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DANCE REVIEW
SLICE TO SHARPNew York City Ballet at New York State Theater, Lincoln Center; (212) 870-5570. Season runs through June 25.
PETER Martins, artistic director of New York City Ballet, is probably feeling pretty good about himself.
On Friday night, he steered safely into port the seventh, and last, of the world premieres, Jorma Elo's "Slice to Sharp," that constitute this season's Diamond Project of new choreography.
Commissioning new choreography isn't much safer than skating on thin ice: The skates are there, the need is there, but you are weighed down with the improbability of success.
Luckily, this Diamond season actually has proved improbably successful, with a number of the new works looking as though they might be genuine additions to the company's repertoire.
Unless it's some obscure reference to cheese, there's no telling what Elo meant by "Slice to Sharp," set to baroque music by von Biber and Vivaldi. It might have been more appropriately called "Whirl to Spin," for it proves virtually an exercise in vertiginous perpetual motion.
Set for four couples, it begins with the four men swinging their partners around in dizzying arabesques, creating separate whirlpools of dance motion. From this striking opening on, "Slice to Sharp" is a wild and violent switchback ride of furious entrances and exits.
The ballet has no real shape, no particular design, only a succession of often inventive gobbets of dance punctuated by quirky gestural accents and basically intended to extend, almost to exploit, the extremities of the dancers' virtuosity.
Exploitation comes especially to mind in the dances allotted to Joaquin de Luz and Edwaard Liang, whose spectacular possibilities to jump and particularly to spin are put to crowd-cheering effect.
The Finnish-born Elo, currently resident choreographer of the Boston Ballet, certainly knows his way around dancers - there is a professional gloss here not too often shown by young choreographers.
Elo also knows how to cast. His wonderfully vibrant and eloquent performers - the other two men are Craig Hall and Amar Ramasar, while the women are Maria Kowroski, Ana Sophia-Scheller, Sofiane Sylve and Wendy Whelan - throw their hearts, not to mention their knees, into Elo's sharply defined and spirited slices.
Apart from a fiesta of new choreography, this fresh look at talent is also a crucial blessing of these biannual Diamond Projects. Almost all of the seven new ballets have opened fresh windows for the dancers, with the company the stronger for it.
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