by Zoë Gorman
Photo credit: Lora Robertson
Making connections across artistic genres has proven to be one of the defining
features of 21st-century music, and The Impulse Wants Company—a new
ballet given life by a crew of budding artists—continued this trend, oozing collaborative
excellence at every turn.
Performed last week at the Joyce Theater, the ballet fused
the creative talents of composer Ellis Ludwig-Leone, the American Contemporary
Music Ensemble, choreographer Troy Schumacher, poet Cynthia Zarin, and the
BalletCollective, as part of the vBallet 6.0 Festival. In the program's first half the collaboration centered around bringing an original composition and
choreography together to exude the imagery and emotional effect of Zarin’s poem, whereas the second half focused more on the collaboration of the musical performers, who
wrote Epistasis (2012) by directly interacting with one another.
The title of the concert’s world premiere, The
Impulse Wants Company (2013), is particularly fitting: Zarin’s individual artistic
impulses were joined by an intimate collaboration of creative minds. The poem and
piece evoked scenes of a beach in summer, with sudden, attacking gestures in the
strings, reminiscent of seagull squawking, joined by rolling, ascending
scales in the piano that called to mind an ocean
tide approaching. Then the piano—Ludwig-Leone’s primary instrument—took off
with the melody and began a descending pattern contrary to a slowly ascending
tremolo progression in the strings.
In a dramatic break about twelve minutes in, the rolling
piano and sombre, mode-shifting strings transformed again to the ascending and
descending patterns of the tide in the pianos before coming to a halt on a loud
drum beat. The pounding continued as the strings reacted in a frenzy, as if
panicked by an explosion. The panic eventually ended, and all that was left were
the increasingly far-apart, yet ever-deadly drum beats. Expressive
and modernistic string parts ultimately found their complement in harmonically clear, tonal patterns, providing a joyous close that was sonically pleasant, yet still intriguing.
Both halves of the ballet featured expressive tonal
progressions and choreography, but the difference in process gave an
alternative feel once the curtain opened again. Originally an organic creation
modeled off the chamber music version of a “jam sesh,” Ludwig-Leone transcribed
and rearranged ACME’s Satellite Ensemble's Epistasis for the second half of the ballet. The piano
usually served as the driving force behind most of the melodic and motivic
development, often with a legato countermelody in the strings or sudden,
reiterated accents. Tremolos in the strings, pizzicato bass notes in the cello
ironing out the harmonies, and arpeggios up and down the keys built a
multitextured, polyphonic experience.
Particularly effective was Schumacher’s use of symmetry,
sometimes overlapping, to fit with the intertwining piano and string melodies.
While the music was fluid, it progressed through a multitude of flavors—an inherent effect of the collaborative nature of the writing process. The character of
the piece echoed a myriad of influences, from the scalar, descending patterns
of Vivaldi to the modernistic fingerboard slides of the Spectralists.
ACME’s next New York showing will be at Le Poisson Rouge on
September 10. Reserve tickets are available here.