A Season-Ending Sampler

Washington

To round out its 2007-08 ballet season, the Kennedy Center put on a weeklong run called "Ballet Across America." This at once ambitious and matter-of-fact sampler, under the guidance of the Center's president, Michael Kaiser, featured nine smaller-scale U.S. companies. For a time, such troupes were known as "regional" ballet companies -- to distinguish them from bigger-scaled organizations such as New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre. But the regional label eventually brought with it the implication that these groups were "provincial," so the designation lost favor.

Carol Pratt

The Washington Ballet's Morgan Rose and Jonathan Jordan in Nine Sinatra Songs.

The ballet troupes that came from across America to share the Kennedy Center's Opera House stage were Salt Lake City's Ballet West, Boston Ballet, Houston Ballet, Chicago's Joffrey Ballet, Kansas City Ballet, Portland's Oregon Ballet Theatre, Seattle's Pacific Northwest Ballet and Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Ballet. No traveling was required for the Washington Ballet, which is connected to the Kennedy Center and to other D.C. venues. Each group participated in a triple bill on which it performed a single work. Three mixed programs made up the week. Two of these were given twice; one, featuring the Washington Ballet, played three times.

The overall artistic direction of the series seems to have been fairly democratic, with the Center more of a traffic cop than a demanding overseer. A guiding principle was for each bill to show one company from each coast and one from somewhere in between. Geographic concerns have little to do with artistic ones, so in the end the aesthetics of the offerings stood or fell on the strengths of the dancers and what they were asked to perform. The results wandered over the map of taste and theatrical effectiveness.

The second program, for instance, suggested that men in American ballet don't wear tights. In all three of the works, spanning 1955 to 1983, the male dancers were costumed in pants.

Boston Ballet

Boston Ballet's Heather Myers, Melissa Hough, and Sabi Varga in Brake the Eyes.

Pacific Northwest Ballet, under the artistic direction of Peter Boal, formerly a paragon of shining classical rigor, chose to present itself, six barefoot dancers strong, in the downcast, mopey "Jardi Tancat," a cliché-ridden excursion created by choreographer Nacho Duato in a modern-dance mode and set to wailing Catalan songs.

On that same bill, Kansas City Ballet's sensitive and delicately detailed performance of "The Still Point" (to Debussy) honored part of its own history. This intimate dramatic work for a lead woman, a somewhat less prominent man, plus two couples was choreographed in 1955 by Todd Bolender, who directed the now 51-year-old KCB from 1980 to 1995.

Washington Ballet fielded seven couples of various shapes and sizes in the program's intense and climactic closer, Twyla Tharp's "Nine Sinatra Songs." By turns raw and sophisticated, the nine-part display of couples dancing to an equal number of Frank Sinatra's classic recordings sets the women in cocktail dresses and men in tuxes (costumes by Oscar de la Renta) loose to amuse, dazzle and engage each other as much as they do their audience.

The two oldest works in the sampler were George Balanchine's 1934 "Serenade" (to Tchaikovsky) danced by Ballet West and Antony Tudor's 1939 "Lilac Garden" (to Chausson) performed by the Joffrey Ballet. Each proved suitably challenging to its performers.

Ballet West's Balanchine dancing sometimes erred on the side of carefulness when abandon would been more appropriate; at times the Joffrey Ballet's rendering of Tudor's gesture-colored moves made his atmospheric work seem overly emphatic rather than hauntingly ineffable. A similarly overemphasized tone disturbed the delicacy of Pennsylvania Ballet's performing of Jerome Robbins's "In the Night" (1970) to Chopin nocturnes.

Oregon Ballet Theatre looked youthful and individual in Christopher Wheeldon's "RUSH" (2003), which the not quite 20-year-old company just acquired. Inspired by Bohuslav Martinu's "Sinfonietta la Jolla," Mr. Wheeldon's three-movement work presented Oregon Ballet Theatre as a little society in which the central movement's mysterious and prominent couple, the impressive Alison Roper and Artur Sultanov, made their presence vivid and emotional as their duet established the ballet's dramatic core.

The low points of "Ballet Across America" came from other 21st-century creations.

Boston Ballet performed "Brake the Eyes" (2007) by the company's resident choreographer Jorma Elo. The approximately 30-minute work amounts to a flashy and mostly opaque exercise for 10 hardworking dancers set to a random, nonsense monologue -- in Russian no less -- intermixed with bits of Mozart; Nancy Euerink is credited with the "Sound Design." If the inane title proves that English is the Finnish choreographer's second language, the empty, overeager and mostly miscellaneous physical emphasis of the meandering choreography sadly shows that ballet's academic vocabulary must be Mr. Elo's 52nd language.

The lowest point of all came from Houston Ballet's artistic director and company choreographer, Stanton Welch, and his numbingly tic-ridden "Velocity," which was set to an orchestral composition by Michael Torke that was nearly as numbing in noisy musical terms. Evidently meant to mate the knock-kneed twitches and aimless fidgets of so-called contemporary dance with samplings of standard classical ballet steps, the 22-dancer work reveals little momentum and pointless pacing.

With barelegged women in white tutus and black-clad men in body-tights, the two equally sized contingents of dancers perform before a wallpaper-like geometric background (designs by Kandis Cook). They all amount to so much flotsam and jetsam. What you get and see is not velocity, per se, and certainly not individual dancers, but non sequiturs of egotistical, schizophrenic and slapdash movement until the music runs out.

"Ballet Across America" is impressive in quantitative terms; the bigger U.S. companies were obviously excluded at Kennedy Center to make room for their smaller relatives. Indeed, there are still more companies in this tier around the country waiting to strut their stuff in the nation's capital. In theory it's a capital idea. If only artistic depth were as easy to arrange.

Mr. Greskovic writes about dance for the Journal.