The Prague Post
September 7th, 2008
Endowment Fund     Business Listings ONLINE      Reservations      Classifieds    Subscriptions
Hotel Prague Centre

Home » Archives » Night & Day

Everything but the kitchen sink

An engaging quartet showcases Prague's young dance talent
Stage Review | Search restaurants | Archives

By Brooke Edge
For The Prague Post
January 30th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
In the Martinů piece, the dancers offer a whimsical take on everyday objects.
enlarge
The Kitchen Revue

When: Thursday, Jan. 31, at 7
Where: Estates Theater
Tickets: 60–250 Kč, available through Ticketportal and at National Theater box offices

For the most recent ballet premiere at the Estates Theater, the crowd was full of little girls all dressed up for a night out, along with proud parents and grandparents toting bouquets of flowers to bestow upon dancers as post-performance congratulations. The audience was also filled with forward-thinking local ballet fans, hoping to get an early look at up-and-coming dance talent.  
The Kitchen Revue is a showcase of four works performed by students of the Prague Dance Conservatory. The title comes from the opening piece, composed by Bohuslav Martinů in 1927 during a stay in Paris, where he fell in love with performances by Les Ballets Russe, the defining dance troupe of the early 20th century.
Martinů wrote The Kitchen Revue expressly as a ballet, which debuted in Brno in 1929. It incorporates popular dance music of the day, like ragtime and the Charleston, and is a lovely, upbeat work. However, it debuted at the tail end of the Roaring Twenties and quickly faded into obscurity.
This revival marks the first time the piece is being accompanied by dance at the Estates Theater. To create new choreography for The Kitchen Revue, the Dance Conservatory turned to Jiří Srnec, best known as a director of black-light theater. He took the title of Martinů’s score literally, creating a work in which utilitarian objects from the kitchen come to life, including a scrubber, a dishcloth, a pot, a lid and a broom.
Dancers dressed as clowns, kitchen maids and ringmasters, together with black-light artistry, bring the objects to life. Adults in the audience may find the effect to resemble a crazy cleanser commercial, but for children the nonsensical ballet brings the imagination of playtime alive onstage, with mock battles, flirtations and innocent fun. The utensils are pals and dance around together, infused with the stage presence of budding professional dancers.
The Dance Conservatory students are well-trained and beautifully skilled, but at numerous points through the evening what they have left to learn makes itself apparent. In particular, a few lifts landed hard in this piece and others. No one was dropped and recoveries were quick, but they elicited some gasps of worry from the audience.  
The night turned a dramatic corner with the next work, the elegant Evening Songs by internationally renowned Czech choreographer Jiří Kylián. This piece is one of his more restrained, classical works, set to music by Dvořák. Kylián is plainly reverential of the music, and his choreography complements Dvořák beautifully. Both elements work together, infusing each other with greater meaning and flooding the viewers’ senses.
Kylián’s immense talent as a choreographer is all the more evident following the opening children’s piece — without any showy lifts or gimmicks, his work is unspeakably moving.
Evening Songs is lovely and feminine, but not frothy, beginning with a trio of dancers in clay-colored, flowing skirts. The women are the strength of this piece, more impressive and assured than the men who enter later.
The third performance is a lovely pas de deux, Musica Slovaca. As the title intimates, the focus of this piece, choreographed by Pavel Šmok, is the music. In the program notes, Šmok explains that he fell in love with the folk music of his native rural Slovakia, and his choreography for this short ballet encapsulates his ardor for his country.
The choreographer’s love of this music is evident from beginning to end of the piece, and the two dancers, Nikola Hauptvogelová and Jiří Havelka, seem to feel it as well. They absolutely radiate the beauty of new love and the folk music themes, perfect for young dancers and extremely well-executed by them. The ballet looks like sheer happiness, how you would move if you could dance the process of falling in love.
If Musica Slovaca is a choreographed interpretation of young love, the night’s final piece, Getting Dark, is an interpretation of young hormones. If your early teenage years were anything like mine, you know that hormones weren’t always pleasant to deal with, and they don’t look any better onstage.
Young men and women show off for each other, flexing, fighting and flirting, assuming schoolyard imitations of adult relationship postures. The choreography by Libor Vaculík is cutesy but far from endearing, and notably inferior to the previous piece.
The work has the subtlety and grace of middle-school romance, with a pelvis-thrusting, T&A-flaunting shtick that goes on way too long. It’s like a ballet version of the basic plot of every raunchy teen sex comedy — young people on a quest to get laid.
This may not be enjoyable anytime, but is especially jarring when performed in the same two-hour span as the childish innocence of The Kitchen Revue. When the offstage sex noises began, I was glad to be sitting a few seats away from the nearest taffeta-clad, 6-year-old ballet fan.  
While it ends on an uncomfortable note, in total The Kitchen Revue is an admirable, enjoyable evening of dance. It’s an especially nice option for parents who might want to take their children to a ballet other than The Nutcracker.
And I’ll bet the sex farce goes right over the heads of the under-10 set anyway.

Brooke Edge can be reached at features@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (30/01/2008):

Browse the Current Issue

If you enjoyed this article, why don't you subscribe to the print version!
We accept secure online transactions provided by PayPal and Moneybookers

Be the first to add a comment!


Full Name: *
City: *
E-mail: **
This comment can be published in the print version of The Prague Post
Enter the text on the right:
 visual captcha
Comment: *
* Required field. In order to be approved for display, comments must have a first and last name and a city.
** E-mails are required and will only be used for internal purposes.

Most visited in Business Listings

Provokator
Hotel booking
The Prague Post Online contains a selection of articles that have been printed in
The Prague Post, a weekly newspaper published in the Czech Republic.
To subscribe to the print paper, click here.
Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited.