Opening night was a gala performance; one might have expected Esplanade, or Arden Court, but that’s just not Taylor’s style. For a choreographer who has been criticized for being too popular in his tastes, Taylor can be very odd indeed.
Author - Marina Harss
Even more than with other choreographers, the costumes and sets are essential elements of Graham’s dance imagination. Think of Martha’s stretchy sack-dress in Lamentation, or the prickly metal tree-dress by Noguchi in Cave of the Heart. They are extensions of the dancers’ bodies, and of Graham’s Jungian world-view.
To preserve or to progress? And if the latter, how? These questions seem to come up increasingly often as companies grapple with the death of their founding choreographers, artists who created importantant schools of dance in their own image.
Teresa Reichlen - known as Tess by friends and colleagues - is an immediately striking dancer: tall, pale, preternaturally serene. She could be a Madonna in a painting by Botticelli.
Without Körbes’s natural, radiant dancing, Jean-Christophe Maillot’s Roméo et Juliette, which dominated the company’s four-day run, would have been hard to bear.
In New York one can begin to feel proprietary about Balanchine, to form the illusion that his choreography is a local specialty, the province of a select group of dancers, all of them employees of New York City Ballet. But this is mere local pride.
Sara Mearns has been New York City Ballet’s reigning Swan Queen since her breakout performance in 2006, when she was only nineteen years old and a member the corps de ballet. It was a performance of surprising intensity, edged with danger.
Now thirty-one Carla Korbes has grown up to become one of America’s most remarkable ballerinas. Her recent performance of Terpsichore’s duet with Apollo at the Guggenheim was one of the most touchingly natural and innately musical interpretations I’ve seen.
N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz is certainly not Robbins’ finest or most original work but perhaps because of its relative straightforwardness, it reveals much about what is so remarkable about this choreographer.
An in-depth interview with the lady who helps bring Balanchine back...
It’s a good thing indeed when a visit to the ballet turns out to be a night full of surprises, all of them good.
Is there a ballet more deceptive than Balanchine’s Divertimento from ‘Le Baiser de la Fée’? If so, I’m not aware of it.
What one does not see much of, at least at first glance, is nostalgia for the motherland. “I never had nostalgia about anything,” Baryshnikov says.
Which brings me to Ángel Muñoz who, with Peña, is the real star of the show. The two couldn’t be more different: Peña is all interiority and nuance, while Muñoz is all bluster and instinct.
I’m not yet fully convinced of the wisdom of New York City Ballet’s thematic seasons, organized around the music of a single composer....
Eiko and Koma are now in their sixties. What stays with you is the image of those bodies, tormented, trembling, vulnerable, but ultimately indestructible.
Dance is a difficult thing to experience outside of the theatre, but for the sustainability of the artform it has to find a way to make itself more widely available.
...it’s remarkable how satisfying the old-fashioned virtues of structure and form can be.
More than sculpture, the choreography reminded me of exhibitions of body-building.
On the eve of the Clive Barnes Foundation announcing its annual awards we interview Valerie Taylor-Barnes, the great critics widow, about her life in dance (including the Royal Ballet) and the work of the Foundation...