Frances Chiaverini and her fellow dancers bring technical precision and elegance to Euripides’ tale of a man punished for defying the gods. Unfortunately, they’re limited by Luca Veggetti’s bland and repetitive choreography. (Kyle Froman)
It takes work to make one of the grisliest Greek myths completely bloodless. But on Tuesday night, Luca Veggetti did just that to “Bacchae.”
The show is the product of Morphoses, a troupe with a drama all its own. It was founded four years ago by choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, darling of New York City Ballet, with Lourdes Lopez, a former principal dancer. But Wheeldon continued moonlighting with freelance work, and left the group last year because of scheduling conflicts. Lopez decided to soldier on without him, reinventing the company as a laboratory with a rotating artistic leadership.
This production, the reincarnated group’s first, has a sleek, stripped-down glamour: a dark stage surrounded on three sides by black, rippling fabric. There’s no scenery, but a platform in the center; the music comes from a solo flutist and the amplified noises of the dancers’ movement.
The source material, Euripides’ “The Bacchae,” tells the gruesome tale of a man who flouts the gods and gets flayed alive by a pack of crazed women. The plot is synopsized in the program, but all Veggetti offers is a generic brooding atmosphere and snippets in portentous voice-overs. There’s also a live media feed to Casita Maria, a Bronx cultural organization, and Zaitzeff, a Lower East Side restaurant, but the bloodiest thing in this “Bacchae” is the bistro’s burger.
At least there’s elegant dancing, particularly from three leads, Frances Chiaverini, Gabrielle Lamb and New York City Ballet soloist Adrian Danchig-Waring. Veggetti has a recognizable choreographic style. The catlike dancers, wearing socks to let them slide easily across the floor, do limber, sweeping phrases that curl, skid and then stop.
But there’s little variety, and less emotion. Although “Bacchae” clocks in at less than an hour, Veggetti’s imagination winds down much earlier, and a Greek tragedy turns into an empty display.
It’s good to take artistic risks, even if they fail, but it would have been better if “Bacchae” had failed in an interesting way — and gone out on a limb with a severed arm or two.