Ballet Hispánico: all that and a stack of bowlers

From top: Bennyroyce Royon, Edwaard Liang
and Annabelle Lopez Ochoa

Ballet Hispánico
Works by Edwaard Liang, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa and Bennyroyce Royon
The Joyce Theater
March 26-31

The women of Ballet Hispánico
and their Magritte-inspired bowlers
in a work by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa
(photo: Paula Lobo)

For this Joyce Theater season, Ballet Hispánico bookends a cheeky, all-female performance of Annabelle Lopez Ochoa's Magritte-inspired Sombrerísimo--a 2013 work made for men--with world premieres by two Asian-American dancemakers. With El Viaje, Taiwan-born Edwaard Liang has gifted this ensemble with a meditation on immigration and the journey towards love, community and hope. What's the connection to this troupe's Latinx profile? Literally, the historic migration of a Chinese diaspora to the shores of Cuba; yet, beyond that specific backstory, the work--lucid and moving--will prove accessible to anyone with a heart. For music, Liang selected Academy of St. Martin in the Fields's sublime recording of Ralph Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis--a performance that has always given me chills. With designers Danielle Truss (costumes) and Joshua Paul Weckesser (lighting), he has turned the Joyce stage into a jewel box displaying every elegantly-sculpted facet of individual movement, partnership and grouping. The dancers are profoundly supple and expressive. One cannot help but get swept up in the energy of Liang's searching and threshing of stage space.

Bennyroyce Royon's gift to Ballet Hispánico draws upon his Filipino heritage and his culture's Spanish/Asian intersection. As in El Viaje, but without the exalted poetics of Liang's dancemaking, Homebound/Alaala, suggests a variety of interpersonal relationships and environments in flux and in possibilities. This robust ensemble will be remembered most for a colorful, cleverly adaptable set design of large boxes developed, in collaboration, by Amanda Gladu and Royon. Continuously rearranged and re-purposed by the dancers, the boxes aid in the telling of stories of leave-taking and travel, of containers holding history and identity, of erecting and dismantling barriers between people.

Ballet Hispánico continues at The Joyce through Sunday, March 31. For schedule information and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (at 19th Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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SPECIAL EVENT:

I'm also excited to announce that Eduardo Vilaro (Ballet Hispánico's Artistic Director and CEO) will join choreographer Bennyroyce Royon for a conversation and screening of excerpts from Homebound/Alaala at Gibney on Wednesday, April 17, 6:30-8pm.

This Sorry I Missed Your Show program is free, but seating is limited. So, please RSVP soon. Learn more here.

Gibney
280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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A taste of Ballet Hispánico at 92Y Harkness

Choreographer Bennyroyce Royon is developing
a new work for famed Ballet Hispanico.
(photo: Kuo-Heng Huang)

92Y Harkness Dance Center's Fridays@Noon series regularly offers audiences up-close-and-personal views of dance. Yesterday, New York's Ballet Hispánico delivered a presentation so masterful and  charged that it was a wonder the relatively small space could contain its energy.

Billed as a celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month and an intersection between Asian and Latinx cultures, the Pino-Latino program gave a just a taste of what Eduardo Vilaro's troupe can do. The afternoon opened with Sombrerisimo (2014), Colombian-Belgian choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa's male sextet with Magritte-inspired bowlers. It is filled with intense and slippery entanglements between and among men, acrobatic flourishes and dashes of salsa, flamenco and Fosse. Filipino-American dancemaker Bennyroyce Royon previewed a work in development, Homebound/Alaala. With its novel use of visual symbolism--primarily, numerous brown cardboard boxes--and the dancers' deeply expressive performances, this ensemble reflects on caring, longing, suffering, mourning, collaboration and community resilience, speaking to what and how we share as human beings.

Following these performances, John-Mario Sevilla, Harkness's director, engaged Vilaro, Royon and two dancers (Raúl Contreras and Gabrielle Sprauve) in a conversation that often returned to the value of the arts for the health of society. When evoking difficult histories (in this case, the ravages of colonialism), the arts can also strengthen cultural identity and help dissolve artificial and destructive barriers between people.

Hurry, hurry, hurry if you want tickets to catch this beautiful company  on either October 12 or October 13 at New York City Center's Fall for Dance Festival. Click for information here.

For information on upcoming Fridays@Noon at 92Y Harkness Dance Center, click here.

92Y
1395 Lexington Avenue (91st-92nd Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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