Friday, April 26, 2013

"Stream," ballet like a river

                                                                  Photo by Blaine Truitt Covert, courtesy Oregon Ballet Theater

Last Friday I was a volunteer usher for the Oregon Ballet Theater premiere of a dance called Stream, which I found to beautifully evoke the flow and colors of a river. In the evening's program it said this regarding the dance's Swedish choreographer, Pontus Lidberg: "At the heart of Stream is a quote that has given Lidberg inspiration, 'What we call a person, the Buddha referred to simply as "stream."' Lidberg clarifies, 'There is no beginning or end, there is just now.'"

The sheer fluid costumes in shades of blues and aquamarine were designed by Reid Bartelme. The program says, "The properties of water ultimately influenced Bartelme's final costume design with the use of translucent fabrics in ethereal blues and greys and a mobius-like top. There are also subtle differences in each costume as well. Bartelme shares, 'Water is all one thing and never the same thing.'"

In Catherine Thomas' review Monday in The Oregonian, she describes the piece as "shimmering instrumentalism, a mesmeric pure-dance ballet set to a luminous strings-and-electronics score by Portland-born composer Ryan Francis ... Stream swirls and surges in calm, clear lines, aided immensely by Reid Bartelme's ice-blue diaphanous costumes against the darkened stage. There's an airy serenity to the piece, although tht 10 dancers are in near-constant motion, streaming en masse, arcing into on-pointe spins, forming and dissolving patterns... Stream is not a showcase ballet; it's all dreamy mood."

Preceding the dance was a lecture by OBT's ballet historian Linda Besant. In that morning's paper there had been a DOGAMI poster of the Willamette River floodplain over time -- she noted that image and compared it to the beauty and flow of the dance piece.


DOGAMI image from LIDAR of a segment of the Willamette River's historic floodplain

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