Mamela Nyamza's "Hatched Ensemble" reflects on the hardship of conforming. (Photo by Tale Hendnes/Dansens Hus)

Breaking free from restrictive expectations and traditions can be painful, but the liberation one gains is cathartic.
 
That’s the message that Mamela Nyamza’s “Hatched Ensemble” sends. This transformative work, seen on Friday night and repeated tonight at PS/21 Center for Contemporary Performance in Chatham, gives a middle finger to the confines of classical ballet and ultimately celebrates the sounds and the dancing of South Africa.
 
Though the work, at its start, is slow and tedious, it ultimately ends on an upbeat note, saluting a soul’s truth. However, it also questions if one can ever really strike out on one’s own – detached from the culture in which one lives.
 
The work begins with the dancers wearing white skirts with clothes pin attached and pointe shoes. Men and women – both topless – shift painfully slow to Camille Saint-Saëns’ “The Dying Swan.” Over and over the music – that references the waning days and ultimate death of the waterfowl – plays on a loop. The dancers, with only their backs to the audience, also cite classical ballet’s undulating arms, reflecting the swan’s mournful journey.
 
And while it appears to be “the ballet” reimagined, the dancers are also raising slender poles on which farm animals, flowers, trees and windmills perch. Then suddenly, one of the dancers pops up, en pointe, to wake up the lethargic, cramped scene. He demands to be seen. Others hatch upwards and thus their journey begins.
 
At this point, there is an assertion of differences. “Hatched Ensemble” then swings into conformity once again – with dancers – literally hung up on ballet. Each hangs their red tutus and trench coats along a clothesline. While some of the dancers fade in the back – behind the line – others slip their arms into the sleeves of the bodices. They flay and jerk as if trying to get free to the music of Given “Azah” Mphago who is a traditional African multi-instrumentalist and the angelic voice of opera singer Litho Nqai who walks among them.
 
One in the background who didn’t try to fit the form, came forward. Using her arms, in a frantic vogue-style, she walks to the edge of the stage. The others got in line with her as they start down stage to confront the audience. It’s as if they are saying see me.
 
The house lights come up so that they could see the audience too.
 
After that, the dancers slip off their pointe shoes, rub their aching toes and celebrate South African style – with calls, whistles, song and a dance of military formation – similar to gumboot without the boots.
 
It is joyous and infectious, but it leaves one to wonder if it’s possible to stay alone.
 
“Hatched Ensemble” will be repeated at 8 p.m. tonight at PS 21 Center for Contemporary Performance, Route 66, Chatham.

World Ballet's "The Great Gatsby" was a hit at the Palace Theatre on Friday night.

World Ballet, which so impressed with its “Swan Lake” at Proctors last November, has done it again – this time with an American classic – “The Great Gatsby.”
 
This shimmering new ballet, choreographed by Ilya Jivoy with a jazz-infuse score by Anna Drubich, was near perfect at the Palace Theatre in Albany on Friday night. Now touring,  this production told the monumental F. Scott Fitzgerald tale by arousing all of its romance, glamour and tragedy. And the production values, were outstanding (always a surprise for touring ensembles) sending the audience reeling back into the Jazz Age when pent-up repressions were released in a steamy mix of new music, dance and fashion that fed a hunger for sex and debauchery.
 
With glittering gold art-deco designs, by Sergey Novikov, and moving graphics by Mikki Kunttu, the audience imbibed in the sensation, feeling as if they were being bathed in the magnums of champagne of a Jay Gatsby soiree. The whoops, screams and hollers it elicited were deserved.
 
Of course, none of this could be expertly launched without the Los Angeles-based company’s marvelous dancers. Once again, the caliber of this small ensemble is astonishing especially as its ranks must dance numerous roles each performance to fill out the production.
 
Leading the pack was Raul Abreu as Gatsby, who is hopelessly in love with the emotionally fragile Daisy, danced by Darya Medovskaya. Abreu portrayed the Gatsby’s devotion to the unattainable Daisy with heartfelt warmth. When they are together in that first meeting, arranged by her cousin Nick (danced by Konstantin Geronik), Abreu and Medovskaya’s pas de deux was a haze of amour. And the table of towering cakes and flowers acted as a metaphor for its ephemeral sweetness.
 
