★★★★★ To my eye, this Harlequinade may be the most well-rounded of Ratmansky's historically-minded stagings of Petipa.
Tag - Sarah Lane
★★✰✰✰ ...watching La Bayadère can feel like observing an artifact stuck in another era, and indicates the need for a conversation about what a contemporary, forward-thinking repertoire should look like.
★★★✰✰ The choreographer and L.A. Dance Project director Benjamin Millepied is a mover and a shaker, a clever curator, a man of taste, a force in the dance world. But is he good choreographer?
★★★✰✰ Ratmansky’s Souvenir d’un Lieu Cher turned out to be a mysterious little ballet, a double pas de deux that captures, ...the complex history of a quartet of characters.
American Ballet Theatre Giselle ★★★★✰ New York, Metropolitan Opera House 26,27 May 2017 www.abt.org Giselle Fever Like Swan Lake, Giselle is a centerpiece of the ballet repertoire; American Ballet Theatre performs it almost every spring season, for good reason. The company’s production is handsome and a bit shopworn, with sets by Gianni Quaranta that were originally designed for the 1987 film...
★★★★✰ Alexei Ratmansky’s new ballet for ABT, Whipped Cream, is like a Viennese confection: so layered and airy that it takes a moment to fully take in the flavor of its many ingredients.
★★★✰✰ Be careful what you wish for. The Boy in Alexei Ratmansky’s Whipped Cream wishes for unlimited sweets; overfulfillment sends him to the hospital with sugar hallucinations.
★★★✰✰ Le Corsaire, a ballet loosely based on Lord Byron’s poem about a chivalrous pirate, has more action than the latest Bond film. There are pirates! Abductions! Beautiful women in distress! The list goes on and on...
★★✰✰✰ Like all galas, this was quite a mixed bag. Over 200 students trooped on and offstage in a veritable tornado of activity before the veteran YAGP dancers stepped out for the showstopping stuff...
Two 2 casts reeviewed - led out by Stella Abrera and a guesting Marianela Nunez. But the star of Cinderella is the ballet itself – Ashton’s tribute to Petipa, to silliness, and to the power of childlike wonder...
Both nights that I attended were blessed with an exquisite Cinderella. Gillian Murphy gave this production a beating heart with her tenderly expressive and incisive performance...
Critics have compared the new Liam Scarlett to Jerome Robbins’ Dances at a Gathering; if so, it’s as if Dances had been set in an unhappy corner of the planet, for a group of lost souls...
No-one could fail to be impressed by the versatility of ABT’s dancers and by the diverse repertoire they brought. They did themselves, their company and their country proud.
Who but Frederick Ashton could turn a marital spat into one of the most delightful, touching works in the ballet repertoire? His 1964 The Dream is precisely that...
To fully enjoy Ashton, one has to be willing to acquiesce to one’s own softer impulses, a sense of wonder and perhaps a little nostalgia, and to surrender the loveliness of small things.
Fashioning a ballet out of The Tempest is no small endeavor. How does one distill Shakespeare’s rather complex play into forty-six wordless minutes....
Has there ever been a more sensitive, sympathetic chronicler of that inner flutter brought on by the onset of love than Frederick Ashton? It seems unlikely, on the evidence of ABT's premiere of A Month in the Country...
...with choreographic masterpieces by George Balanchine and José Limón and a Washington D.C. premiere of Alexei Ratmansky’s new work, this ABT program was in every way a balletomane’s dream come true.
The season began with a high-energy mixed bill which showed the company on sparkling form.
The highlight of the gala was the seventieth-anniversary performance of Agnes De Mille’s Rodeo, preceded by a short film describing its creation, with archival footage of the hilariously histrionic, diminutive choreographer.