Complexions Contemporary Ballet Review
March 20, 2025 | The Kennedy Center – Washington, D.C., USA
It’s hard to believe that, for the first time since their founding in 1994, Thursday, March 20th was the opening night of Complexions Contemporary Ballet’s first full company performance at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Technically and creatively, Complexions has been at the forefront of American contemporary ballet for decades and co-directors Dwight Rhoden and Desmond Richardson’s work has had a lasting impact.
That impact was on full display in the opening work Black is Beautiful showcasing students from the Howard University Dance Department. Black is Beautiful originally premiered in 2021 during COVID 19 as a dance film featuring Complexions company dancers.
During a 2023 residency at Howard University, Rhoden and Richardson, together with dancers from the company, brought the choreography to life as a live work. It was a strong technical performance from a talented group of students.
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Complexions Contemporary Ballet Review
The first act of the evening’s main program – all choreographed by Rhoden – began with the two most recent works, both choreographed in 2024.
This Time, With Feeling, set to an original score by David Rozenblatt, opened with the dancers pressed into the downstage. Lit by high upstage lights through the haze, the dancers in their purple shorts and halter topped leotards seemed to glow with a silver lining as the light glanced off their limbs. It was minimalist, but still lush.
This Time, With Feeling built slowly.
The partnering was especially fabulous - a hallmark of Complexions’ work and something which set the tone for the whole evening.
Dancers on pointe and on flat took turns exchanging partnered lines as phrases kept resolving to a rotating lift – one dancer draping their back around the other, both pointe shoes in the air. Every time the lift appeared the momentum grew until a single couple remained forever spinning into the blackout.
This Time, With Feeling may have been a little dry, but the power of precision, the partnering, and the way the choreography sat at the technical limits of the line felt emblematic of Complexions’ dancers, and Rhoden’s work.
Deeply, a pas de trois excerpted from a larger work and performed by Jillian Davis, Joe González, and Diego Tápanes and set to Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel, was my favorite work of the evening.
Spiegel im Spiegel has been a frequent subject of choreographic study. The most well known might be the often excerpted duet from Christopher Wheeldon’s After the Rain but choreographers Mats Ek, John Neumeier, and Pilobolus are just a few of the others who have tackled Pärt’s deceptively simple classic.
With a piece of music as well known and overdetermined as Spiegel im Spiegel it can be difficult to find new depth.
However in a creative exploration of tripartite weight sharing coupled with an unmistakable choreographic voice, Rhoden found something unique and powerfully evocative.
There are few choreographers who can get as much effective mileage out of a single extension.
Davis’s massive tilts, eternally rooted, before breaking the line at the knee and being slid to the floor, were mesmerizing. Tápanes in contrast was ready to fling himself with abandon through the air into González’s arms. All three slipped around each other in edgeless loops before coming to rest in a multiple counterbalance; there was an emotional mobile mirrored in the kinetic one.
The two following works, Gone and Ave Maria were both dives into Complexions’ extensive back catalogue.
With it’s dancers under Matrix-green lights, Gone, choreographed in 2000, brought some of the evening’s best rhythmic structures in broken but still groovy syncopations.
Ave Maria, a pas de deux choreographed in 1995, was the other standout work of the first act. Set to music from the Giulio Caccini opera (not Schubert’s hugely popular 1825 song of the same name), Ave Maria danced by April Watson and González was fiercely passionate.
Huge suspended positions floated along the soaring vocals and baroque strings, punctuated by an urgent sharpness in the legs and feet. Watson’s long balance in a grand plié in second position on pointe two thirds of the way through the work drew an extended round of applause.
The first act closed with an excerpt from 2009’s Mercy. Mercy had all the technique, precision, and power on display throughout the program, but it felt overshadowed by the music.
Hans Zimmer’s epic 160 BPM was originally written as credits music for the film Angels and Demons – a genre of music which exists to occupy the entire sensory bandwidth of a cinema audience. Especially compared to the other music in the first act, it left little room for the dancers to occupy. No matter how they leapt, flung, or tilted, the dancers always seemed to be shouting over the score.
While the first act at its most evocative took deep dives into specific relationships and choreographic ideas, the freestanding excerpt from For Crying Out Loud which made up the second act, felt more like a journey.
Set to the driving but laid back music of U2, For Crying Out Loud was also an exceptional example of choreographic craft. Over half a dozen songs, huge slides, spiraling lifts, and a thematic running step wove in and through each other morphing into new expressions, solos, and large group sections before reappearing with Bono’s unhurried vocals.
It’s impossible to write about this show without addressing the context of its moment.
Portraits of the sitting President – and newly elected Kennedy Center Board Chairman – Vice President, and First and Second Ladies have recently been hung in the Hall of Nations. Noxious and incongruously pulling focus while simultaneously vanishing into the grandeur and quiet bustle of the hall. A few disgusted-looking theater goers paused to take photos of the new exhibit on their way out.
Although Thursday’s performance was well attended, ticket sales at the Kennedy Center have plummeted nearly 50% in recent weeks. The cancellations of performances, both by the Kennedy Center and performers, have been widely reported and are steadily increasing. The Kennedy Center regularly announces its upcoming season in early March, but as of this writing that had not yet occurred.
Complexions is American contemporary ballet at its best and highlighting that kind of exceptionalism is what the Kennedy Center exists to do. But it is an opportunity that is slipping away.
Featured Photo of Complexions Contemporary Ballet‘s Christian Burse in Dwight Rhoden’s For Crying Out Loud. Photo by Taylor Craft.
