Juggling two art forms
Ballet gets a new partner on American stages
BETHESDA, Md. — Both art forms rely on grace, movement and creating patterns. And both are dependent on gravity, which can quickly upend each.
But ballet and juggling have rarely combined as they do in "4X4: Ephemeral Architectures," a piece uniting the circus practice with the classical dance form.
Choreographed by Royal Ballet dancer Ludovic Ondiviela and directed by noted juggler Sean Gandini, "4X4" makes its U.S. debut Sunday at the Music Center at Strathmore in Bethesda. It premiered at the 2015 London International Mime Festival.
Balls, rings and clubs fly through the air from four jugglers, as four dancers leap among them in what has turned out to be an easier marriage than originally imagined, Gandini said in a recent phone interview from London.
"They were surprisingly similar, at least to our eyes," he said. "We felt like they were good bedfellows." After all, he added, juggling and ballet "both deal with time and space. And the title of the piece has the word ' ephemeral' in it. They both draw these things that vanish as soon as you've done them."
When Gandini approached Ondiviela about working together, Ondiviela had no experience with juggling whatsoever.
"I hadn't really experienced seeing juggling before," he said. "My idea of juggling was extremely limited." But, once in rehearsal, "I was surprised of how much you could do, actually," he said, adding that he admired the work ethic of the jugglers, who "spend hours and hours to refine their art, because it is their art."
There can be some peril to the process.
"There's a section ( in ' 4X4') which is still quite a gamble every time we do it, where we do very geometrical club passing and the dancers skip through it," Gandini said. "And the dancers are doing very complicated steps as they going through these clubs. If you miscount by a half a beat basically, you get a club on your head."
One dancer was particularly wary at first, Gandini said, but would not show her fear. Clearly it was not something she had ever encountered in the ballet studio.
"As a dancer you have a lot of think about," Ondiviela said. "You have to think about musicality, you have to think about your space, yourself within the space, you also have to think about your body and how it works. So then having to think about all that and then having to not get hit by balls — that was a quite challenge for the dancers."
But, he added, "I think they were all excited about it. Because it was something quite new, something that hadn't been seen before." And, he noted, "you get hit by a ball once, twice, and you learn not to get hit again."
The dancers may have had little experience with juggling, but most of the jugglers came from a dance background and began taking daily ballet classes once they were involved in the project.
"What we tried not to do, though, was to try to get the jugglers to move in an unnecessarily balletic way," Gandini said, "because they have a natural movement which I think suits them more than if they tried to emulate the bal-
let dancers."
It helps that the Cuban-born Gandini was devoted to mathematics before he turned to juggling at age 16 in London. With his wife, Kati Yla-Hokkala, he formed the Gandini Juggling company, which has created a number of shows
involving the form, from an homage to dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch to one marking the London Olympics.
They also contributed juggling to a Los Angeles Opera production of "Akhenaten" in November. "It's a Philip Glass opera that has a lot of repetitive structures," Gandini said. "We choreographed and matched a lot of structures."
When "4X4" premiered in
London, one critic said, "it's hard to see where the limbs stop and the clubs begin, or where the arc of a ball becomes extended by the arm of a dancer."
Ondiviela said that because the work was presented in the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, it attracted a dance audience.
"People didn't know what to expect — just as I didn't know what to expect when I first got in the stu-
dio with them," the dancer said. "And I think they were pleasantly surprised how ballet and juggling really married themselves very well, although the idea of it might not come to anyone as something that would work."
Ondiviela said the work attracted "dance audiences and juggling audiences and also people who would not normally go to ballet because they think it's reserved for
a certain elite. But all of a sudden, because it is mixed with a juggling company, I think people think it's more approachable."
In the end, Gandini said, "I would say we've introduced more circus people to ballet than ballet people to circus. But the dance audiences who have come to see it have been very generous. And I like how differently they read it than a circus."