★★★★✰ On the penultimate day of the fall season, I managed to catch a performance of New York City Ballet’s revival of Merce Cunningham’s Summerspace. The 1958 piece, which had its City Ballet premiere in 1966, was last performed here in 2000.
Tag - Marc Happel
★★★✰✰ One of the earliest things I appreciated about Balanchine is that he made me feel okay about liking Tschaikovsky (as NYCB likes to spell it)...
★★★✰✰ No evening of new works is perfect; the excitement lies in the hope that at some point some magic will happen. And in that solo for Taylor Stanley by Kyle Abraham, we got a glimpse of that magic.
★★★✰✰ Like Walker’s first work for the company "Dance Odyssey" shows a lot of promise. It has warmth and humor, a good grasp of stage geometry and a sensitive musicality.
★★★✰✰ The pattern is set: the company commissions works from three or four choreographers, often quite young, and pairs them with prominent designers. The works are short, and are introduced by filmlets...
★★★✰✰ Handsome to look at, with its film-noir lighting and flattering black 1940’s style dresses (by Marc Happel), Jeux nevertheless proves to be rather thin...
Jeux, has a distinctly adult atmosphere and a highly cinematic look. Actually, the look might be the most interesting thing about it...
Nobody surpasses New York City Ballet in sleekness and urbanity. The company is like a glistening skyscraper: sharp-edged, diamantine and, sometimes, a little cold...
It’s as pointless to complain about ballet galas as it is to grumble about the weather. They serve a purpose...
Opening night of New York City Ballet’s spring season wasn’t a gala, but there was a festive buzz in the theatre nonetheless. The ballets were all by living choreographers; the oldest dated from 1988, half were of more recent vintage.
One feels as Débussy did when he wrote, at the end of the nineteenth century, that “amid too many silly ballets, Lalo’s Namouna is something of a masterpiece.”
Amid all the fuss about the costumes, the choreogaphy paled... What a joy, then, to see a section of Western Symphony, with those marvelous frou-frou tutus by Karinska and that euphoric outpouring of Balanchine’s’ crisp, witty steps.
"It’s very lonely out there... I mean, it would be nice to have some sort of mentorship with regard to what it takes to be a choreographer."
After the dreary bombast of Alexei Ratmansky's recent Firebird for American Ballet Theatre, the Balanchine/Robbins version, with its blessedly shorter score (Stravinsky's Firebird Suite), heavenly Chagall designs and the great Ashley Bouder in one of her first great roles, was a welcome palliative.
I think it's safe to say that neither of the new works knocked the planet off its axis...