★★★✰✰ The return of the company’s Giselle is a return to a kind of normalcy, even if the performance itself contained reminders that this time is anything but normal.
Tag - Hee Seo
★★★★✰ I saw two performances; each of them demonstrated why Giselle is still so popular even 180 years after the ballet’s premiere.
★★★★✰ 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.
★★★★✰ 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.
★★★★✰ Roberto Bolle, who played his usual striking Albrecht, responded to Seo with nuance and subtlety. The same goes for how Seo revealed Giselle’s madness...
★★★✰✰ 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.
★★★✰✰ 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.
★★★✰✰ It is the melodrama that people remember and are drawn to in Onegin. But his kind of melodrama isn’t everyone’s cup of tea...
★★★★✰ Jessica Lang's Her Notes is a lovely and poetic work, though one with a slightly subdued effect. It is almost too tasteful.
★★★★✰ "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."
A highlight of the season is the return of Kurt Jooss’s The Green Table, made in 1932. This meditation on the folly of war in eight scenes has lost none of its punch...
But no end of fine, or even inspired, performances can breathe life into this tired production
American Ballet Theatre – Les Sylphides, Pillar of Fire, Fancy Free, Theme and Variations – New York
There are times when a dance lover just can’t believe her good fortune and one of those times comes around once a year in New York...
The ballet radiates warmth, but also an awareness of death....
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...
"It was a hell of a performance." Marina Harss on Jerome Robbins’ Fancy Free.
Liam Scarlett's "With a Chance of Rain" premiere - It seemed Marcelo Gomes and Hee Seo might never detach from each other in the final pas de deux...
American Ballet Theatre’s Swan Lake is looking tired ...bogged down by reams of flavorless dancing.
The Sunday matinee performance I attended had all the prerequisites for huge success, featuring world-class principals Paloma Herrera and Ivan Vasiliev, plus a superb supporting cast.