Dancing Roosters, The Rolling Stones and Classic Ballet — Rock, Roll & Tutus Shakes Up Houston’s Performing Arts Scene

Those lucky enough to see Houston Ballet’s Rock, Roll & Tutus can count themselves as witnesses to something extraordinary. The program brings a solid medley of short works from the repertoire featuring beloved music from Tchaikovsky and — cue the excitement — The Rolling Stones.

Brett Ishida’s what i was thinking while i was waltzing opens the program. The curtain rises on five couples gliding in a waltz like statuettes on a child’s music box. Yet the unexpected scarlet of the ballerinas’ ballgowns, the moodiness of the lighting and the sawing of the violins in Ezio Bosso’s String Quartet No. 5 feels menacing and phantasmal. It foreshadows what we’ve come to know as Ishida’s signature — a journey beyond the wall of appearances and the real.

The dark narrative of what I was thinking while I was waltzing explores the mask couples may present to the world and the desperate reality of the disconnection, loathing and suppressed violence that can brood beneath the surface. All amplified by Ishida’s startling costume design.

One after another, the women break away from their partners — first in beautifully arched deep cambrés back, but then in movement more agitated and angular. Their partners also recede, stoic and angry. The women shed their skirts and crawl out free, leaving the stiff appurtenances of tradition and what is expected of them perched on the stage like flaming haystacks.

Then, slowly, as if a primal magnet from prehistory were drawing them, the couples crawl toward each other and rise. The women regain their skirts and their grace, and the men extend their arms to lead their partners into the classic position for the waltz.

Indelible among iconic moments of contemporary ballet will be the tarantella-like spectacle of Ishida’s dramatic finale. The ballerinas are lifted high in a twirling embrace, their skirts whirring in a speeding circle of scarlet — the intensity maximized by Bosso’s unsurprisingly turbulent and sinister music. (It was, after all, composed for a live score of Alfred Hitchock’s 1927 movie The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog.)

Ishida says she is influenced by the magical realism of Japanese author Haruki Murakami, who claims in The City and Its Uncertain Walls that the wall between the real and unreal can shift and transform “depending on the person and the circumstances.”

Ishida has developed her own, unique movement language to express the narrative and textures of emotions inherent in her work. Her choreography emerges without echo or precedent. Ishida’s narratives are drawn from her own experience, her own life and childhood and family. Her work is pure and comes from her heart, soul and essence. Audiences feel this and respond.

With one exception — first soloist Danbi Kim — all five of Ishida’s waltzing couples were drawn from Houston Ballet’s strong corps de ballet: Nikita Baryshnikov, Greta Batista, Zoe Lucich, Alejandro Molina León, Saul Newport, Brittany Stone, Rench Soriano, Allison Whitley and Ryan Williams.

As the curtain came down on the opening act, the audience’s European-style rhythmic clapping acknowledged a special moment. Ishida was affirmed once again as a choreographer of importance for her generation.

A Classic Ballet

Houston Ballet artistic director Stanton Welch’s Balanchine-style classical confection Vi et Animo bookended company soloist Jacquelyn Long’s effervescent Illuminate, created for the 2023 Jubilee of Dance, and Christopher Bruce’s fun-loving Rooster, set to the music of The Rolling Stones.

Rooster premiered in Geneva in 1991, when Bruce was already 46 years old and three decades after the height of The Rolling Stones’ popularity. Its inspiration is a children’s story The Little Red Hen. He changed the hen to a rooster and created the Mod-style “preening cockerels that symbolize the stylish but chauvinistic men of my youth.”

Bruce’s dancing roosters do great imitations of authentic barnyard residents when it comes to bobbing their necks and Gallic strut. How long the lively Rooster will endure is unknown. It might depend on nostalgia and other factors, including the dance community’s huge respect for Christopher Bruce.

After a program of high drama and the quotidian, it was a pleasure to be enraptured and enveloped in the singular beauty of Balanchine-style classical ballet in Stanton Welch’s 2023 Vi et Animo.

The Latin is sometimes translated as “with strength and courage” or “by force and spirit.” Welch has chosen it to mean “with heart and soul.”

The simple words under the title in the program, “For Mark,” tell us we’re going to experience a significant personal expression. The blending of Tchaikovsky’s impassioned Piano Concerto No. 1 with Welch’s masterful display of love for his art form is aesthetically pleasing in every way. And deeply moving emotionally.

Principal Harper Watters, making his season debut, is the first to appear onstage. He was missed in the company’s sublime production of Onegin earlier in September.

The audience delighted in Watters’ centered turns, keen musicality and the perfect placement of his open porte de bras. His tender pas de deux with Karina Gonzalez was attentively done, and distinctive in how majestically high he can hold a ballerina aloft in his long arms.

He partnered and mirrored her perfectly with the precise parallel lines we also admired when he was paired in the past with the delicately radiant Yuriko Kajiya.

A Ballet Balancing Act

In Vi et Animo, Kajiya brought all of her artistry to a brilliant pas de deux with principal Aaron Robison. A certain womanly quality she now projects has in no way diminished her grace, the way she flows from position to position, and the arabesque she is known for. Audiences wait to see her astonishing balance that allows her to remain unaided on pointe for as long as 30 seconds, which she accomplished opening night and driving her fans wild with thunderous enthusiasm.

The power and gymnastic abilities of the male dancers were exciting as well. Simone Acri, Eric Best, and Naazir Muhammad outdid one another with broad leaps and dizzying turns.

The fiery energy third movement belonged to company soloist Sayako Toku and principal Angelo Greco. Their dazzling pas de deux was a display of technical bravura and brilliance and brought down the final curtain, leading the spirited corps de ballet in a meringue of tutus.

After a night featuring just about every strain of choreographic innovation to have touched ballet in the last 100 years, it was lovely to see the polished and spritely ballerinas of the corps de ballet in their toe shoes and tiaras, a reminder of what made the world fall in love with ballet in the first place.

Houston Ballet’s “Vi et Animo” continues through this Sunday, September 28 at the Wortham Theater Center. Performances are set for this Friday, September 26 at 7:30 pm, Saturday, September 27 at 1:30 pm and 7:30 pm and Sunday, September 28 at 2 pm. For more information and tickets, go here.