By Sarah Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 5, 2007

There's good reason that ballet treatments of the Shakespeare plays "Romeo and Juliet" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" are popular: Love and its pitfalls is a theme dance handles especially well. So when the Washington Ballet asked each of seven choreographers for a short new work based on the Bard, to be bundled together in the "7x7: Shakespeare" series that opened Thursday, guess what? Three offered up takes on "Romeo and Juliet" and one turned in a meditation on "Midsummer."

There were also two works inspired by "Hamlet." No surprise: Repetition and predictability are the entirely predictable outcomes of a program like this, held in a converted studio at the company's headquarters on Wisconsin Avenue NW. Shakespeare is rich reading and great theater, but as source material for dance his work is somewhat thin. Or, more precisely, thick. The playwright's intricate wordplay and dovetailing plots constitute treacherous ground for choreography, particularly of the under-10-minute variety.

But this was exactly the impossible task set for the participants in "7x7": In addition to making some new statement about Shakespeare (for inclusion in the loosely defined Shakespeare in Washington festival), make it in just about seven minutes. Hence the program's title.

The results are not without their charms, but it's a misdirected endeavor overall. I don't know why this now-standard end-of-the-season series has to have a theme -- given the constraint on length and the slashed rehearsal time -- choreographer Matjash Mrozewski noted in the program that he had but five days with the dancers -- it seems wiser and more productive to simply let the artists do whatever they feel they can do best.

The most successful piece didn't have as much to do with "Romeo and Juliet" as with the resonance of its heroine today. Stephen Petronio's "deCapulet" was inspired by the recent book "Letters to Juliet," a selection of the thousands of letters sent each year to Verona and addressed to the 400-year-old fictional character. She has become a Dear Abby for the well-read romantic. The letters are answered by volunteers, but Petronio isn't interested in that end of the exchange. Read onstage by dancers Kara Cooper and Luis Torres, Juliet's mail chronicles the confusion and inconveniences of modern love.

Against this emotional and bizarre backdrop, and accompanied by excerpts from Prokofiev's ballet score and music by the band M83, the dancing was like a squirt of lemon, or a light in the fog. It was bracing and direct, with ballet's stretch and precision married to the weightedness of modern dance. This, it seemed, was Petronio's answer to the letters: Get a grip.

There was nothing tentative or weepy about the two couples -- Brianne Bland and Jonathan Jordan, and Jade Payette and Jared Nelson. Dressed in babydoll nighties, Bland and Payette possessed a solid, no-nonsense force. Bland, in Raggedy-Ann pigtails, just about stole the show. Petronio brilliantly showcased her intriguing duality, with her perfectly turned out legs and open hips set against her expression of tight-lipped wariness. No star-crossed lover she. Bland was fully in control, daring her partner rather than submitting to him.

With his muscular "Queen of the Goths," Trey McIntyre veered away from convention to find inspiration in "Titus Andronicus." He got right to the point: mourning gives way to revenge, and oh, how sweet that is. Sona Kharatian was a ravenous Queen Tamora, with Jordan and Jason Hartley as her two scheming sons. The narrative impact here wasn't so much in the choreography as in Kharatian's dark eyes and the kicky pop music selections by Nancy Sinatra and Supergrass.

Matthew Neenan's "quick bright things" was a pleasing showcase for six dancers, particularly Elizabeth Gaither, Torres and Marcelo Martinez, an underused dancer with flamboyant technique and a sweet crooked smile. This was a happy, summer-of-love kind of piece, ostensibly having something to do with "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

Neenan, formerly of the Pennsylvania Ballet, put an upbeat ending on what had become a heavy evening, with a knotty "Gathering His Thoughts," based on "Hamlet," by fashionable dancemaker Karole Armitage, and Cathy Marston's tension-choked "Whispers" drawn from the same source. In that vein, too, was Brian Reeder's "The Sorrow of Lady C," a look at the funk into which Juliet's mother, about whom nobody cares, has sunk.

Mrozewski's "Lovers Speak" was a mopey romp in the hay with our favorite young couple, perhaps a little more graphic than most. Or maybe it just seemed so, in an awkwardly voyeuristic way, since dancers Bland and Zachary Hackstock were romping just a few feet away from the seats.

That's the bonus of an evening like this, and for some, it might make up for lapses in the choreography: You're close enough to see who has his bellybutton pierced (Torres), who's got the best set of abs (up for discussion), and you get to hear a whole lot of heavy breathing.

7x7: Shakespeare runs through May 20 at the Washington Ballet's England Studio Theater.