Sarah Halzack of the Washington Post was enchanted by ABT’s The Dream Tuesday night at Kennedy Center. The Washington audience was fortunate to see Herman Cornejo as Puck. I’ve seen him in that role several times and I fully agree with Sarah:
“Surely there’s not a ballet dancer today who is better suited than Herman Cornejo for the part of Puck. Cornejo often imbues his dancing with a certain impish charm, and what vehicle could be better for that than the role of this elfin prankster? Cornejo also reminded us what a brilliant technician he is, with straddle jumps that looked like they came off a trampoline and pirouettes that stopped on a dime after a jaw-dropping number of spins. (Was that six rotations? Eight? He does them too fast to count.)”
She was not impressed with Les Sylphides, with no mention of the lead dancers:
“But whatever the reason, the execution of this ethereal dance felt sloppy. In a section in which the women were supposed to be traveling shoulder-to-shoulder in a line, there was a temporary gap between dancers. When the group was supposed to be swaying with the unfailing continuity of a pendulum, there were moments of quickness that interrupted the flow. Those kinds of blips made it hard to fall under the dance’s spell.”
She thought that Marcelo Gomes’ Aftereffect, which premiered in the last ABT fall season “…was pleasant enough to watch, if not terribly memorable,” and not distinctive from the works of modern-dance choreographers such as Mark Morris.
ABT’s Kennedy Center run concludes with Don Quixote from Thursday through Sunday.