people I chatted with after the show were most drawn to the more contemporary works.

The program opened with a colorful, upbeat work by Joshua L. Peugh, the New Mexico-based founder and artistic director of Dark Circles Contemporary Dance. Slump defies categorization with its musical environment ranging from Klezmer Juice (described online as Jewish Soul musicians) to Peruvian singer Yma Sumac to jazz icon Ella Fitzgerald. The women are dressed in 1950s-style party dresses with crinoline underskirts that give a sassy nod to tulle tutus while emphasizing the pointedly un-classical and often upside-down lifts with one leg hooked around the partner’s neck.

At one point the men perform a rubbery, jelly-legged movement that used to be known as “eccentric” dancing, and later they walk with what my grandmother would have called a “switch,” as if mocking their female partners. The partner dancing includes the kind of weight-bearing that remind me of when little girls dance with their feet planted atop their daddies’ feet like life-sized rag dolls. They slouch, they drop, they roll in joyous freedom. The women’s wide-legged stance, the men’s swirling hips, the flirtatious and irreverent partnering all seemed to be as much fun for the dancers as it was for the audience.

Stoner Winslett’s Echoing Past was in stark contrast to the shenanigans of Slump. Described as a ballet about one woman’s journey, looking back while moving forward, the work is set to music by Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel and played live by pianist Joanne Kong. Originally titled “Das Alte Jahr” (“The Old Year”), the ballet was choreographed in honor of Leslie Peck, a former member of the New York City Ballet, a recognized authority on Balanchine ballets, and a former ballet mistress with Richmond Ballet.

Eri Nishihara represents this woman, with Annika Kuo, Kaitlin Roemer, and Kennady Jackson dancing the roles of her past selves. Nishihara wears pink while the past selves are dressed in gray. Nishihara seamlessly trades places with her past selves, sometimes dancing back-to-back or mirroring the other women, as the peace evolves into a rich and satisfying conclusion. The ballet may be a metaphor for the company itself. Echoing Past was first performed at the VMFA in 1996, and Winslett formally stepped down as Artistic Director just under a year ago, in July 2024. So, the ballet somewhat mirrors Winslett’s own journey as artistic director, choreographer, and a woman in a position that is still dominated by men.

Yury Yanowsky, a former principal dancer with the Boston Ballet, first introduced Richmond audiences to his work Fading Creatures as a part of the Richmond Ballet’s New Works Festival in 2023. Inspired by Salvador Dali’s familiar melting clocks, the work begins with the feeling of a sci-fi ritual as the dancers lie on the floor with small lights hoovering over them. Once the lights have ascended and the dancers have risen from the floor, the dancers adopt an athletic style of movement – muscular, posed, poised, measured, abstract.

While inhabiting the lower level, the dancers flip, slide, reach, and lunge, but once the lights rise above them like a constellation, the dancers’ movements become bolder and more sinuous at the same time. Sometimes they appear to float or glide, only to suddenly run and freeze, or rewind and repeat, bending and stretching time, ending with a sudden stop!

What a satisfying conclusion to the company’s 2024-2025 season, the first under the artistic leadership of Ma Cong. Much like the woman in Echoing Past, perhaps intentionally so, this season has been marked by reflection and change and concluded on a rich and satisfying note.

The Richmond Ballet 2025-2026 season begins with Moving Art One, September 11-21 featuring Wild Seet Love by Trey McIntrye and a world premiere by Ma Cong.

Moving Art Two, October 16-26 is scheduled to present Slice to Sharp by Jorma Elo, a world premiere by Andrea Schermoly, and French Twist by Ma Cong. The Nutcracker will be performed at Dominion Energy Center December 6-23 and Giselle will be performed there February 13-15. The season will continue with Moving Art Three, the company’s New Works Festival with works by Natasha Adorlee, David Morse, Price Suddarth, and Serkan Usta from March 19-29, and conclude May 14-24 with Moving Art Four with George Balanchine’s Apollo, John Butler’s After Eden, and a world premiere by Val Caniparoli.

———-

Julinda D. Lewis is a dancer, teacher, and writer who was born in Brooklyn, NY and now lives in Eastern Henrico County. When not writing about theater and dance, she teaches dance history at VCU and low impact dance fitness classes to seasoned movers like herself and occasionally gets to perform.

