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Breaking Glass Project: Claudia Schreier & Company
By R. Pikser Claudia Schreier’s evening of works at the Ailey Center was the culmination of her year-long mentorship by The Breaking Glass Project, started in 2013 in New York by Ellenore P. Scott of ELSCO Dance and Nathalie Matychak of MATYCHAK and extended to Los Angeles in 2014. The Project’s goal is to help female choreographers reach their full potential; to this end, award recipients receive a year of artistic and organizational mentorship. The evening’s pieces, which included three world premieres, two of them performed to live music, enjoyed the participation of members of some of the most prestigious ballet companies in the United States: American Ballet Theatre, Dance Theatre of Harlem, the Los Angeles Ballet, the New York City Ballet, and the Suzanne Farrell Ballet, all of them technically impeccable. Ms. Schreier’s work at this point in her career owes much to Balanchine: there are many arabesques and extensions; movement is quick; lines are clear, sculpture intertwines the dancers. The whole forms a visually satisfying intellectual puzzle that is hard to grasp in one, or even two viewings.
The music that Ms. Schreier seems to prefer, whether of American Jeffrey Beal, or Dutch Douwe Eisenga has a driving underbeat that dominates melody; unfortunately this style of music did not provide the dancers with stimulation to explore different approaches to their movement. Even in the two pieces performed to Franck (Anomie) or to de Victoria and Rachmaninoff (Vigil), there was little interplay between the choreography and the music. In the premiere Vigil, though the chorus, Tapestry, was arranged in a semi-circle on stage behind the two soloists, the singers and the dancers seemed to occupy two separate, if contiguous, worlds, rather than being part of one integrated theatrical experience. The same criticism may be made of the premiere of Almost Morning to Jeff Beal’s Almost Morning, also premiered on this evening. The piano quartet, placed in the upstage right corner of the stage, occupied the most powerful visual stage position in cultures that read from top to bottom, left to right; yet the musicians were never included in the choreography. If the musicians dominate the stage, why does the choreography ignore them?
In fact, throughout the evening, in spite of the many interesting formal interplays in partnering and staging, the dancers barely related to each other. Drew Grant was the exception to this rule: Every time he placed a hand on a partner or looked at someone, it was almost a seduction. He created relationships on the stage. De’Von Doane’s energies and pleasure in dancing left the stage to be warmly projected outward to the audience. Anomie, a piece from 2009 was interesting because Ms. Schreier’s varied her style. The piece began and ended with two suggestive partnering sculptures that hinted at an emotional underpinning. The movement attempted to incorporate fluid body movements and curves into the choreography. The subtext of the piece could have been love, or loss, or longing, or even playfulness. Though the dancers, especially Mr. Grant and Lydia Wellington, seemed to be at the point of going beyond the pure movement to a more complex level of interpretation, no one found a way of initiating movement from the center of the body as the choreography seemed to cry out for. The final piece of the evening, another premiere, also to music by Mr. Eisenga, had the largest cast and showed Ms. Schreier’s considerable intellectual abilities to their best advantage. Entrances and exits flowed seamlessly from the movement, as the dancers picked up or paralleled each others’ movements; combinations and recombinations of shapes and groupings were dazzling in their variety; and the movement, though cleanly modern was almost Baroque in the fugal complexity of its structuring. Another plus in this was the presences of Nayara Lopes who, for all the speed and complexity of movement, managed to revel in her dancing and to help us remember that dance derives from the ecstatic. Ms. Schreier is clearly talented and her intellect is impressive. However, her work could be so much richer if there were more exploration between the dancers, between the dancers and the musicians, and between the dancers and the subtext that seems to be suggested by the pieces. Breaking Glass Project 
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