Carolina Ballet draws on Picasso for latest performance

The Carolina Ballet’s Picasso features four ballets inspired by the Nasher Museum of Art’s exhibition Picasso and the Allure of Language. As though performing a ballet inspired by an art exhibition celebrating a painter’s relationship to writing is not ambitious enough, Picasso chooses four very different samples of the artist’s work to motivate each piece.

 To begin, the ballet reaches back into biblical history with Salome, choreographed by Richard Weiss. Typically, Salome is portrayed as a seductress. She beguiles her father into promising her anything she wants with her captivating dance, then demands John the Baptist’s death. The ballet, however, captures a more complex heroine, trapped between a mother’s jealous demands and her own young love. Randi Osetek’s nuanced performance of Salome memorializes the forgiveness evoked by the delicate drypoint print Picasso created after reading a poem written in Salome’s voice.  

Guernica, the next piece, is inspired by Picasso’s chaotic depiction of the city’s destruction during the Spanish Civil War. Long-limbed and frail, dancer Lara O’Brien curls into herself protectively, then stretches her arms out as if striving for survival. Five strapping men alternate between carrying her carefully, bending as she climbs high on their backs and throwing her violently to one another. Attila Bongar’s choreography reveals the complicated, tragic interaction between men and their city. 

The next dance, Weiss’s Picasso’s Harlequins, is a welcome reprieve from Guernica’s sorrowful destruction. It serves as a powerful reminder of the imposing emotional power of delight. Two couples dressed in the joyful jester checkers of Picasso’s harlequin paintings tease, tempt and twirl one another flirtatiously. Each dancer is definitively precious. David Heuvel costumes the dancers like candies in stained-glass colors, detailed with red ribbons.

In The Song of the Dead, Weiss uses two dancers to represent the red brush strokes Picasso used to adorn the letters in poet Pierre Reverdy’s Le Chant des Morts. Together, the two move toward six dancing couples, touching them gently. Awakened, the couples express loss and yearning through their dances. 

The show’s roots remain loyally locked in Picasso’s art. From there, however, the choreography reaches up and entangles. Fluent in the languages of art and emotion, the ballet captures how disparate sentiments and mediums coexist, connect and inform one another. Whether it’s death, dancing or cheeky flirtation, affective art captures humanity at the height of its expression.

The ballet runs through Nov. 1 at the Fletcher Opera Theater in Raleigh. For more information, visit carolinaballet.com/picasso