Artistic administrators of Dance Now! Miami Diego Salterini and Hannah Baumgarten had quite a lot of causes to stage an Arpino work of their upcoming Program III. The Relativity of Icarus, choreographed by Arpino, who cofounded the Joffrey Ballet with Robert Joffrey and later grew to become its creative director, premiered in New York City in October 1974.
Now, the work is at risk of being misplaced. No unique recordings of the ballet exist and Arpino died in 2008, taking a lot of the dance with him. Salterini and Baumgarten who, since 2010, have taken nice care of curating canonical works of Twentieth-Century dance masters for Dance Now! Miami. Past packages have included works by Isadora Duncan, Doris Humphrey, and José Limón.
To reconstruct Icarus, Salterini and Baumgarten turned to former Joffrey Ballet principal dancer Cameron Basden, who’s on the board of administrators for the Gerald Arpino Foundation and acts as a principal répétiteur of his works, approved to show and rehearse Arpino’s choreographies all through the world. Basden can be the founder and creative director of Miami Dance Hub.
The quick, 12-minute ballet for 3 performers obtained fiercely damaging criticism after its 1974 opening on the New York City Center and its 1978 reprisal.
New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff questioned whether or not the work was simply “a nightclub adagio act for two near‐naked men” whereas New Yorker critic Arlene Croce described the work’s central duet as “an endless vision of the young and gay in one another’s crotches.”
“The homoerotic undertones of the work made it very controversial at the time of its debut,” explains Salterini.
For his half, Arpino maintained that the critics had been flawed and that his Icarus was a retelling of the theme of paternal love embodied by the traditional delusion of Daedalus and Icarus. In the Minoan delusion, the nice Greek inventor, Daedalus, created wings of feathers and wax in order that he and his son might escape a tyrant’s clutches.
Despite his father’s warning, Icarus destroyed his wings by flying too near the solar and died plunging into the ocean.
Baumgarten says that the work was even thought of scandalous when it premiered.
“We really felt confident that enough had changed since 1974, and the homoerotic overtones of Icarus would take a back seat to the dramatic dance-reimagining of the Greek myth,” she says.
David Jewett and Anthony Velazquez will carry out the roles of Daedalus and Icarus.
Photo by Hannah Baumgarten
Company dancers David Jewett and Anthony Velazquez will carry out the roles of Daedalus and Icarus, respectively, in Dance Now! Miami’s program.
“Knowing Arpino the way I did, I’m sure there must have been an element of his personal taste in there,” says Basden. “However, he would have been so convinced of the story he was telling — the story of a father ‘giving wings’ to his son — that it would have taken priority in his mind. The son who becomes enamored, or addicted, to something [the sun] and the eventual demise of the one thing that the son holds most dear, his father.”
Basden says there have been quite a few difficulties restaging Icarus, together with that the ballet’s unique music by Minneapolis Symphony conductor and composer Gerhard Samuel had been misplaced. Samuel died in 2008.
“To my knowledge, there is no recording of the actual ballet itself,” says Basden. “We do know that Gerhard Samuel composed the score Arpino adapted for the 1974 ballet. We have received permission to use a recording of a performance made [of Samuel’s work] on February 1, 1971, at the Fireman’s Fund Theater in San Francisco.”
Basden says she continues to be trying to find a few of the music, together with the opening solo danced by the “Sun,” which will likely be carried out by DNM dancer Julia Faris.
From the standpoint of dancing, Icarus poses its personal challenges from the ballet’s scanty costuming to its set design.
“With a 12-foot diameter platform that is raked [meaning a tilted dancing surface], giant hanging mirrors, ropes, and ribbons, the technical theater aspect of the piece is almost as daunting as the near-acrobatic dancing,” says Baumgarten, who described the Icarus reconstruction as “monumental.”
David Jewett, Austin Duclos, Anthony Velazquez, and David Harris in Gli Altri/The Others
Photo by Simon Soong
DNM’s May program additionally contains the world premiere of Gli Altri/The Others. Salterini and Baumgarten collaborated in creating the 40-minute ensemble piece that entails your complete firm.
Set in a practice station, Gli Altri/The Others (“gli altri” is Italian for “the others”) unfolds with dancers crisscrossing the stage as completely different sorts of individuals momentarily cross paths on the way in which to their locations.
Salterini notes that he drew inspiration for the ballet from the feeling of imagining somebody’s story on the idea of how they appear or behave in nameless public areas that teem with all types of individuals.
“We see so many people, so many faces that catch our eye and often times draw conclusions about them only based on what we see,” says Salterini. “But what is the story behind? How far off are we in our assumptions, sometimes not far at all, some other times we are on a different planet.”
When requested how the brand new work matches with a heavyweight piece like Icarus, Baumgarten contrasts attitudes within the Seventies with present-day social tendencies.
“In the end, we are discovering that here in Florida we are experiencing some backlash in the progress on social issues and it is tough to see,” she says. “So, in a way, creating a piece that addresses ‘the others’ the unknown, hidden, overlooked is a good fit… but in a way it is a reminder of how the ballet and the choreographer himself were demonized and diminished for being ‘other,’ for showing that perspective.”
Note: The program accommodates some grownup content material and themes and will not be applicable for all audiences.
– Sean Erwin, ArtburstMiami.com
Dance Now! Miami’s Program III. 8 p.m., Friday, May 12, on the Broward Center for the Performing Arts, 201 SW Fifth Ave., Fort Lauderdale; and eight p.m., Saturday, May 13, on the Aventura Arts & Cultural Center, 3385 NE 188th St., Aventura; 305 975-8489; dancenowmiami.org. Tickets value $50.