Tag Archives: Nils Frahm

Dimming the Lights, Cerrudo Delights With Three Dance Originals

Review: Charlotte Ballet’s A Realm of Existence

By Perry Tannenbaum

March 6, 2025, Charlotte, NC – Past and present eras of Charlotte Ballet intertwined at Knight Theater in their latest program, A Realm of Existence, named after none of the choreography below. Three of the four pieces were by artistic director Alejandro Cerrudo, including Dos y Dos y Dos, his first world premiere with the company since he was designated to lead it in 2022. After a break, Pacopepepluto lightened the mood with settings for three Dean Martin hits, and Cloudless cast an intimate, almost erotic aura before the second intermission. Hearkening back to the preceding Hope Muir stint as artistic director, nine dancers performed the surreal scenario of Johan Inger’s Walking Mad. It was the first piece performed at Knight Theater under Muir’s leadership in 2017, reprised there by Muir in 2019.

For a piece that emphasized pairs, Dos y Dos y Dos was strikingly touchless – and for that reason, perhaps most fascinating in its interstitial moments between the various couplings. The first ensemble reacted to one another in waves, like coils of a Slinky toy or a row of dominoes, creating the push-pull of gravity between them out of thin air. The intriguing style carried over into the pas de deux – not religiously since there was minimal contact – but wasn’t as unique for me in that idiom. While the variety of the ensembles grabbed me more, the variety of music for the couples – composed by Marek Hunhap, Jean Michel Blais, and Frederic Chopin – brought fresh vibes to their dreaminess.

Absent any props, scenery, or flashy costuming, Cerrudo placed strong emphases on form and flow in his new work. Lighting by Michael Korsch is important in this piece – but not expensive. Dim lighting has been almost a trademark of Cerrudo’s tenure, certainly CharBallet’s settled style in recent non-Nutcracker production photos. PR photos of A Realm of Existence couldn’t be anything other than dimly lit. But as Pacopepepluto quickly made clear, a dimly lit mood needn’t always chime with a Chopin Nocturne.

“Memories Are Made of This,” the first of Cerrudo’s three solo pieces (the “Paco” piece?), showcased a true gem of bad Dean Martin imitation by Joe Scalissi – or a treasure since neither Spotify nor Apple Music have a clue about Scalissi, Joe or otherwise. You could hardly imagine a better dance track for mocking Martin’s schmaltzy style, Cerrudo’s moves prodding Mouzon into projecting the antithesis of suavity.

Apparently, gems like Scalissi’s are very rare indeed, so Mario Gonzalez had to content himself with an authentic Martin cut, the exponentially schmaltzier and creepier “In the Chapel in the Moonlight,” so he drew more laughs than Mouzon’s antics anyhow. How did Cerrudo top himself after that for Rees Launer? With Dino’s most beloved – and outright silliest – hit, “That’s Amore,” complete with its original chart-topping chorus and accordions.

Packaging moon, stars, and an underfoot cloud, this was clearly the “Pluto” segment. There was so much intrinsic merriment in that track for Launer to build on with his discordantly spasmodic movements, and the choreographer mischievously brought back Gonzalez and Mouzon for comedic cameos as lagniappe. That really was amore, especially for the gals in the audience since the guys were hardly wearing a stitch.

Flipping the customary script, Cerrudo had objectified his men more than he would the women in Cloudless, Anna Owens, and Adriana Wagenveld on opening night. Branimira Ivanova’s costumes for this pas de deux were more for a dance studio than a runway. That enabled Owen and Wagenveld to build their chemistry, intimacy, and heat from scratch, a steeper climb without flashy lights and glam dresses. With the gentle music of Nils Frahm simmering in the background, there was actually a bit of tension for me, wondering how far the intimacy would go – and whether it would upset the giggling church ladies sitting behind us. The work out costuming helped to widen Cerrudo’s latitude.

