Theatre: Review: Love. an internal affair.
Image (c) Ballet Nouveau Colorado
Two days before Valentine’s Day, a ballet all about love was an interesting choice for a chronically-single gay man such as myself to attend.
Last night, I went to Ballet Nouveau Colorado’s original production, Love. an internal affair., without considering that the audience would be a venerable parade of heterosexual couples. Normally one wouldn’t see a huge quantity of straight men at the ballet (at least not outside of Manhattan), but two days before Cupid’s arrows were to be shot, there were plenty men willing to bite the bullet in an attempt to please their girlfriends or wives.
Nevertheless, there was plenty for this young homo to enjoy. After all, the two reasons I love contemporary ballet are that, firstly, and like all contemporary art forms, it isn’t as locked to heteronormativity as are more traditional styles of art; and secondly, there are lots of beautiful men (and women) upon which to marvel.
“an internal affair,” a series of short love-themed scenes completely choreographed by the company, did not fail on either count. Sadly, no, there was no gay love story told in dance. Still, the original pieces performed by the spectacular dances did not present women in the archetypes in which they are normally presented in the arts: either as damsel, temptress, or shrew. Instead, the portrayals of human lives and love during the performance showed a sharing of power and vulnerability, strength and weakness, between both the men and women on stage.
The performance also featured dramatic contrasts which, in my interpretation, helped to capture the powerful contrasts of love, those of pain and pleasure, comfort and unrest, holding tightly and letting go. Movement flashed between fast and slow; pairs of dancers alternated between harmonious movement and sharp contradictions. Even the lighting – wonderfully timed and staged – drew sharp lines between the bodies and background one moment, only to shift and absorb all human life the next.
My first experience with ballet was seeing the New York City Ballet perform at the Kennedy Center in Washington. Seeing “an internal affair” reminded me of the opening scene from NYC Ballet’s performance, in which the curtain opened on a stage of sharp red light shining between two enormous black panels, broken only by a single, still figure. That was an image that I hope always stays with me, and similar striking images appeared throughout last night’s production.
While there were many memorable scenes, my two favorites were entitled “Smile” and “For the Love of Pete.” “Smile” began with a woman packing her bags, seemingly to leave a man behind, only to come across his suit. Putting it on, she began a sorrowful but ultimately reassuring dance that may well have represented the parts of old lovers that we take with us, impossible to shed, until that moment when the impossible becomes, instead, inevitable. Then again, maybe it represented the need in these modern times of fluidity to ourselves be all things, rather than clinging to the roles to which men and women were once so definitively assigned. This always seems to me to be most clear during breakups, during which time we are forced to acknowledge that no other person can truly complete us; rather, we must complete ourselves.
“For the Love of Pete,” the concluding act of the evening, was as close to a mating dance as human beings may ever come. Looking at love and lust from a playful perspective – all to teh soundtrack of Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” and “Sleeping Beauty” – had the audience in stitches. Here, humans in love were shown to be childlike in their tentative obsession, and primal in their physical infatuation and force.
As I watched the mating ritual progress, the human body, in all its strength and compulsion and desire, had never seemed so animalistic – and yet beautiful. For in that animal were both complexity and simplicity, a dualism of attributes and attitudes, like a single-celled organism blown up on a slide to reveal a universe of simultaneous occurrence; like love itself, both but a flicker in time or a single spec of sand, and yet, everything.
BNC’s “Love. an internal affair.” plays tonight, 2/13, and tomorrow, 2/14, at the Performing Arts Complex at PCS in North Denver. For tickets, click here.
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