Kabaniaev's sweet 'Cinderella'

Rachel Howard, Special to The Chronicle

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Diablo Ballet is a chamber-size suburban troupe with a lot of assets. It's got nine solid dancers, a dedicated following among the denizens of its hometown, Walnut Creek, and steady high-profile patronage in the form of Ashraf Habibullah, president of an engineering firm called Computers and Structures Inc. (He was onstage at the Dean Lesher Regional Center for the Arts again Saturday night, wearing a tux and welcoming his employees in the audience to the Diablo Ballet family.)

But Diablo also has a problem: over-reliance on the choreography of Co-Artistic Director Nikolai Kabaniaev. This began four years ago with Kabaniaev's "The Magic Toy Store," a sturdy and likable reduction of Léonide Massine's "La Boutique Fantasque" that proved an overwhelming family hit. It became a problem as Kabaniaev's adaptations grew more absurd, and the choreography thinner: a ludicrous "Carmen" with endlessly mugging ghouls; a silly yet earnest existential "Petrushka."

And yet Kabaniaev has real skill for staging a story engagingly when he tells that story fairly straight.

REVIEW
Much writhing as 'Hamlet' takes a ballet turn
Rachel Howard, Special to The Chronicle

Monday, March 26, 2007

Can you make meaningful choreography out of "To be or not to be"? That remains the question. Whether it is possible to wring interesting movement ideas from the existential soliloquy of "Hamlet," one fact was clear during Diablo Ballet's 13th anniversary performances: Viktor Kabaniaev hadn't managed the feat.

His "Remembering Hamlet," premiered over the weekend at Walnut Creek's Dean Lesher Regional Center for the Arts, is a curious disappointment. Taking on "Hamlet" in dance may be pure folly, but Kabaniaev's reduction sounded promising. After all, Kabaniaev -- a Russian transplant with a gift for fluid, European-inspired movement and a penchant for high emotionality -- is the more talented of two brothers who choreograph for Diablo (his twin is the company's co-artistic director, Nikolai). And condensed versions of familiar stories rendered with a contemporary twist is just the sort of thing Diablo Ballet, with its roster of eight endearingly theatrical dancers, excels at.

'Hamlet' darkens upbeat program
By Mary Ellen Hunt
TIMES CORRESPONDENT
Shakespeare's "Hamlet" has been pared to its essence in Viktor Kabaniaev's "Remembering Hamlet," which Diablo Ballet unveiled Friday and Saturday at its performances at the Lesher Center for the Arts.

Staged as a three-person drama, Kabaniaev's latest work offers an abstract, capsule view of inner turmoil -- a meeting in purgatory of the three lost souls from one of Shakespeare's most oft-cited tragedies.

The arrangement is simple: Three lonely figures, who start out sitting primly on black, coffin-like boxes, dance one by one in expressionist, almost emotional solos.

Lauren Main de Lucia, in a blood-red dress, devours the stage with deep Martha Graham-like stretches. Tina Kay Bohnstedt, in white, ripples as she pours backwards over the edge of her box. And as the central man of inaction, Edward Stegge turns his solo into a continuous throw of momentum with pulses of movement that seem to ripple outward through his limbs.