As for Walking Mad, I’ve written about it before, here and elsewhere. So I’m dispensing with yet another description of the piece and developing a theory about Inger’s intent – after noting those same church ladies’ surprise and delight in seeing it for the first time. No doubt the wooden wall, nearly as versatile as the dancers who play with it, is in permanent storage somewhere in town now that this crowd favorite has been performed three times. This wall plays such a big part in the action that what it is can quickly elude our consideration.

It’s a wall that separates the insiders partying behind it from the outsiders who can’t seem to forget their worries and merge with the mindless, monotonous fun. That’s fairly obvious when a crowd of partyers with conical hats spill out from the sides of the wall and briefly join the lonely, trembling folks on our side – especially since they’re almost always engulfed by the hypnotic repetitions of Ravel’s Bolero. But there’s also a night-and-day monotony to Inger’s scheme, for the first dancer we see, seeking to toss away his workday attire and join the festivities, is wearing a bowler hat.

A group of male dancers will parade funereally across the stage later in the piece, all wearing similar Magritte bowler hats. It’s a broad hint that our days are as repetitious and monotonous as our nights, only more formal and mindful. That’s where the fears and trembling of the outsiders come from. Notwithstanding the surprised gasps and giggles from the crowd, this may not have been the best realm of existence.

Cerrudo Revives Innovative Works With Fresh Excitement

Review: Innovative Works at Center for Dance

By Perry Tannenbaum

Charlotte Ballet’s reveal wasn’t as dramatic as the recent return of the renovated Old Barn on Queens Road with a full-fledged Theatre Charlotte musical. But after the COVID shutdowns, postponements and cancellations, and the abrupt departure of artistic director Hope Muir after barely five years – the last two during the pandemic – it was hard to feel that Charlotte Ballet was all the way back until last weekend. Until we had seen some choreography by the new AD, Alejandro Cerrudo. Extra frustrating for me, since I had declared his work a perfect fit for CharBallet when I had first seen it at Spoleto Festival USA in 2014, had been the absence of his imprint on the Fall Works program at Knight Theater last October.

With Cerrudo now hosting the annual Innovative Works wintertime program, contributing a fine piece that crowns an invigorating evening at the McBride-Bonnefoux Center for Dance, we can let it all seep in. A new era has emphatically begun at the Center for Dance, with a new AD starting to reshape the company’s identity, working with a mix of familiar dancers, new dancers, and dancers who have matriculated to the varsity through the satellite Charlotte Ballet II troupe.

The state of Charlotte Ballet, to coin a phrase, is strong.

Jennifer Archibald’s vowel-starved HdrM and Helen Simoneau’s The Details Are the Meaning, both world premieres, preceded Cerrudo’s no-less-cryptic Silent Ghost. Silence was a subtle motif: It’s been awhile since Charlotte Ballet presented an entire evening of dance works that were devoid of storyline, song lyrics, or voiceovers. Taking on the hosting chores, Cerrudo recalled his takeaway from the first time he squired his daughter to a set of modern dance pieces. Comprehension was no problem at all, as it turned out. Just let it seep in was the core of his message.

On this occasion, anyway, Cerrudo discarded the introductory videos that have enhanced the studio ambience at past Center for Dance programs, where the evening’s choreographers, projected on screens flanking the audience, would talk about their works before we saw them, or dancers would give us their insights. Instead of those slick videos – all three “Behind the Ballet” videos are available at Charlotte Ballet’s website – we contented ourselves with Cerrudo’s remarks and a strange, mysterious welcome from CharBallet dancer Maurice Mouzon Jr. in a flowing black costume. Three quarters bacchante conjuration and one quarter airline steward pantomime, the conjuration was so absorbing that I really didn’t pay attention to the voiceover until Mouzon pointed out the exits to us.

That shtick was another great ice breaker, arguably the most amusing of the night.

