DULUTH — The St. Louis County Depot space now known as Studio Four originally served as a space for the handling of train passengers' baggage. That history became apt on Friday night as Minnesota Ballet inaugurated the next phase of the room's life with a series of new works that are very much about where we're going and what we carry with us.
The bleachers, with a capacity of about 150, were packed with patrons who settled in for a generous evening of entertainment: The program began shortly after 7 p.m. and didn't wrap up until nearly 9:30 p.m. With five pieces and two 15-minute intermissions, the program — called "Forward" — comprised what some companies would regard as two evenings' worth of dance.
Artistic director Karl von Rabenau and executive director Maude Dornfeld deliberately held their welcoming remarks until after the first piece, von Rabenau said while standing on the newly installed dance floor. "I thought, you know what? We shouldn't do a curtain speech first," said von Rabenau. "We should just, in this new space, say: 'Here we are.'"
That opening statement came via choreography by two company members, Ellis Roux and Ken Shiozawa. "Catharis" was an exuberant burst of movement with jazz inflections, building momentum reminiscent of the locomotives sitting just around the corner in the Lake Superior Railroad Museum. Ending in ecstatic collapse, the piece incorporated what emerged as the touchstone gesture of the evening: a supportive embrace.
If you didn't think people hug in ballet, well, they do now. Even as the program marked the company's confident emergence into a venue where it will build its future, it also served as a space to process the lasting effects of the ongoing pandemic. We all bear its scars, but lockdown found performing artists alienated from their lives' work, while the organizations enabling that work faced an existential threat.
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As von Rabenau underlined in his remarks, two pieces on the program particularly spoke to dance's haunted re-emergence onto live stages. His own "Rinnovo" found the company filling the stage with a complex, contrapuntal ensemble piece that earned the night's first standing ovation. The benefits of the smaller space became clear as the performers' expressiveness captivated an audience near enough to read every facial expression and nuance of movement. (Von Rabenau also contributed the classical, springlike "Con Grandi Speranze.")
"From Here" was choreographed by Jennifer Miller, the company's ballet master. Built on just six dancers, making it the evening's most intimate piece, it found dancers falling into each other's arms with a sense of both joy and grief, languid gestures unfolding before movers who held back with troubled expressions. It demonstrated what an intensely focused experience Studio Four can provide.
As a performance space, one of Studio Four's most distinctive features is its series of openings to a higher level that effectively becomes a mezzanine. That will present both opportunities and challenges for programming during hours when members of the public are roaming the St. Louis County Historical Society exhibits located there, but on Friday it added dimension to the warm sense of community as company members who had finished performing appeared overhead to line a railing and watch the evening's final piece along with the audience.
"Home Ablating Downstream" was created by guest choreographer Adam W. McKinney, who appeared in an introductory video calling Minnesota Ballet "an exceptional ballet company." After speaking about his perspective as a choreographer of color, he said that "to homogenize all people, in and of itself, is oppressive and disallows opportunities for creativity."
The piece emerged as a study in contrasts, opening with a silent, shared gesture of genuflection before exploding into a series of spiraling solos and fast-paced duets set to music including that of Mel Torme and "Yiddish swing" artists the Barry Sisters. Incorporating classical movements performed with a desperate, deliberately glitchy energy, it ended the program on a celebratory note while also evoking the evening's sense of continuing unease: A sense that while we're moving "Forward," not all is well.
While work remains to be done in every sense of that word, this weekend's program sees Minnesota Ballet taking full artistic ownership of a bold program and a warm new space. In the words of a tween sitting near me when the lights came up, "That was awesome!"
"Forward" will be reprised Saturday night at 7 p.m. For more information, see minnesotaballet.org.
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