“Slump” Virginia Premiere by Joshua L Peugh

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RICHMOND BALLET: MOVING ART ONE

Ballet Celebrates First Program on the New VMFA Stage

A Dance Review

Performance By: The Richmond Ballet

At: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Leslie Cheek Theater, Richmond Ballet Stage, 200 N. Arthur Ashe Boulevard, RVA 23220

Performance Dates: March 20-30, 2025

Ticket Prices: $25 – $85 ($85 – $125 on opening night)

Info: (804) 344-0906, etix.com, or richmondballet.com

THE PROGRAM

PENTAPTYCH

Choreography by Ma Cong

Music by Ryan Lott

Costume Design by Emma Kingsbury

Lighting Design by Les Dickert

Visual Artist: Eric Sall

World Premiere: September 14, 2018, Tulsa Ballet, Tulsa Ballet’s Studio K Theatre, Tulsa, OK. Richmond Ballet Premiere: March 20, 2025, Leslie Cheek Theater, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA

AFTER THE RAIN Pas de Deux

Choreography by Christopher Wheeldon, OBE

Music by Arvo Pärt

Staged by Jason Fowler and Craig Hall

Costume Design by Holly Hynes

Lighting Design by Les Dickert after Original Design by Mark Stanley

Pianist: Dr. Douglas-Jayd Burn

Violinist: Karen Johnson

World Premiere: January 22, 2005, New York City Ballet, New York State Theater, New York, NY. Richmond Ballet Premiere: March 20, 2025, Leslie Cheek Theater, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA

LAMBARENA

Choreography by Val Caniparoli

Music by Johann Sebastian Bach and traditional African (as arranged by Pierre Akendengué and Hughes de Courson)

African Dance Consultants: Dr. Zakarya Diouf, Naomi Johnson-Diouf, Ibrahima O. Diouf

Scenic and Costume Design by Lisa J. Pinkham, Recreated by Les Dickert

Staged by Maiqui Manosa

World Premiere: March 28, 1995, San Francisco Ballet, War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco, CA. Richmond Ballet Premiere: March 20, 2025, Leslie Cheek Theater, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA

—–

In celebration of the very first performance of the Richmond Ballet’s new Moving Art series – replacing the long-time, popular Studio Series – current Artistic Director Ma Cong, Founding Artistic Director Stoner Winslett, and VMFA Director and CEO Alex Nyerges shared the stage on Thursday evening, March 20, for an enthusiastic pre-show welcome. There was a full house for this gala event, and all performances of the March 20-30 program were already sold out.

Moving Art One marks the return of the Richmond Ballet to the VMFA after last performing there in the 1990s and the first major renovation of the Leslie Cheek Theater stage since it was built some 70 years ago. The renovations include widening the stage to better accommodate ballet, new lighting for the house and the stage, and upgraded A-V equipment. A press release indicates that the performers’ dressing rooms and restrooms and the green room have also been upgraded. The theater seats 472 audience members, and the seating has reportedly been refurbished but in my opinion the seats are still a bit too tight and would probably not be comfortable for all audience members, and the raking does not allow for an unobstructed view if you are vertically challenged, or if a tall person sits in front of you. But that’s just my two cents.

As with the Studio Series performances, the Moving Art series consists of a program of three works and features both classical and contemporary ballets produced in an intimate setting (as compared to, say, the 1,800-seat Carpenter Theatre where large works such as The Nutcracker Ballet or Cinderella are performed).

Moving Art One opened with the world premiere of Ma Cong’s Pentaptych (def., a work of art consisting of five panels or sections). There is a live artist onstage, Eric Sall, who interacts with the dancers and creates a large, colorful abstract painting. The bold brushstrokes are a stark contrast to the black, white, and gray costumes worn by the dancers – except for one dancer whose costume appears to be a part of or an inspiration for the painting. The ballet is of the contemporary genre, and the dancers’ monochrome costumes, paired with the abstract, ethereal, and sometimes athletic stretching motions and the original score by Ryan Lott, for a moment I had a flashback of sitting in Merce Cunningham’s Westbeth studio in Manhattan’s artists’ community, watching his company perform. (For those not familiar with Cunningham’s work – this is a positive comparison, and you should look him up!) The finished painting, by the way, is available for purchase via an online auction. The proceeds are to benefit the Richmond Ballet.

