Boston Ballet meets Beyoncé

Yes, that's James Whiteside, Principal Dancer of Boston Ballet - or rather that's his alter ego, "JBDubs," breaking out into the club scene and channeling Beyoncé - or at least her famous SNL skit - with his new (hopefully) hit single "I Hate My Job" (backed by fellow Boston Ballet dancers Bradley Schlagheck and Lawrence Rines; I hope they don't all hate their jobs!). Now I'm not sure old Beyoncé needs to worry about James' pipes - but his legs are another matter; the choreography here is hot, and the boys are definitely rockin' those, um, red shoes, oh yeah. And it sounds like James may have chops as a producer, and the lyrics are nasty fun most definitely. You can hear more of JB's songs on his blog (see how many of the Ballet's dancers you can spot in the song "So I Cry"), or, boogie down in a master class with him for just $15 at Urbanity Dance next Wednesday.  Now all I have to do is shake these images before I see Don Quixote in two weeks . . . that is if James hasn't decamped for stardom in Lady Gaga's entourage by then . . .

Urbanity Dance has a new home

Here at the Hub Review we're fans of the up-and-coming troupe Urbanity Dance, which has been growing by leaps and bounds since its founding just a few years ago.  Led by the intrepid and (almost scarily) organized Betsi Graves, Urbanity has consistently impressed with both their artistic program and their savvy approach to building a new company.  Hot off a successful appearance at Jacob's Pillow this summer, the troupe has just now announced another landmark in its development: Urbanity is opening a new home.  No photos of the new studio are yet available, but you can check it out this Sunday, Sept. 25, when Urbanity cuts the ribbon on the space at 280 Shawmut Avenue in the South End.  There's a day-long program of free activities planned, from yoga to kids' classes to funk improvisation. And you can even nab some discounts on dancewear. Full details here.

The women of Urbanity Dance.

It's only sophomore year for Betsi Graves Akerstein's Urbanity Dance, but the troupe looks stronger than it has any right to, with more dancers, more fans (the performance I saw nearly sold out) and more artistic ambition than companies twice (or gosh, even three times!) its tender age. Already Urbanity is commissioning new musical work, toying with high technology, and making innovations in its dance development process. But I'm afraid the company's burgeoning ambitions don't always bear artistic fruit - at least not this time around; Akerstein and her dancers are pushing the conceptual limits of what their art can be, but to communicate their fresh ideas they're too often sticking with the dated language of jazz dance, and a collective approach that guarantees them a broad appeal, but limits their interpretive depth.

Of course it's a bit ridiculous to expect a fledgling troupe to begin immediately competing with the likes of, say, Nederlands Dans Theater. And certainly having broad appeal isn't exactly a bad place to be. Urbanity's sophomore year hardly qualifies as a slump. Still, it would have been nice to see some steps forward (even baby steps) from the company's debut. And frankly, the troupe's logistical prowess produces such a polished effect (there were dozens of costumes, lighting effects, and even a giant projection of computer graphics this time around) that high (perhaps unrealistically high) artistic expectations almost inevitably ensue.

Still, nothing in the concert dragged, and the pieces moved uphill in quality (always a good sign). Big Red Door, a collaborative venture between Graves Akerstein and her dancers, had its moments - particularly in a brief, struggling duet for Jon Arpino and Becky Anderson - but these didn't amount to all that much in the end. Urbanity has a weakness for earnest, rather broad vignettes revolving around obvious symbols (last year's concert featured a girl-sized cage; this year we got the eponymous "big red door," above left). At first I didn't really want to think too hard about what, exactly, that "big red door" might literally refer to - but by the end of the dance, with its many rather generic movements, the symbol seemed so generalized that I didn't much care what it might refer to. The good news was that Big Red Door featured two male dancers (Arpino and Theo Martinez) as strong as the many women who form the core (and corps) of Urbanity, and whenever they were around, the piece had some real kick.



Which was more than you could say for Little Blue Dot (above), an ambitious attempt to say something or other - I'm not sure what - about dance and navigation via the Global Positioning System. Oddly enough, the original music commissioned for the work - composed by the talented Mu-Xuan Lin after the choreography was set - proved quite intriguing; it was the dance itself that was abstractly inert.

