Chopin never wrote a ballet. But that hasn't stopped choreographers from mining his music. Fokine created "Chopiniana" in 1894 and revised it in 1908, and it appeared in that enduring form under a new title, "Les Sylphides," when Diaghilev introduced it to the West in 1909.
Ashton created the heartbreaking "A Month in the Country" in 1976. Robbins couldn't keep away either. Count four Robbins ballets set to his music: "The Concert" (1956), "Dances at a Gathering" (1969), "In the Night" (1970) and "Other Dances" (1974). The last three are classics.
Against such luminaries, choreographing another Chopin ballet may seem an almost reckless act. But what Dwight Rhoden, co-founder of Complexions Contemporary Ballet, brings to the table in his 2007 work, "Dear Frederic," that the others don't is a dedicated focus on the composer's energy and use of counterpoint.
Rhoden's Chopin is no pale, terminally ill Romantic languishing in Paris salons. He's a successor to Bach and an inheritor of Baroque drive.
Excerpts from Rhoden's plotless "Dear Frederic" opened a sensational seven-part program Friday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion by the company Rhoden founded in 1994 with his then-partner and always-muse, dancer Desmond Richardson.
Some have found Rhoden's nonstop, hyperactive choreography shallow and wearing. He takes classical ballet positions and warps them with movements from modern, street or acrobatic dance. Hips shake, arms jerk, torsos bend, then feet fly off the floor in perfect entrechats or dancers melt into gorgeous arabesques. It's easy to be turned on -- or distracted -- by all the activity, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.
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A refocusing
Rhoden really hears what's going on in the music, and not only in Chopin but also in Handel and John Cage (both in "Momentary Forevers") and the marvelous Marvin Gaye ("Chapters"). All three works, also on the program, were created after Rhoden suffered a massive heart attack in 2005 that refocused his life and work.
Danced to unsubtle, almost painfully amplified recorded playing by pianist Henry Wong Doe, "Dear Frederic" married movement and musical phrase structure in ingenious, unpredictable, sensitive, often classically symmetrical forms.