The classical portion of the program was provided by Eri Nishihara and Jack Miller, performing the pas de deux from Christopher Wheeldon’s After the Rain. Commissioned for a New York City Ballet program in honor of George Balanchine’s birthday, the ballet is in two parts. The first part is a dance for three couples, and the second part, the pas de deux, is often performed separately, as it was here on the new Richmond Ballet Stage. The dance is set to music by Arvo Pärt, played live by Dr. Douglas-Jayd Burn and Karen Johnson, and is notable for placing the ballerina in flat shoes instead of en pointe.

It is a stunningly beautiful and tender ballet in which the male dancer, Miller, sometimes lifts his partner is the most unexpected ways – for example, frozen into a position that I can only describe rather awkwardly as table-like. Another moment, Nishihara gently caresses her partner’s face while he stands strong and unmoving, or she perches delicately on his extended thigh. Burn’s piano and Johnson’s violin emit gentle, almost ambient sounds, like, yes, like raindrops. The piece ends with a silent embrace and the partners gently melt into one another.

Val Caniparoli’s Lambarena is much more difficult to write about, not because it was not beautifully performed, but because I am not sure what to think of it. Colorful, energetic, and fun, the work is performed to a rather unique blend of music by Johann Sebastian Bach and traditional African (what part of Africa?) music arranged by Pierre Akendengué and Hughes de Courson.

Performed by the full company, the work serves as a showcase for dancer Naomi Robinson who leads the women in leaping lightly like gazelles over the savanna. (This brought back another memory, that of seeing a herd of gazelles dashing through the grasslands of Kenya.) In a later section, they held their arms back and arched, reminding me of ostriches – and the beautiful solo Awassa Astrige created by Asadata Dafora (1932). The men, at times, reminded me of giraffes – also common to Kenya and other parts of East Africa. There was lots of light footwork and hip action unlike anything one usually sees in a traditional ballet. Sometimes I heard strains of a stringed instrument that reminded me of a berimbau – a one-stringed instrument I’m familiar with from Brazilian dance and capoeira (a Brazilian martial art/dance). I believe the berimbau originated in Angola, in southwestern Africa. The music also incorporated choral sections and clapping.

Overall, the work is sassy and joyous, and performed with extraordinary energy. My dilemma, perhaps, comes from recent discussions I have been having with my dance history students at VCU, where we have been mulling over the differences between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation. The program lists African Dance Consultants – Dr. Zakarya Diouf, Naomi Johnson-Diouf, and Ibrahima O. Diouf – and the company hosted a Community Dance Class with local dance organization Ezibu Muntu on March 16, shortly before the opening of the Moving Art One program.

Still, I felt a certain uneasiness as I watched – and enjoyed – Lambarena, and watched others enjoying it, too. I appreciated it, but there does seem to be more than a little cultural appropriation – context? accreditation? intent? Acknowledgement – beyond the generic designation of “African” – or at least an appearance thereof. I need to look more deeply into Caniparoli’s inspiration and motivation before making a final decision on this work.

In the meantime, while I’m rummaging around in the stack of dance history, if you can’t get to see Moving Art One, there will be a Moving Art Two, running from May 8 – 18. That program will include Joshua L. Peugh’s Slump, a ballet about modern courtship, Stoner Winslett’s Echoing Past (set to a score by Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel), and Yury Yanowsky’s newly completed Fading Creatures, a work-in-progress he introduced at Richmond Ballet’s 2023 New Works Festival. It draws inspiration from the melting clocks of Salvador Dalí’s popular painting The Persistence of Memory.

—–

Richmond Ballet dancers in Pentapych by Ma Cong. Photo by Sarah Ferguson.
Richmond Ballet dancers in Pentaptych by Ma Cong. Photo by Sarah Ferguson.
Eri Nishihara and Jack Miller in the pas de deux from After the Rain by Christopher Wheeldon. Photo by Sarah Ferguson.
Eri Nishihara and Jack Miller in the pas de deux from After the Rain by Christopher Wheeldon. Photo by Sarah Ferguson.
Naomi Robinson in Lambarena by Val Caniparoli. Photo by Sarah Ferguson.
Richmond Ballet dancers in Lambarena by Val Caniparoli. Photo by Sarah Ferguson.

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O’KEEFFE!

