When Your Lover Has Gone - Duet

And now we have a second pas de deux.

Abby returns to the stage, but she has traded Askar for Pali.



This piece was a delight to choreograph. It was also the last piece set for the ballet. It has a more dramatic flavor than the piece with Askar.



Abby has such a pretty quality to her dancing that she doesn't often get a chance to show her more sensual side. She usually gets cast in soubrette roles. In Nutcracker, she is the Marzipan Shepardess who bemusedly herds her flock of errant sheep. So it was nice to give her a break.



This piece is a fairly classic adagio pas de deux. And by that I mean... there are no surprises. It moves along from one sequence to another, logically.

Without the element of surprise or change of tempo, it is then up to the dancers to create the tension necessary to keep the audiences interest.



In staging pieces to music from the Twenties and Thirties, I dislike nostalgia or sentimentality. To me, this was the "Modern Age" in the 20th Century. Retrospection was not the vogue. So while I use lines that are evocative of the time, I don't do so because I want people to "go back in time."

I want people to stay in the present. Memories are never as vivid as current experience. If a dance becomes TOO MUCH of a period piece, you place a barrier (of time) between the audience and the subject. I think this keeps an audience from fully engaging with the dancers.