Monet Impressions

Guest choreographer Lynne Taylor-Corbett and artistic director Robert Weiss chose two different strategies for their homages to Claude Monet in this evening-length work, originally commissioned to accompany a 2007 blockbuster exhibition by the North Carolina Museum of Art. Taylor-Corbett’s Picnic on the Grass, based on the artist’s Dejeuner sur l’Herbe, provides a window into the life of the nineteenth-century painter, one made even more impressionistic by the prismatic costumes of designer William Ivey Long and the music of Poulenc. In Taylor-Corbett’s interpretation, the painting presages a moment of transition in Monet’s primary relationships with his ailing wife, Camille, and his partner-to-be, Alice Hoschedes, amid the sun and the shadows of the outdoor setting. In Weiss’s The Gardens of Giverny, dancers embody and animate the famous elements of the paintings made at his country home: water, clouds, and a bevy of flora, including irises, roses, and water lilies, to the music of Debussy and Chausson.