Kansas City Ballet Dancer Alladson Barreto in Caroline Dahm’s “hold on tight” for FUSION. Photography by Brett Pruitt & East Market Studios (Courtesy of Kansas City Ballet)
With four distinct visions from four different decades, it was all about the vibes during Kansas City Ballet’s “FUSION,” a mixed bill closing the 2024-2025 season.
This company production was performed in the Muriel Kauffman Theatre in the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. All the music was from recordings, representing a wide swath of style and period, Baroque to traditional Irish to electronic to contemporary classical.
The performance opened with Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s playful “Tulips and lobster,” originally created for the Kansas City Ballet for Midwest Trust Center’s New Dance Partners program in 2018. Inspired by the paintings of 17th century Dutch masters and set to a variety of music pulled from the Baroque era, the beautifully hued work had a playful sensibility, playing with formality, playing schoolyard games, playing with props, which the company (particularly the men) leaned into with excellent comic timing. True to the work’s painterly origins, Lopez Ochoa set up distinct tableaux with her cadre of four women and six men, but with quirky compounding details that delighted.
Caroline Dahm’s “hold on tight,” making its world premiere, was brilliant. This is the first piece by a local Kansas City choreographer commissioned for a mainstage program by KCBallet, though Dahm had previously choreographed on the company for the New Moves series. The administration’s confidence in this up and coming artist was well founded.
Dahm is an exquisite movement artist and her no-holds-barred approach brings infinite innovation to her choreography; she’s not afraid to mix graceful motion with contortions.
She collaborated closely with composer Philip Daniel, who created a score of dramatic contrasts specific to her vision for the work. It was intense and rhythmic, drum-heavy in the first part; cutting to Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces” in the middle; and with more sweeping symphonic and vocal tones later, drawn out crescendi ramping up the tension and emotion.
Ballet is all about extension—trying to look taller and longer on stage than a person stands in reality—and Dahm pushed her dark clad dancers to the extreme: arched backs, rolls thudding onto the floor, jutting elbows, and high, twisting lifts. Animosity and torment laced the first portion: in one transition, two men aggressively leaned against each other like exhausted boxers.
And then…a silver manikin dropped from the rafters, instigating a one-sided funny/tragic duet-of-sorts during the Patsy Cline number.
More than a hint of dance rave followed, with dancers jumping in formation, tightly packed into a color changing spotlight. As they spread across the stage, stark side light flashed one side to another, creating a manic, mercurial energy, the dancers’ stoic expressions in quick shifting shadows.
And finally, where the piece had seemed to “hold on tight” with aggressive force, Dahm finished with a more gentle touch, a duet of tender struggle.
Audience members were on their feet before the curtain went up. Dahm’s work is well worth seeing again, and local audiences will get that chance next weekend at the Kauffman Center and then again when it’s performed by KCBallet in September, during next season’s New Dance Partners at Johnson County Community College’s Midwest Trust Center.
The second half of the program focused on famous works by two American choreographers from decades past and, side by side, presented an interesting contrast.
William Forsythe’s “In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated” was premiered in 1987 in Paris and first performed in Kansas City in 2019. The company excelled in this sophisticated work.
With its crashy, crunchy drum-machine-y score by Thom Willems, collaborating with Leslie Stuck, it retains a mid-80s aesthetic that keeps “of an era” rather than outdated. It’s a dark world (the work is part of a larger ballet with dystopian themes), the shady lighting and dark green costumes designed by Forsythe, too. The rhythmic music and repeated phrases—both in sound and movement—evolved through repetition into mesmerizing, periodically interrupted by sudden bursts of synth static.
The piece, overall, felt like a series of sharp breaths, suspended: the pauses, the tension, and the elongated, wide movements, stretching every gesture, grounded and dense.
On the other hand, the full company of dancers during Lila York’s “Celts” jumped and leaped and bounced with such consistency that it seemed like they spent as much time on stage as they spent above it. It was a joyous performance, especially from soloist Joshua Kiesel, whose gleeful bravado captivated in the flights of fancy inspired by Irish stepdance.
There were also suggestions of battle, the men barechested and grappling, as well as romance, with a graceful duet surrounded by the dancers kneeling or seated on the stage, their arms and legs making undulating movements, like naiads of the river.
There was something in the program to appeal to just about anyone, even those smitten with traditional tutu corps de ballet choreography. My young companion was unsure about the Forsythe piece beforehand, then when it ended said, “That was so cool!”
Reviewed Friday, May 9, 2025. The Kansas City Ballet performs “FUSION” May 16 and 17, 7:30 p.m. and May 18, 1:30 p.m. For more information visit kcballet.org.
