Millepied's dance company delights, disappoints

‘Black Swan’ choreographer launches new dance group with mixed results.


Millepied's dance company delights, disappoints

Benjamin Millepied's new company rehearsing his choreography, "Moving Parts."

L.A. Dance Project


When: Saturday and Sunday

The premiere of the L.A. Dance Project, Benjamin Millepied's new company, promised audacity.

For months, we had heard that the French choreographer, best known for his work on the film "Black Swan," was creating something bracingly different and quintessentially Southern Californian for a city that hasn't had a major resident dance group in more than 25 years.

The lobby was abuzz last Saturday at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. What would Millepied's new six-person ensemble look like? And what brave new worlds would be unveiled in "Moving Parts," a commissioned world premiere by Millepied, which featured a score by hot dance composer Nico Muhly, costumes by Rodarte's Kate and Laura Mulleavy and a "visual installation" by respected New York artist Christopher Wool?

There were surprises, alright. But they came from a 20th-century avant-garde giant who's been dead for three years: Merce Cunningham. His "Winterbranch" (1964) was the lone success in an evening of three works that disappointed more than it delighted.

The concert began with "Quintett" by William Forsythe, an American choreographer who has spent much of his career with the Frankfurt Ballet.

Created in 1993 as a way of saying goodbye to Forsythe's terminally ill young wife, it features a snippet of an old hymn, "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet," sung by a homeless man near Waterloo Station in London. Composer Gavin Bryars loops it endlessly over an increasingly rich string arrangement as the dancers explore various repeated movements: catches, jumps, spins, falls, lyrical and quirky duets and solos, all of which impressively demonstrated the strengths of this physically varied but uniformly strong collection of dancers.

But "Quintett" is too inward-looking and cryptic to yield much emotional reward. There's no clear thematic through line, a shortcoming which focuses undue attention on Bryar's score, which mystically and movingly transcends its pedestrian origins in ways that the choreography never equals.

The dancers were all wonderfully committed to Forsythe's tricky demands. Charlie Hodges and Julia Eichten were particularly well matched; both are short and intense yet capture the playfulness that the work sometimes requires. Frances Chiaverini, a tall, lithe dancer with a solemn stage presence, found pensive poetry in the choreography's moments of stillness.

"Winterbranch" was next. Set to a disturbing and raucous soundscape by La Monte Young, it explores two simple "facts in dancing," as Cunningham called them: falling and rising.

"Winterbranch" unspools its limited material rigorously, cleverly, and with moments of humor and horror that the choreographer, who used randomness to dictate his creative process, would have insisted were completely accidental.

In the opening moments, a figure bound by an armless costume crawls across the stage like a worm, barely visible. Dancers are briefly and imperfectly illuminated by seemingly random lights, as if they're caught in the headlights of passing cars. A blanket is used as a mode of transportation and later to cover a pile of seemingly dead bodies. A strange, flashing machine crosses upstage.

While people could debate the work's meaning endlessly, as a creative study of limited thematic material it leaves no doubt about its intentions or success.

Millepied's "Moving Parts" has many of them – three sections, five artistic collaborators – but the often frenetic 27-minute work is less than the sum of its ingredients.

The dancers move in front of, behind and around three large paintings on wheels; the canvases are covered with letters of different sizes. High-energy groups suddenly coalesce then break apart just as quickly. Large lights, also portable, can be wheeled into place by the dancers to focus on solos or other moments of glory.

Millepied's work has some high points. A duet in the second movement for Morgan Lugo and Nathan Makolandra was virile and muscular. Hodges danced a memorably pliant solo in the third movement.

The Mulleavys' costumes have color-coded stripes that serve to pair each man up with one woman whose stripe colors match. They were effective, as was Wool's large canvases, but Muhly's rhythmic, spare yet constantly shifting score was by far the best element of the work. The choreography, on the other hand, lacked any sense of a dramatic arc or thematic unity.

Millepied's approach to "Moving Parts" reflects his apparent philosophy for the new company: focus on work that's determinedly modern and challenging.

That's an admirable goal. The big trick will be creating an entire evening – and later a season – that delivers on such a promise without boring us or making us dwell on contemporary dance's excesses.



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