A One-Woman Show About Art, Life, and Love

Written and Performed By: Lucinda McDermott

At: Richmond Triangle Players at the Robert B. Moss Theatre, 1300 Altamont Avenue, RVA 23220

Performances: January 25 & 26, 2025

Ticket Prices: $45

Info: (804) 346-8113 or rtriangle.org

A Theater Reflection by Julinda D. Lewis

In this mesmerizing one-woman show about the American artist Georgie O’Keeffe, Lucinda McDermott, who both wrote and stars in the play, stated early on, “I will not be mediocre.” That simple statement was a battle cry that foreshadowed what we know of the life of the artist, O’Keeffe. It was a statement first of faith and in retrospect of fact, about the work of playwright and actor Lucinda McDermott.

More than a biography, better than a documentary, O’Keeffe briefly immerses the audience into the world that created Georgia O’Keeffe. On a simply dressed stage – just a small desk, a chair, a basket on our left, a coat rack on our right, and a gigantic framed blank canvas upstage center – McDermott reveals her subject with reverence, humor, and love. To borrow a line from the script, McDermott “fills the space in a beautiful way.”

I imagine those who came as fans of the artist left affirmed and those who came as blank slates left with the satisfaction of having filled a void they didn’t know they had. O’Keeffe explores the things that inspired O’Keeffe as well as the challenges faced by a woman artist existing in a man’s world, more specifically as a woman artist living in the shadow of a well known and successful man – a renowned photographer more than 20 years her senior who also managed her career. The play dares explore the question, did Alfred Stieglitz exploit, manipulate, or otherwise (re-)direct the course of O’Keeffe’s life?

There is no doubt a popular, powerful, older male mentor can open doors closed to other women. And although McDermott did not dwell on it, there was mention of how he would not allow her to have children, her lengthy, life-affirming retreat to New Mexico, and even allusions to her affair with a mutual friend, the Harlem Renaissance writer, Jean Toomer and his long-term affair with arts patron Dorothy Norman. Yet this is a love story, and their marriage lasted in some form for 30 years.

“It’s an unpleasant sensation, squeezing the life out of someone; you won’t like what’s left.”

McDermott’s storytelling skills are immersive all on their own, yet in and as O’Keeffe, she takes it to another level. At one point, as an example, McDermott asked the audience to close our eyes to listen to music (the sound design was the work of her own real-life husband, Jonathan Piro) and then she asked three people to describe what they had seen in their mind’s eye.

McDermott commands the stage for about two hours, not so much playing the role O’Keeffe, as embodying the spirit of the artist, with time for one intermission, and not one minute of her stage time is dull or wasted. O’Keeffe resurrects the artist and allows her – not McDermott, but O’Keeffe – to lead us on an amazing journey of discovery: it is art process; it is love story; it is the heart of an artist, taken out, bared, and entrusted to a group of people who may have entered as strangers but who left as co-conspirators, a group unified by a common experience who cradled it, acknowledged its strengths and admired its cracks, and returned it to its owner so it could be shared again and again…and again.

NOTE: To answer a question raised – by McDermott? by O’Keeffe? – why do critics get paid for their opinions and the rest of us don’t? It’s combat pay, needed to buy bandages for the wounds from the darts and daggers others tossed at those who dared to defy social conventions and express an opinion, whether popular or not. And I make a distinction, in these days of social media, between the professional reviewer or academic critic and those who use and abuse social media for the sole purpose of inflicting harm on others for no other reason, apparently, than for sport. But that’s a whole other discussion.

———-

Julinda D. Lewis is a dancer, minister of dance, teacher, and writer who was born in Brooklyn, NY and currently resides in Eastern Henrico County. When not writing about theater, she teaches dance history at VCU and low impact dance fitness classes to seasoned movers like herself and occasionally performs.

———-

O’KEEFFE

Written & Performed by Lucinda McDermott

Directed by Dr. Jan Powell

Cast

Lucinda McDermott as Georgia O’Keeffe

Creative Team

Playwright/Actor/Producer:	Lucinda McDermott
Director:	Jan Powell
Sound Design/Co-Producer:	Jonathan Piro
Costume Design:	Elizabeth Weiss Hopper
Lighting Design:	Andrea Stratton
Master Electrician:	Gabriel Beard

Performance Schedule

Saturday, January 25, 2025 8:00PM

Sunday, January 26, 2025 4:00PM

Tickets

Ticket Prices: $45

Run Time

Approximately 2 hours, including one intermission

Photos N/A [from Lucinda McDermott’s Facebook page]

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