Luckily the troupe seemed to double down after this elaborate misfire. Red Smoke Rises, by Michelle Chassé, took its Elmer Bernstein score just about where we thought it would, but Urbanity's jazz-dancy aesthetic slid into Bernstein's brass like a hot hand into a long, slinky glove, and the piece - lit in lurid, neon red - was undeniably fun. Better still was KK Apple's Big White Moon, a genuinely haunting meditation on the loss of youth that included several motifs of innocence - including slo-mo versions of happy, heedless running - that were unexpectedly poignant. This piece deserves a place in Urbanity's "repertory," if that's what they're building.

The final dance on the program, Green Grass Grows (again by Graves Akerstein) summed up, it seemed to me, both this promising troupe's strengths and current limits. Set to music from "The Knee Plays," the minimalist divertissements scattered through Philip Glass's epic Einstein on the Beach (and featuring vocalists simply counting to eight over and over), Grass featured not just a large company but also many blocks of literal turf. The dance played out as something like Busby-Berkeley-does-Buddhism, but actually, that's a pretty interesting thing to attempt, and you had to admire both Graves Akerstein's choreographic skill as well as her guts for trying to make sense of this notoriously obscure stretch of chant (which still puzzled plenty of people in the audience). The only trouble with the piece was that the Urbanities (the Urbanites?) didn't yet have the clean precision that minimalism really requires. But like its subject matter - and this appealing troupe - this dance can only grow over time.

Dancing feat

The Youtube promo for Urbanity Dance.

I'm late with a few words - which happily can be kind ones - about Urbanity Dance, a new dance group founded and directed by Betsi Graves Akerstein, which gave its first performance ever, "Cage Free," at the BU Dance Studio last weekend. (Full disclosure: I was invited by a friend, Kate Patten Cook, who dances with them.) The troupe is loosely centered in alumni of Boston College, all of whom have a surprisingly high level of talent and training, and who under Ms. Akerstein's direction managed to sustain that high level minute-to-minute in a two-hour-plus program of their own choreography (which is no small feat).

What was even more surprising, however, was the professional sheen of the whole production. There was a panoply of smart and sexy costumes, and two very-cool set-pieces (such as the giant bird-cage below) to ooh and ah over, while the lighting (by Matt Breton) morphed constantly in close coordination with the dance, much in the mode of Nederlands Dans Theater. One left the performance in a certain awe of both Ms. Akerstein's logistical skills and the determination and dedication of her young troupe.

And the dances themselves were always energetic, resourceful and charming, even if they tended to bump repeatedly against a certain artistic ceiling. The program had a "theme" - freedom - which everyone can believe in without getting into pesky specifics, and Ms. Akerstein had decided to let many of the dancers have their own choreographic say on the subject: she developed a long initial piece, which was then followed by a series of shorter dances, each generally the length of an accompanying pop song. Given those parameters, you can probably guess at the pop-literalism that slightly limited the work; we knew we would eventually see an actual bird-cage (with an actual dancer trapped in it) and an actual bare-chested guy with a literal pair of wings, etc. (although the wings, which blinked, did look awesome). The musical selections were also what you might expect from a lot of choreographers fresh out of a liberal arts college: Sigur Rós and Sufjan Stevens figured prominently, as did Dario Marianelli (composer of such high-end chick-lit-flicks as Atonement and Pride and Prejudice).


Urbanity Dance in action. Photos by Eli Akerstein.

Still, I can't say I didn't enjoy the program (despite its over-amplification); I mean, what's not to like about large groups of pretty girls (and the occasional boy) struggling to be free of something or other? And I have to give a shout-out to my pal Katie, whose choreography for "La Belle et Le Bad Boy" and "Such Great Heights" struck me as particularly strong. Not that anyone in this line-up is a slouch. There were plenty of fine moments from Ms. Akerstein and others, as well as a striking solo from dancer Kara McCann; it's clear Urbanity Dance has in its first program already staked out a prominent piece of territory on the local dance map. Moving forward, however, I hope they can break out of a certain jazz-dance cage that "Cage Free" sometimes seemed stuck in (this is probably the artistic flip side of its laudable commitment to artistic inclusion). And more solos and duets would be nice - the choral sequences got a little repetitive, and floated along at about the same level of intensity; the sudden pairing of Jon Arpino and Michelle Costello, for instance, brought a welcome dose of conflict and something like real narrative to the goings-on. But I'm sure, given their obvious organization and vision (they even gave out a scholarship!), that artistic expansion is definitely among this troupe's plans.