Top Hat

Salt Lake City has a pretty good ballet company Ballet West.  Not great or New York good, but pretty good, and well worth watching (or paying to see I should say).  I go once or twice a year.  They have a short program season, half to two-thirds of which I cannot bear.  Not because of the dancers but the choreography.  Nutcracker -- no never again without a small person who has never seen it, and probably never at all except at the best companies.  And then they do an old big thing, La Bayadere (which is not old, but still lumbers a bit).  I try to go to the programs with short pieces and multiple choreographers.  Which is a long way to a short review of the last show of the season.
As I said, good dancers.  They are always a bit better than I expect them to be.  And they do the traditional stuff very well indeed (relative to being here).  The corps is pretty good and good at being a corp.  (Plenty of times I say ABT corps perform anything but as a corp, so it is an accomplishment.)  So the ending program was a nice mix of traditional and modern ballet choreography Balanchine's Serenade (which was quite nice), Caniparoli's Hamlet and Ophelia which I likes a lot, followed by Bruce Marks' Continuo.  Most of the last was  last.  Not very interesting, beyond a piece for a lot of men to dance.  A few good bits, but overall nothing more than passing time.  Show ended with Twyla Tharp's Nine Sinatra Songs, very funny dance.  Done well, the dance is very funny, even if you don't know much about dance.  Funny and interesting.  But, what I found interesting is that Ballet West did a bad job with it.  The dancers knew their parts (even if various bits of costuming fell off).  And they did some impressive things, particularly when one dancer lost her shoe, all fine.  It was clear, however, that they could not perform the dance properly -- they were not loose enough I think, or not quite something.  I fell into the notion that because the Tharp piece is more relaxed, that a lesser company would be better at it.  On the contrary, and to my surprise.  I've seen it done a number of times, with the likes of Baryshnikov and Farrell.  But this performance showed me just how really accomplished the performances were, how very difficult it is.  It was a surprise to me to realize that the piece is hard for anyone not at the very top of ballet, or perhaps trained as modern or jazz dancer. 
I know this seems to end negatively.  I enjoyed the show and will be back, and the dancers are good.

And the really odd thing, the thing that is astonishing, is that Ballet West is one of about half a dozen pretty good to decent professional companies in Utah, that Utah supports more and better professional dance than Los Angeles.