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In Season

October 23, 2012 by 1 Comment
The peerless Herman Cornejo in Ratmansky's Symphony #9. Photo: Gene Schiavone

Hello!  Goodbye! American Ballet Theatre’s City Center season came and went with dispiriting speed—seven performances in five days (October 16 through 20). The pleasures outweighed the disappointment. New Yorkers could rendezvous with revivals of three ballets in the company’s history: Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo (1942), Antony Tudor’s The Leaves Are Fading (1977), and Mark Morris’s Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes (1988).  Alexei Ratmansky premiered a gorgeous new ballet. And a live orchestra played the music. Ratmansky’s … [Read more...]

10/23/12 7:35 PM | filed under: ballet |

Astray in Summer Dreams

June 28, 2012 by 6 Comments
Cory Stearns as Oberon and Xiomra Reyes as Titania in ABT's The Dream. Photo: Gene Schiavone

If you can’t see a production of Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a woodland setting during a long June twilight, as I once did, you can be enthralled by a different sort of magic conjured up by the Bard’s plot. George Balanchine’s 1962 ballet of the same name ended its week in the New York City Ballet’s season before American Ballet Theatre hit the solstice dead on with Frederick Ashton’s 1964 The Dream. These are two such beautiful ballets that I wish I could have crossed Lincoln Center Plaza from an NYCB matinee … [Read more...]

06/28/12 6:04 PM | filed under: ballet |

Love and Death in an Imagined India

May 31, 2012 by 8 Comments
Herman Cornejo and Alina Cojocaru in Act I of ABT's La Bayadere. Photo: Gene Schiavone

People interested in ballet history can entertain themselves with unlikely questions. What, for instance, would Marius Petipa think of the production of his 1877 La Bayadère that the great ballerina Natalia Makarova constructed for American Ballet Theatre in 1980?  If he were sitting in a seat at the Metropolitan Opera House during ABT’s current season of classics and new works, how much of the choreography would he recognize as his own? Makarova wasn’t the first to delete, add to, and alter the ballet. Bayadère today is like a … [Read more...]

05/31/12 2:10 PM | filed under: ballet |

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