Boston Ballet is in shape for Paris with ‘Spring Experience’

A former dancer at Kylián’s Nederlands Dans Theater, Ossola was in the original 1995 cast of “Bella Figura” and has staged that piece for Boston Ballet. He also created “Zoom In” for the “Process & Progress” program of the company’s virtual 2020-21 season. “The Space Between” was inspired by the “non finito” works of Michelangelo, specifically the four “Prisoner” statues intended for the tomb of Pope Julius II. Ossola collaborated on the original score, “Toccata for Orchestra and Live Electronics,” with music director Mischa Santora and jazz pianist and electronic artist Michael Cain.

At nearly 40 minutes, this is a major project. The Boston Ballet Orchestra starts it off with pizzicato strings and timpani; the brass chug over a steady ostinato, a syncopated melody develops, and the music settles into a kinetic groove. After eight minutes, the curtain rises on Lia Cirio and Jeffrey Cirio, both looking agitated and puzzled, perhaps wondering why they weren’t finished.

Over the next half hour, the score intersperses climaxes with lyric interludes while hinting at Broadway, jazz, and film; a ticking wood block might mark the passage of time. It’s pleasing to listen to but there’s no apparent direction. That’s true of the choreography as well. The nine men and seven women preen and gyrate as if trying to escape their marble confines. Duets ensue: María Alvarez and Paul Craig, Haley Schwan and Patrick Yocum, Abigail Merlis and John Lam, Seo Hye Han and Jeffrey Cirio, Lia Cirio and Daniel Rubin. Chyrstyn Fentroy has a languid solo, but nothing quite develops. Eventually the hypnotic electronic component of the score kicks in. “The Space Between” ends with all 16 dancers in a huddle, trying to writhe into existence, hardly any space between them. I wonder whether the piece couldn’t use some tightening. It’s certainly worth a second outing.

Boston Ballet premiered “Blake Works III (The Barre Project)” on 2022′s “MINDscape” program. This time out, Forsythe has upped the number of dancers from six to seven. The barre appears in the background but doesn’t feature in the angular, animated opening duet; to James Blake’s meditational “Lindisfarne I,” Schwan and Lawrence Rines Munro show off for themselves, each other, and the audience. Acrobatic solos accompany “Buzz and Kestrel”; My’Kal Stromile shimmies along the barre, Sun Woo Lee caresses it, Ji Young Chae barely touches it. Lia Cirio careers out centerstage before remembering the title of the work.

A brief video segment shows three sections of a barre in close-up, with hands playing them like a keyboard. Then a dimly lit Cirio, her arms tossing and turning, makes the barre her pillow as she solos to the nocturnal “Lullaby for My Insomniac.” The closer, to a throbbing, cowbell-laced “200 Press,” brings on Daniel Durrett as all seven dancers follow Blake’s instruction to “gather round the beat like a campfire”; amid the explosive solos, there’s a sinuous salsa turn for Cirio and Rines Munro. And we’re reminded that what they do with the barre makes possible what they do without it.

Boston Ballet has presented “Bella Figura” five times in town now and taken it to New York and London, so the piece is part of the company’s DNA. Its poster girls are the bare-chested pair in voluminous red skirts who, each pulling a black curtain from her side of the stage, meet in the center, kneel, and writhe in a slow-motion ecstasy of not quite touching each other, to the sublime Lento from Lukas Foss’s neo-Baroque “Salomon Rossi Suite.”

The rest of the music is actual Baroque, movements from Pergolesi (his “Stabat Mater”), Marcello, Vivaldi, and Torelli, all of it slow, almost penitential, accompanying Kylián’s battle of the sexes. The piece begins with seven of the nine dancers warming up in silence beneath a pair of nude mannequins in transparent coffins. To that same Foss Lento, Han struggles in the folds of a black curtain that seems to conceal an assailant while a cramped Lam, coiled upside down, tries to sort out his feet.

What follows is both quirky and mystifying. Schwan and Jeffrey Cirio find a curtain closing in on their duet; another curtain descends just as Lam seizes Han. Craig dog-walks a saluki-like Chisako Oga; then they change places. All nine dancers, wearing just those red skirts, sway chastely to the siciliana from a Torelli concerto grosso. The conclusion, to Pergolesi’s “Quando corpus morietur,” is a succession of ambivalent duets, with fires burning on both sides of the stage. Schwan and Yocum at least walk off hand in hand; Han and Jeffrey Cirio seem transfixed by the audience as they exit. Kylián withholds the “Amen,” so Lam and Lia Cirio, pulling each other’s hunched shoulders down, finish the piece in silence before leaving. We’re left to wonder.

SPRING EXPERIENCE

“The Space Between,” by Ken Ossola. “Blake Works III (The Barre Project),” by William Forsythe.” “Bella Figura,” by Jiří Kylián. Presented by Boston Ballet. At Citizens Bank Opera House, through May 19. Tickets $25-$185. 617-695-6955, www.bostonballet.org

Jeffrey Gantz can be reached at jeffreymgantz@gmail.com.