Performing Arts

The light was subdued, the tone somber, the style elegant. Or, to use a metaphor, it was gray upon gray upon gray, a palette that under other hands could have easily canceled itself out. But Aspen Santa Fe Ballet, appearing under the auspices of TITAS on Friday night at SMU's McFarlin Auditorium, proved that as in music, variations on a theme have the cumulative effect of drawing you in, while widening the scope of the theme.

BEN FREDMAN/DMN

Members of the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet stretched their arms, legs and emotions in Nicolo Fonte's Left Unsaid in a show presented by TITAS at Southern Methodist University's McFarlin Auditorium.

The primary theme, exemplified to different degrees in all four works, was the complex interplay of couples. Limbs stretched out in all angles, like the blades of a Swiss knife snapping open and shut.

In Nicolo Fonte's Left Unsaid for three couples and three chairs and set to a violin solo by Bach, all the undercurrent of emotion surfaces in those interlocking limbs. A contrasting dynamic was in play as men strode in between. Chairs – pushed and upended, stood on and stretched out upon – added yet another level of tension.

In William Forsythe's Slingerland, dim light had the effect of blurring the distinction between where one body started and the other ended. But as soon as Katherine Eberle, in a cream-colored flat disc of a tutu, edged away from Sam Chittenden, every angle was cleanly etched.

Twyla Tharp's witty Sinatra Suite and its nightclub ambience let Katie Dehler and Seth DelGrasso move from cautious to tender to anger-laced ambivalence, with a dose of humor tossed in.

Only in Jorma Elo's 1st Flash, set to Jean Sibelius's emotionally charged music, do the six dancers scatter and regroup. Their movement was idiosyncratic, explosive at one moment, and simply odd at another, with the occasional duet adding complexity.

Margaret Putnam is a Richardson-based writer who covers dance.

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