★★★✰✰ Half-narrative and semi-abstract, ISADORA hop-skips through the dancer’s life; it’s described in the program notes as a “freely interpreted biography,” and it cherry-picks around unsavory elements...
Tag - Veronika Part
★★★✰✰ 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.
★★★★✰ This is a production that lives and breathes, and which rewards multiple viewings, changing subtly with each cast.
★★★★✰ American Ballet Theatre’s spring season has turned into a kind of voyage into the mind of Alexei Ratmansky, its choreographer-in-residence since 2009.
★★★✰✰ 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.
ABT galas are more laid-back than City Ballet’s; they’re less “produced,” with fewer speeches or slick video presentations. For the most part, the company just gets on with the show, with minimum fuss.
The American Ballet Theatre season continues with Giselle where Marina Harss saw Stella Abrera's company debut. The response to the performance was understandably enthusiastic.
Both nights that I attended were blessed with an exquisite Cinderella. Gillian Murphy gave this production a beating heart with her tenderly expressive and incisive performance...
"It was a hell of a performance." Marina Harss on Jerome Robbins’ Fancy Free.
Few nineteenth-century story ballets are as satisfying as Giselle, with its simple and poetic plot, compact structure and starkly contrasting moods. This week I watched four Giselles, with four distinctly different casts...
To fully enjoy Ashton, one has to be willing to acquiesce to one’s own softer impulses, a sense of wonder and perhaps a little nostalgia, and to surrender the loveliness of small things.
So far this season I’ve seen three “traditional” Nutcrackers: Ratmansky’s version for American Ballet Theatre, Gelsey Kirkland’s, and the familiar and much-loved 1954 staging by George Balanchine for New York City Ballet. All three have their charms...
On Sunday, American Ballet Theatre’s two-week fall season draws to a close. By most measures, it’s been a success...
It’s good to see the company perform Sylphides again after a hiatus of eight years. The style hasn’t eroded. ...The dancers believe in it.
The previous night had been dominated by Gillian Murphy’s performance. She is an absolute powerhouse in this role, a kind of super-stylized, inhuman creature, an art-deco distillation of speed and daring.
I have to say that after seeing the Shostakovich Trilogy twice, and picking up many more details ...I found it very compelling indeed, especially the opening and closing ballets.
Has there ever been a more sensitive, sympathetic chronicler of that inner flutter brought on by the onset of love than Frederick Ashton? It seems unlikely, on the evidence of ABT's premiere of A Month in the Country...
Symphony in C, a luminous outpouring of legs and arms, crisp geometries, bobbing rhythms, and articulate patter-like conversations for the feet, is a vivid reminder of why one goes to the ballet at all. Luminosity and classical logic, laced with wit and intelligence.
...with choreographic masterpieces by George Balanchine and José Limón and a Washington D.C. premiere of Alexei Ratmansky’s new work, this ABT program was in every way a balletomane’s dream come true.