★★★★✰ I caught four débuts in the lead roles of Giselle and Albrecht: Skylar Brandt with Herman Cornejo on Oct. 21, Thomas Forster alongside Gillian Murphy on Oct. 22, and both Cassandra Trenary and Calvin Royal III at the Oct. 22 matinee
Tag - Calvin Royal III
★★★✰✰ Program II of the Fall for Dance festival features premieres by Dormeshia and Kyle Abraham, plus excerpts of works by Balanchine and Lar Lubovitch...
★★★★✰ The Kaatsbaan Summer Festival offers the respite of communication without words, of the beauty of the body moving freely through space, and of shared experience.
★★★✰✰ The emphasis here was on new. This was a night to check in on the creative efforts of two emerging voices on the ballet scene - Gemma Bond and James Whiteside.
★★★★✰ In programs like this one, ABT really looks like an American company, steeped in American popular music and the relaxed attitude of popular dance. It’s a mode that suits the company well.
★★★★✰ The fewer the speeches, the better the gala – this universal truth seems to have bypassed the organizers at American Ballet Theatre...
★★★★★ As someone who cries easily, it’s a wonder that Manon remains a favorite ballet of mine... Misty Copeland and Cory Stearns were passionate and persuasive in their respective roles as Manon and Des Grieux.
★★★★✰ It’s impossible not to be impressed by the range of these works, from introspective and conversational (Symposium) to brilliantly classical (The Seasons) to dramatic (Dnieper).
★★★✰✰ The fall season is too brief, particularly because it always feels as though it takes the company a few days to warm itself up. The dancing at the gala on Oct. 17 was a little slapdash, but by Friday things had begun to settle.
★★★★✰ The audience laughs, the company looks great, the orchestra... sounds full and vibrant, and you leave the theatre with a rare feeling of joy. Lightness of spirit and complexity of execution in one delightful package.
★★★✰✰ The program opened and closed with the most recent works: Jessica Lang’s Her Notes and Alexei Ratmansky’s Serenade after Plato’s Symposium. Both premiered at ABT in 2016, and both are works whose inspiration largely comes from their scores.
★★★✰✰ In between the speeches and the short films came the dancing. The main attraction was the new Ratmansky work, Songs of Bukovina...
★★★✰✰ 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.
★★★★✰ Don Q is pure entertainment, the kind of extroverted spectacle that the ballet is so very good at.
★★★★✰ Ballet Across America – a festival that showcases the stylistic, creative and geographical diversity of American ballet – returned to the Kennedy Center this month...
★★★✰✰ Murphy is a sensual Odette, something made all the more effective by Stearns’ tenderness.
★★★✰✰ Shostakovich Trilogy is a rich work, containing too much to take in at a single sitting. It reveals some of its secrets, but not all.
★★★★✰ It isn’t often that a gala program proves satisfying, but this one was the exception.
★★★✰✰ " Bond's strength, for now, lies in a kind of old-fashioned insistence on beauty and her ability to coax sensitive, generous performances out of her dancers."
Just before intermission Simkin included two film-and-performance works by Alexander Ekman. Simkin and the City, which went viral with the Internet-savvy dance crowd a couple of years ago, always gets a good chuckle.