Waltzes, Westerns, and Hooch

Comments (0) By Celeste Fraser Delgado for artburstmiami.com Thursday, Dec 30 2010

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Feel like you’re sleepwalking into the new year? Let Miami City Ballet jolt you awake with George Balanchine’s classic La Sonnambula (The Sleepwalker), a tale of a romantic poet who finds himself alone with a beautiful dreamer at a masked ball. Watch out, a jealous flirt has the poet stabbed to death in the end. The dramatic tale is a great excuse for gorgeous dancers to don sexy masks and make like Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut — on pointe. Less kinky, but every bit as fun, is Western Symphony, a hoedown featuring cowboys and dancehall girls that gives classical ballet the Wild West treatment. While no guns are actually fired, plenty of sparks fly as the dancers challenge each other to ever more spectacular leaps and twirls. Adding a touch of sophistication to that rustic charm is Baker’s Dozen, a silky jazz number set to the piano stylings of Roaring Twenties legend Willie “The Lion” Smith. Once described by choreographer Twyla Tharp as a playful game of jacks, the piece tosses 12 dancers into surprising solos, duets, quartets, sextets, and so on. It gives dancers a chance to showoff while playing off one another like a late-night jazz combo at a gin-drenched speakeasy. Wake up and smell the hooch during Miami City Ballet’s Program II.
Jan. 7-9, 8 p.m., 2011