Miami City Ballet’s Your Perfect Golden Hour, presented at The Parker in Fort Lauderdale on April 11 and 12, brought together four works from the company’s existing repertoire. The program paired Amy Hall Garner’s “Resplendent Fantasy,” José Limón’s “Chaconne” and “The Moor’s Pavane,” and Alonzo King’s “Following the Subtle Current Upstream,” a lineup that asked the company to shift rapidly between contemporaries. It was also my first time at The Parker, and it felt like an ideal room for ballet. So much dance in South Florida is experienced in spaces that emphasize scale and grandeur, at the cost of distance. The Parker offers something else. The stage never feels small, but the theater does feel intimate and personal. That closeness served this particular program well because Your Perfect Golden Hour was all about texture and tension.
The opener, “Resplendent Fantasy,” was the revelation of the afternoon for me. Choreographed by Amy Hall Garner, the piece is described in the program as a celebration of the union of movement and music, and that is exactly how it landed. Danced here by Adrienne Carter, Rui Cruz, Mayumi Enokibara, Nicole Stalker, and Damian Zamorano, it immediately established a vivid rapport between the five dancers and the score. The costumes helped seal the effect, giving the work a visual elegance that felt both contemporary and theatrical. More importantly, the dancers seemed to inhabit the piece. I was especially struck by how assured the whole thing felt; it impressed me deeply.
Then came “Chaconne,” José Limón’s solo set to Bach, performed here by Satoki Habuchi with Mei Mei Lou on violin. The work is undeniably beautiful, but this was the one piece in the program that did not fully reach me in performance. Habuchi is an elegant dancer, and the architecture of the choreography remained clear, yet for much of the solo I felt a distance between dancer and material. The body was there, the phrasing was there, but the investment seemed withheld until the very end, when suddenly the dance opened. That late ignition made the conclusion more affecting, but it also highlighted what had felt missing earlier.
“The Moor’s Pavane,” also from Limón, compresses jealousy, manipulation, and catastrophe into a devastating chamber tragedy for four dancers in a medieval or Renaissance-style setting. Miami City Ballet cast Steven Loch as the Moor, Chase Swatosh as his friend, Hannah Fisher as the friend’s wife, and Ashley Knox as the Moor’s wife, and together they made the story grimly captivating. The work’s use of restraint only sharpens its use of violence. Every formal gesture feels shadowed by suspicion.
“The Moor’s Pavane,” also from Limón, compresses jealousy, manipulation, and catastrophe into a devastating chamber tragedy for four dancers in a medieval or Renaissance-style setting. Miami City Ballet cast Steven Loch as the Moor, Chase Swatosh as his friend, Hannah Fisher as the friend’s wife, and Ashley Knox as the Moor’s wife, and together they made the story grimly captivating. The work’s use of restraint only sharpens its use of violence. Every formal gesture feels shadowed by suspicion.The program closed with Alonzo King’s “Following the Subtle Current Upstream,” danced by an ensemble including Dawn Atkins, whose presence remains one of the company’s great gifts. I had seen the work before, and it was just as strong this time. What stayed with me again was its sense of collective intelligence, bodies listening to one another as much as to its incredible, layered score. Dawn Atkins, in particular, is a treasure for Miami City Ballet, radiant and utterly commanding without ever seeming to strain for effect. She gives the choreography soul.
