That's Life
Daniel Camargo in "Sinatra Suite" at American Ballet Theatre
What a surprise to be so moved today by this performance of Twyla's "Sinatra Suite" by Daniel Camargo and Sunmi Park at American Ballet Theatre. As he did in “Of Love and Rage,” Camargo strikes me as an extraordinary actor-dancer, a performer who relays the quality of thought and inner life and complex, shifting emotion with amazing clarity and simplicity, both through his face and through his dancing. Each movement means something, and takes just the right amount of time. Added to that, he is such an able, engaged partner; with him, partnering becomes an expressive art. In this performance of "Sinatra Suite" I felt I could see his every passing thought: a sense of rapture in "Strangers in the Night," a powerful romanticism in "All the Way," disenchantment and roughness in "That's Life," loss in "My Way," and an almost unbearable hurt in "One for my Baby." He played that final solo with the looseness and swaying imbalance of someone who has had too much to drink, but within that tipsiness there was also reflection—we could almost hear him thinking. The pauses between movements suggested conflicting currents. He stopped, he started, he fell, then rose up and opened his hands, as if thinking, “wat’s left of all of that?” A swooning lift in "All the Way," held for an extra moment on the word "aaaaaallll," made me hold my breath. SunMi Park was a perfect partner: fresh, game, confident, even a bit teasing at times. The two of them flowed together. She seemed happy to go along for the ride.