Some of the best sections of the ballet were designed around the ensemble – for example the opening scene at New York’s Penn Station captured its vibrancy and diversity. The party thrown by Gatsby for Daisy was spectacular with a chorus of dancing flappers, a bejeweled and boa-wrapped singer Aria Saha and the bouncing and flipping Mykhaylo Kalenta. These amazing sections were intertwined with large ensembles that seamlessly hit on the popular dance of the day – the Charleston, the shimmy and the quick step.
 
Jivoy incorporated them all as Drubich kept the score jazzy, but also mysterious.
 
Finally, speed and the highway and the eventual tragic ending of Myrtle (danced with sass by Tatiana Suliak) was ingeniously depicted by Kunttu’s graphics – basically a projection of cars racing along a highway. However, if I had to criticize, the car that hit Myrtle in Fitzgerald’s novel was yellow, not red as shown.
 
If World Ballet could amend this detail its “The Great Gatsby” would be deemed perfect.

Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company performed its annual show at The Egg on Saturday night. (Photo by Gary Gold)

Over her 34 years as a choreographer, Ellen Sinopoli has always stood out as intellectual artist – one whose aim was to draw her viewer into unchartered landscapes inspired by music, art or poetry. Her works make one think. And they also make one see.
 
But the Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company wasn’t one to make one feel. That is until “Fade.” The piece, premiered during the pandemic when indoor theaters were shuttered, somehow missed my scrutiny in 2021. And on Saturday night at The Egg, when it was restaged, I was honestly gobsmacked because it was a part of Sinopoli artistry that I never saw her express. And I absolutely loved it because this is the first piece, except for maybe her 1991 “Dreams,” in which I saw her heart. It was broken, but beautiful.
 
It began on a dimly lit stage with five dancers in chairs. Almost imperceptibly, they moved their eyes and heads as if watching something float away. And then they started to slide, melting from their chairs, limply into the floor. Clearly, they were mourning.
 
Set to Henryk Gorecki’s “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (Lento e Largo), the dance reminded me of Martha Graham’s “Lamentation” but on a larger scale – depicting not one loss but many. And like in Graham’s work, the pain was expressed by reaching out, struggling to rise again and lifting their heavy heads to search of solace. Ultimately, the five dancers came forward, held their hands over their hearts and laid them down on the stage – a resignation and acknowledgement of the irretrievable loss.
 
It was an impactful statement that must have landed even harder in 2021.
 
But that was not all that Sinopoli had to offer on Saturday. She premiered “Sometimes I Cascade,” a company work set to jazz violin music of Leroy Jenkins, which stands along what one generally sees from the choreographer. The dancers, dressed in costumes with fabric that looked like river rocks, swayed and tumbled as if swept away by a water’s flow or a wind that blew them off their foundation. The work had a drunken quality that also had audience swept up in its flow.
 
The evening also featured the previously reviewed “Celebrated Emblems” that paired the marvelous Musicians of Ma’alwyck with Sinopoli to create an evening-length work that delved into the desert’s vastness in “Dust Devil” and the need for community in “Telling.” The works were inspired by Missy Mazzoli’s “Death Valley Junction”  and James Lee III’s “Quintet for Clarinet and String Quartet,” respectively. 

The musicians of Ma’alwyck, directed by violinist Ann-Marie Barker Schwartz with violoncellist Andre Laurent O’Neil and guest artists Heather Chan on violin, Andrew Snow on viola and Brett Wery on clarinet, also performed George Walker’s “Lyric for Sting Quartet (molto adagio)” as an emotive interlude that had all ears at attention.
 
Finally, Sinopoli has revised The Egg Kids Project that gathers the communities most talented pre-professional dancers, age 12 to 18, to perform a work choreographed by one of her dancers. Emily Gunter obliged in a jazzy “Left Ajar,” to music by Ravayah by Amazonon. The six young dancers and Gunter reassured the future of dance is in capable hands.