Dance - Speak up

Maurice Ravel once called his Bolero “a piece for orchestra, without music.” He took a single Spanish theme and repeated it nine times at a constant tempo. Listen too casually, and you might imagine the French impressionist had written but a few minutes of music before handing it over to the Industrial Age equivalent of a Xerox machine (a grisette good with a fountain pen, perhaps). But into these mechanical repetitions Ravel slipped a slow, steady crescendo; he worked rising variations on his perpetual theme. From the unvarying geometry something frantically human emerged.

Bolero, upon which Atlanta Ballet artistic director John McFall has set a vulnerable dance that moves in the shy spaces between comfort and connection, is a fair proxy for the challenges of ballet nearly 350 years after Louis XIV and friends established the standard five positions that have been repeated by ballet choreographers ever since. Does the old vocabulary have anything left to say? With this weekend’s An Evening of New Works, the Atlanta Ballet will attempt a fresh conversation.

“I love that challenge,” says choreographer Alan Hineline. “I’m always trying to reinvent the classical wheel.” For his contribution to the program, Hineline developed a unique sliding technique for pointe shoes to send the dancers skating across the floor in Bachslide, which he describes as a “humanistic ballet.”

David Parsons’ Caught departs more decisively from the classical mode. Using strobe lights and precisely timed movements, Caught creates the illusion that the dancer is remaining still as a statue while sliding and flying in impossibly arcless horizontal lines across the stage. Though a bit gimmicky in premise, the impact is astonishing and gives the audience an opportunity to consider ballet’s kinetic forms in persistent static images.

The evening concludes with Jupiter, also by McFall, to selections from Mozart’s last two symphonies (including the “Jupiter Symphony”). McFall uses the vitality of Symphony No. 41’s finale and the introspection of Symphony No. 40 to reflect on the “energy and idealism of our time,” he says, “the comradery of people working together to take an idea forward.”

Under McFall’s leadership, ballet in Atlanta continues to move (and leap and throw itself) forward, and, despite the exertions and the long conversation, still shows no signs of running out of breath.

The Atlanta Ballet presents An Evening of New Works, May 7-8 at the Ferst Center for the Arts at Georgia Tech, 349 Ferst Drive. 8 p.m. $30-$40. 404-894-9600. www.atlantaballet.com.