A frequent hiking partner (and season ticket holder to the Colorado Ballet) nudged me into accompanying her to the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet performance in Denver on Nov. 1. The program consisted of 4 short works, Petal (choreography by Helen Pickett), Slingerland (William Forsythe), Chameleon (Itzik Galili), and 1st Flash (Jorma Elo) (and 2 lengthy intermissions). Despite my lack of dance knowledge, I'll go ahead and arbitrarily label these as: Petal - modern ballet, Slingerland - classical ballet, Chameleon - pantomine, and 1st Flash - modern dance.

The dancers all were extremely athletic and they were incredibly together rhythm-wise at all times. The whole program was executed flawlessly. My friend was really impressed (especially by Petal). But I just couldn't connect with the performance. It took me until mid-way through the last work to think of a reason why. What I decided was missing FOR ME was that all the pieces except Chameleon were abstract (and I thought that Chameleon, which involved 5 women more-or-less sitting in chairs and making a variety of sweet, pouty, gracious, and impolite gestures, was kind of dumb) and none built towards any sort of emotional climax or for that matter seemed to go anywhere. It just seemed sterile to me. Maybe I'm just a bit old-fashioned?

Well, "sterile" abstraction can already be dated back nearly a century, so it too could be imagined as "old fashioned" already.