Review | A new ballet tips ‘Evita’ Perón off her pedestal

‘Hamilton’ choreographer couldn’t find a show he liked. So he wrote one.

It’s no simple activity to wipe the slate clear on an iconic determine of stage and display, and to supply a contemporary tackle Argentina’s well-known first woman, who dominated her nation unofficially beside her husband, President Juan Perón, till her demise at 33 in 1952. But choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa does a outstanding job of tipping Eva “Evita” Perón off her pedestal on this 70-minute-long manufacturing, which opened Wednesday on the Kennedy Heart.

After we first meet her, Perón — carried out by Dandara Veiga, an artist of velvety magnificence and impeccable management — is stiffly posed. She is an empty icon, a figurine. So stiff, certainly, that she topples over, in a little bit of heady symbolism. A bare-chested crowd of dancers catches her. They set her on her platform once more, and the ritual of breakdown and restart repeats.

For dancers performing in museums, first rule is: Don’t bump into art

Wait, I hear you asking, why are the dancers naked chested? Good query! I refer you to the gods of dance photos. Perón, in actual life, affectionately referred to Argentina’s impoverished plenty as “los descamisados” — Spanish for “the shirtless ones.” Lopez Ochoa capitalizes on this as a dressing up motif for the male dancers of Ballet Hispánico.

But these males don’t spend a lot time writhing round Perón, for she doesn’t keep caught on her basis. By the top, she has turn into a creature of the air, hovering and uncatchable. In between, Lopez Ochoa’s work unfolds in dreamlike snapshots. The impact is like flipping by means of a scrapbook with a couple of lacking and torn pages.

We see flashes of her damaged household life, the place it helps to know beforehand (because it’s a bit unclear within the dance) that younger Eva’s father had one other household on the facet. Quickly we’re whirling together with her by means of a hungry quest for approval and stardom. She’s the hit of a nightclub, kicking her legs to the sky, slinking from suitor to suitor. She cartwheels within the arms of 1 and spirals immediately towards one other, a heartless capturing star arcing to new conquests. The boys prepare their smartphones on her, fixing her in at the moment’s social media firmament. For if Perón have been alive, she’d have one heck of an Instagram account.

Mark Morris’s tribute to Burt Bacharach is what the world needs now

The climate modifications when dashing Juan Perón walks in (Chris Bloom, with an air of measured coolness). Out of the blue, Veiga is perched on his shoulder, not a chilly temptress however a kitten. You may nearly hear her mew.

There are piercing hints of the most cancers that can declare her life. At one level Veiga’s Eva spins slowly between two males in white coats — docs, presumably — whereas Bloom’s Juan Perón exchanges a tense look with one other, and eventually ends the standoff with a curt nod. This easy, remoted gesture poignantly telegraphs his smothered turmoil.

All through, there are waltzes, smoky tangos, airborne flights in all method of gasp-inducing brilliance from a splendid ensemble swept into movement by Peter Salem’s lush, agitated music, carried out reside. Ballet Hispánico is on the prime of its sport right here, and Lopez Ochoa shows the dancers’ silken, protean skills superbly. However, beautiful as it’s, not all the dancing works dramatically or strikes the story ahead.

Washington audiences might know Lopez Ochoa’s work from a number of collaborations with the Washington Ballet and different teams. Curiously, her “creative collaborator” in “Doña Perón” was theater director Nancy Meckler; the 2 teamed up beforehand to create a dance model of Tennessee Williams’s play “A Streetcar Named Desire” for the Scottish Ballet. (It got here to the Kennedy Heart in 2015.) Lopez Ochoa’s works are deeply theatrical and expressionistic, and this one is not any completely different. It’s not a lot a reassessment of Perón as a prismatic view of her, as a creature of sturdy appetites and deep emotions, a lady with a big coronary heart and likewise a chilly one, and as an unstoppable pressure who enchanted her husband and her folks and who, many years after her demise, nonetheless guards her secrets and techniques. There’s a lot thriller about Eva Perón; in “Doña Perón,” that is her most memorable high quality.

Should you can’t catch this work earlier than it leaves city, you might be able to see it at dwelling in a couple of months. A PBS digital camera crew recorded Wednesday’s efficiency for “Subsequent on the Kennedy Heart,” slated to air in spring 2023.

A last notice: That is my final evaluate as dance critic for The Washington Submit, as I will likely be shifting on to different issues and The Submit is eliminating the dance critic place. I really feel it’s becoming that my last efficiency was this one — a deeply looking out work of nice ambition, humanity and compassion. These qualities sum up one of the best of what I’ve seen in dance over time, and what I’ve endeavored to seize and interpret in phrases. Dance artists brim with illuminating tales to inform about our world and our lives, and I dearly hope that dancer-led tales proceed to be embraced, examined and celebrated. This isn’t the time, it appears to me, for a slender outlook. This appears a very necessary time to enlarge it.

Ballet Hispánico performs “Doña Perón” on the Kennedy Heart Eisenhower Theater by means of Dec. 3. $35-$129. kennedy-center.org.