Like the other dances that followed, HdrM didn’t readily disclose its intentions, but Archibald offers a couple of useful hints in our program booklets. Her subject is environmental psychology, questioning whether society has a responsibility to humanize architecture. What the choreography takes aim at is “hard architecture,” as explored in Robert Sommer’s Tight Spaces: Hard Architecture and How to Humanize It (1974). Since there is no scenery with the fledgling piece, nor any projections, we can decide among several kinds of hard architecture that Sommer was concerned with: prisons, classrooms, asylums, hospitals, or zoos.

Kerri Martinson’s drab costumes seem to narrow that field to secure buildings for human adults, with no further clues provided by the music of Federico Albanese, Ludwig Ronquist, and Heilung. What I found most enjoyable here was Archibald’s struggling, yet never agonized, language of movement – a mixture of sensual interaction between the eight dancers and self-absorbed precision. Likewise, there were episodes when the dancers connected intimately with the flow of the music, interrupted by abrupt mechanical disconnects from the soundtrack.

While the eight dancers never evoked a prison or an asylum, they brought us a dark, broken world. The moments of trauma were less common and affecting than the flow of brave, resolute striving. If the other choreographies reached these levels of intensity and artistry, I knew that the evening’s experience would be unforgettable.

Dressed in a different set of Martinson costumes, these in various colors with sheer unisex skirts, Simoneau’s The Details Are the Meaning showcased six fresh dancers whom we hadn’t seen in the previous piece. Though collections of Caroline Shaw compositions played by the Attacca Quartet have won two Grammy Awards since 2019, the music that Simoneau had selected was badly overmiked on Saturday night – far past the point of clarifying detail, if that was the point.

Movements in Simoneau’s setting were more classical and conventional than Archibald’s had been, with a greater tendency toward traditional partnering: Anna Mains with newcomer Oliver Oguma, Sarah Hayes Harkins with Rees Launer, and Isabella Franco with Mouzon. Beautifully executed lifts were no more lively or original, and I missed the point of the static, I-could-also-do-that poses in the middle of the piece. Combined with the wayward potting of the audio and the unsexy unisex outfits, this piece struck me as calling for more time in the workshop and more polish.

Silent Ghost felt very consonant with the two premieres that had preceded it, so Cerrudo had been judicious in calling upon Michael Korsch to provide lighting design for the new works after serving as Cerrudo’s original designer back 2015, when Ghost premiered in Santa Fe. Saving his own work for last was also a sensible idea, for it presented more CharBallet dancers for our scrutiny and delight than either Simoneau or Archibald had engaged.

Yet as Cerrudo’s numinous title indicates, the mood was far from celebratory or triumphant, as you might expect capping an Innovative program. The ambiance hinted at in the ghostly title was perhaps best approximated by the music of Jon Hopkins and Kenny Anderson (King Creosote) – a dimly recorded household conversation mixed over New Age piano. The opening track, by Dustin Hamman, presented a similar profile with fuzzy guitar chords strummed over intermittently intelligible vocals. Additional tracks were by Ólafur Arnalds and Nils Frahm.

Costumes by Branamira Ivanova were even more monochromatic than Martinson’s for HdrM, but smarter somehow and more fun to wear and dance in. While Cerrudo’s style of movement never struck me as either edgy or outré, which Archibald’s choreography definitely had, the style was markedly individual, comfortably at odds with tradition rather than defiant of it. Silent Ghost flowed no less naturally than HdrM. There was no perceivable strain on the ensemble in clothing themselves with the choreographer’s movements, and they were all perpetually wedded to the soundtrack, no matter what combination was onstage.

These combos were often pas de deuxs pairing Sarah Hayes Harkins with Oguma or Mains with newcomer Luke Csordas, always excellent. To my understanding, past ADs at Charlotte Ballet haven’t given new company members so much spotlight so soon, tending to give the impression that there was an unofficial hierarchy. I applaud Cerrudo’s audacious impulse: it makes his new era of leadership feel more exciting and unpredictable.