★★★★✰ It isn’t often that a gala program proves satisfying, but this one was the exception.
Tag - Stella Abrera
★★✰✰✰ 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...
★★★★✰ "Ratmansky’s new staging is a Beauty like you have never seen before: it uncovers the original ballet’s genuine beauty, which faded over the years under the clutter of modern revisions."
ABT galas are more laid-back than City Ballet’s; they’re less “produced,” with fewer speeches or slick video presentations. For the most part, the company just gets on with the show, with minimum fuss.
I want to see what LeCrone can do with more bodies and longer pieces.
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...
Perhaps the most striking element in Alexei Ratmansky’s new Sleeping Beauty for American Ballet Theatre is its musicality, the way the steps, peppered with accents and breaths, unspool within the music.
The American Ballet Theatre season continues with Giselle where Marina Harss saw Stella Abrera's company debut. The response to the performance was understandably enthusiastic.
Nothing can ignite a cowboy’s imagination better than the fluttery ruffles of a voluminous skirt...
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.
The three dancers who took their leave this week – Sascha Radetsky, Yuriko Kajiya and Jared Matthews – are all soloists. Each led a different cast of the company’s 1997 production of Coppélia.
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...
Few nineteenth-century story ballets are as satisfying as Giselle, with its simple and poetic plot, compact structure and starkly contrasting moods. This week I watched four Giselles, with four distinctly different casts...
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.
On Sunday, American Ballet Theatre’s two-week fall season draws to a close. By most measures, it’s been a success...
Throughout the Bach Partita, Tharp’s movement is technical, precise, and highly articulated. As with Balanchine, the bodies are always distinct, framed in space.
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.