★★★★✰ The program opened with one of Justin Peck’s best pieces in years, Partita...
Tag - Taylor Stanley
★★★★✰ Lauren Lovette has just said farewell to NYCB. Marina Harss on some moving performances - "The ovation was heartfelt, and went on for a long time."
★★★★✰ Marina Harss with thoughts/observations on La Valse, Other Dances, After the Rain pas de deux, Agon, Monumentum Pro Gesualdo, Movements for Piano and Orchestra and Chaconne.
★★★✰✰ The Fall Fashion Gala has become a staple at New York City Ballet, a siren song to the well-heeled, who show up in their fineries year after year. It’s also a big money-maker...
★★★★✰ Featuring dancers and works from Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, New York City Ballet, Dance Theatre of Harlem, American Ballet Theatre and Ballet Hispanico...
★★★✰✰ ...it was Miller’s dancers’ forceful and liquid dancing that pulled it all together.
★★★★✰ The latest offering from New York City Ballet, by Kyle Abraham, is a particularly handsome, intelligent, and well-filmed example of the (made and streamed under Covid) genre.
★★★★✰ George Balanchine's "Stravinsky Violin Concerto" has just been streamed by NYCB - Jann Parry on a complex and effervesent masterwork, if Balanchine stated that it was simply his response to Stravinsky’s music...
★★✰✰✰ Strasbourg 1518 has been lauded as 'head buttingly confrontational' and an original 'dance for today'. It isn't. Familiar Bausch tropes don't really reflect 1518's psychogenic mania, which was communal, or today's experience of isolation, stress and tedium.
I don’t really believe in lists, but it’s admittedly fun to look back over the year and reflect on moments that have stayed with me. So here they are, in no particular order…
★★★✰✰ Robbins’ response to Chopin (in Dances at a Gathering) is also extraordinary: sensitive, simple, vulnerable, direct, un-fussy.
★★★✰✰ Kudos to Lovette for really going out on a limb... The Shaded Line feels truly her own, and it’s clear that she has much to say about her chosen profession...
★★★★✰ There’s a reason why New York City Ballet doesn’t do George Balanchine’s Scotch Symphony very often. It’s a strangely disjointed ballet...
★★★✰✰ Liebeslieder Walzer is one of the most precious of all Balanchine’s ballets; within its fifty-minute span it seems to contain a world of emotion, both profound and infinitely civilized.
★★★✰✰ Major draws were the new Justin Peck and a revival of William Forsythe’s 1992 commission Herman Schmerman, not seen in full since the 90s...
★★★★✰ Nothing revives a repertory like new casting. So we can be grateful to the interim leadership at New York City Ballet for reconsidering who gets to dance some of the company’s most elemental repertory: Agon, Apollo, Serenade.
★★★★✰ There has been a generational shift at New York City Ballet, that much was clear last night in a program of Stravinsky ballets that included two major débuts and several smaller ones...
Other years have been more exciting, I think, but this one has had its share of remarkable performances, including a few thrilling ones. Here, in no particular order, are the ones that really stood out, for one reason or another.
★★★✰✰ It’s fascinating to see how Balanchinean charm and wit are interpreted by dancers for whom the Balanchine repertoire is more of a foreign language.
★★★✰✰ 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.