Last Updated: Friday, August 29, 2008

A Life in Dance

By Tony Guzman

Yanis Pikieris

South Florida’s preeminent contemporary ballet troupe, Maximum Dance Company, kicked of its sixth season a while back at the Gusman Center with a program that included the company’s 31^st and 32^nd world premieres. Especially of late, local audiences would be seeing precious little of intriguing new ballet were it not for Maximum Dance. But the real focus and emotional core of the evening was that it marked the retirement from on-stage dancing of Yanis Pikieris, the company’s co-founder and co-artistic director, along with David Palmer, and, like Palmer, a frequent and important choreographer for the troupe.

The program included a tribute video, a compilation of video clips, starting with shots of Yanis dancing as a kid and ranging over highpoints of his 20-year career as a dancer: Yanis’ fluid, gutsy jumps and impetuous traveling turns dancing Le Corsair at the L.A. Olympics; an amazingly funky Yanis dancing a percussion-driven piece called Bond to the Rhythm with Deutsche Opera Berlin; Yanis, with Ballet du Nord, partnering his wife Mariaelena Mencia with suave sureness in classic pas de deux from Coppélia and Don Quixote. Yanis’ innate soft-spoken modesty as a person belied his fiery leaping and charismatic stage presence. You’d have to have been looking awfully hard the last few seasons to notice the least wisp of tentativeness intruding into his partnering, an occasional hint of a hitch in his step, but, to the end, Yanis was capable of catching your breath with a leap or an inspired air turn into or out of the wings.

That night he danced the Spartacus pas de deux with Hiroko Sakakibara, and it was a compendium of everything Yanis at his best, set off marvelously by Sakakibara’s appealing delicacy and solidity on pointe. For his final number, company members Douglas Gawriljuk and Mikhael Plain created Solo Ellas Saben (Only They Know) which, probably intentionally, comes across as a contemporary reworking of Balanchine’s Apollo and his three Muses. One could hardly ask for better for one’s Muses, three of South Florida’s finest female dancers: long, tall Sally Ann Isaacks, all smiles, high-kicking flirtatiously; enigmatic Andrea Dawn Shelley, here perky and easy-going, our favorite mode for her; and the peerless Marifé Giménez, all sass, fire and fun for Yanis’ last dance. Talk about a sendoff! The piece included some charismatic, energized solo turns for Yanis and finished with him sitting alone contemplating his Muses and all that went before. This fitting, affecting end touched off a moving standing ovation.

Also on the bill were the world premiere of Mist by David Palmer, an impressive piece in rather a neo-classical mode despite the Gothic atmospherics, set to the pulsating circular arpeggios of a Philip Glass score. There was also a reprise of Yanis’ Imagined Notions, featuring fascinating pairings and solo work by Max Dance company members, well worthy of comment. But, again, the evening belonged to Yanis, as does this column. Only someone who’s actually taken a crack at it can understand the intense dedication, physical demands and psychological pressures involved in a dance career. Now, with his own dance company to choreograph for and help guide, as well as the Mencia-Pikieris School of Dance he runs with his wife, Yanis can look forward to the fullness of a life in dance, so rarely attained. A tip of our New Year’s party hats to him.