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?
Tag - Sara Mearns
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.
It’s as pointless to complain about ballet galas as it is to grumble about the weather. They serve a purpose...
Justin Peck has gone from unknown corps-member to choreographer-of-the-moment in a blink of an eye. (He created his first piece for the company in 2012; this is his sixth.)
In many ways, Jewels is Balanchine’s choreographic résumé – a retrospective and a vivid showcase of his aesthetics and creative genius...
Watching these three ballets, made over a span of thirty-two years, one can see how Balanchine’s style evolved toward the hyper-stylization of Violin Concerto...
George Balanchine’s favorite composers may have been Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky, but it’s no secret that he also had an affinity for France and its music...
Acheron, Liam Scarlett's new piece, revealed a choreographer of prodigious imagination and compositional craft, adept at building an atmosphere and suffusing it with traces of meaning.
There is perhaps no better way to start off a season at New York City Ballet than with a performance of Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco.
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.”
...what joy to see a performance turn into a kind of rave, ...to feel the music overflow the boundaries of convention and habit and feel, well, intensely alive.
Creases revealed, once again, Just Peck’s ability to create strikingly imaginative patterns and formations onstage.
But stuck in the middle of all this brightness was Ivesiana, like a ghost at a birthday party. It is a most unsettling ballet.
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.
Is there a ballet more deceptive than Balanchine’s Divertimento from ‘Le Baiser de la Fée’? If so, I’m not aware of it.
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....
The highlight of the gala was the seventieth-anniversary performance of Agnes De Mille’s Rodeo, preceded by a short film describing its creation, with archival footage of the hilariously histrionic, diminutive choreographer.
I’ve noticed two troubling trends this season at New York City Ballet. Perhaps they are connected. The first is the creeping tendency toward stolid tempi from the pit...
I think it's safe to say that neither of the new works knocked the planet off its axis...
It’s becoming something of a New York City Ballet tradition to start off the season with, if not a whimper, then let’s say a less-than-stellar performance. Perhaps it’s a kind of exorcism, a ritual cleansing. Maybe that’s why the gala usually takes place a few days later...