Gallery by Dave Morgan...
Tag - Wendy Whelan
The three dancers who took their leave this week – Sascha Radetsky, Yuriko Kajiya and Jared Matthews – are all soloists. Each led a different cast of the company’s 1997 production of Coppélia.
At the outset I have to say I thought this year was one of the better years and we should all feel encouraged at the creativity on show.
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.
No sets – just glorious lighting designs playing essential roles in the performances.
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.”
Even more than with other choreographers, the costumes and sets are essential elements of Graham’s dance imagination. Think of Martha’s stretchy sack-dress in Lamentation, or the prickly metal tree-dress by Noguchi in Cave of the Heart. They are extensions of the dancers’ bodies, and of Graham’s Jungian world-view.
It’s a good thing indeed when a visit to the ballet turns out to be a night full of surprises, all of them good.
Within (Labyrinth Within) is no masterpiece, but it presents exciting possibilities for contemporary ballet while avoiding the hyperextended steps and sexual clichés that muddy so much of the field.
What is there to say about Orpheus, except that it seems to slip deeper into the recesses of time? I’ve read that at the première, the critic and poet Edwin Denby was so moved by it that he sat dumbfounded during intermission, unable to stand. It is difficult to imagine such a reaction today.
In the second act, storytelling gives way to pure dance, the highpoint of which is one of the most delicate, poetic pas de deux ever made - an allegory of love, danced by an unidentified couple. It is a Balanchinean vision of absolute trust and partnership...
La Scala Ballet is often dismissed as a company without depth, a haven for international guest artists living on a steady regime of full-length ballets. And yet Makhar Vaziev, who left the Mariinsky to take the helm in Milan in 2008, has been taking on more ambitious projects, one baby step at a time...