"...it’s hard not to get the impression that New York City Ballet is on a roll."
Author - Marina Harss
Marina Harss is a free-lance dance writer and translator in New York. Her dance writing has appeared in the New Yorker, The Nation, Playbill, The Faster Times, DanceView, The Forward, Pointe, and Ballet Review. Her translations, which include Irène Némirovsky’s “The Mirador,” Dino Buzzati’s “Poem Strip,” and Pasolini’s “Stories from the City of God” have been published by FSG, Other Press, and New York Review Books. You can check her updates on Twitter at: @MarinaHarss
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, is there a ballet choreographer working today who is more imaginative, more wholly himself, than Alexei Ratmansky?
One cannot help but be amazed by the number of exceptional women in the company, and by how differently they approach the steps, the music and the temperament of each ballet.
The evening is divided into two parts, with images of love and coupling more dominant in the first and greater abstraction seeping into the second.
It’s as pointless to complain about ballet galas as it is to grumble about the weather. They serve a purpose...
For the second year in a row, the Fall for Dance Festival began with a pair of performances at the outdoor Delacorte Theatre in Central Park, one of the most enchanting spots in the city.
As he has shown again and again, the choreographer Mark Morris has a way with Baroque music. He clearly adores it...
If there’s one thing you can say for Yuri Grigorovich’s 1968 ballet Spartacus, it’s that it gets its point across loud and clear.
...the real star of Don Quixote is the Bolshoi itself.
It is even more disappointing that the troupe should open its run with a Swan Lake so lackluster... It’s not the dancers’ fault. At every level, the Bolshoi dancers move with thrilling force and fullness.
...I think it’s safe to say that she is an artist who follows her obsessions with a tenacity that is both admirable and frequently defeating.
Watching Rosas danst Rosas this weekend it was easy to understand why it still stands as a prime example of De Keersmaeker’s choreographic approach.
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...
...the dancers seem able to handle whatever comes their way. It’s a quality that will serve them well in their travels.
American Ballet Theatre’s Swan Lake is looking tired ...bogged down by reams of flavorless dancing.
In the end, the real pleasure of the evening is watching two extraordinary showmen...
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...
Since becoming artistic director at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 2011, Robert Battle has been steadily mixing up the company’s repertory, adding works by choreographers beyond its usual range: Paul Taylor, Ohad Naharin, and Wayne McGregor, to name just three.
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.