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Dancing Love and Love of Dancing

May 25, 2013 by 5 Comments
Hee Sao and David Hallberg in American Ballet Theatre's production of Frederick Ashton's A Month in The Country. Photo: Morty Sohl

American Ballet Theatre’s new production of Frederick Ashton’s “A Month in the Country” on a program with Mark Morris’s “Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes” and George Balanchine’s “Symphony in C.” Metropolitan Opera House, May 21-23. Frederick Ashton’s A Month in the Country distills the five acts of Ivan Turgenev’s eponymous play and the passage of several weeks into 40 minutes of dancing, during which a summer wind blows erratically through a country house, stirring passions to life.  It’s a wind quite … [Read more...]

05/25/13 1:04 PM | filed under: ballet |

For Eyes and Ears

April 7, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Rita Donohue and Mikhail Baryshnikov (foreground) and (L to R) Aaron Loux, Dallas McMurray, Maile Okamura, and (half hidden) Amber Star Merkens. Photo: Stephanie Berger

Mark Morris Dance Group. James and Martha Duffy Performance Space, Mark Morris Dance Center, Brooklyn, New York. April 3 through 14. You can’t predict much about a dance by Mark Morris. There’s no doubt that he responds to music and —with love and respect—choreographs that response into what he hears. He acknowledges with great sensitivity a composer’s tempi and structures and atmosphere, but you never know what else the sounds will trigger. Antonin Dvorák’s Bagatelles for two violins, cello, and harmonium, Op. 47 (1878) … [Read more...]

04/7/13 7:13 PM | filed under: contemporary dance |

About That Nutcracker

December 16, 2012 by 2 Comments
A dream wedding: Clara and her Prince (Hee Seo and Cory Sterns). Photo: Gene Schiavone

The Nutcracker in its many manifestations is like an attic toy box into which generations of children have tossed the playthings they’ve grown too old for. Amid the dolls and stuffed animals and fairy tales and toy soldiers are folded longings, nightmares, pre-pubescent thoughts of sex, and fear of growing up. The ballet by Lev Ivanov that premiered in St. Petersburg in December of 1892 has bourréed across centuries, discarding this, adding that. Mark Morris, for his delectable The Hard Nut, even leapfrogged backward over the ballet to … [Read more...]

12/16/12 10:07 AM | filed under: ballet |

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 |

Midsummer, Music, Morris

July 5, 2012 by 5 Comments
The Mark Morris Dance Group in Festival Dance. Photo: Stephanie Berger

  In 1931, Noël Coward walked out of the first public performance of William Walton’s Façade: An Entertainment in 1923, and a critic described the music for flute, clarinet, trumpet, saxophone, cello, and percussion as “relentless cacophony.” Coward may have been put off by the fact that Edith Sitwell, the author of the poems that formed Walton’s libretto, sat behind a screen and read the text into a megaphone that poked through. Ernest Newman, however, writing in London’s The Sunday Times, said of Walton, “as a … [Read more...]

07/5/12 9:08 AM | filed under: contemporary dance |

Sampling Dance, Bite by Bite

November 3, 2011 by 4 Comments
Lil Buck on point. Photo: Erinn Baiano

What’s not to love about Fall for Dance? For $10, you can sit in the pseudo-Moorish splendor of the refurbished City Center Theater and view one of the mixed bills running through November 6. Now’s the time to revisit companies you admire and discover ones you’ve never heard of. And don’t hurry home. Hang out for a while in the atrium running between 55th and 56th Streets that has been transformed into Lounge FFD—a place to drink, snack, and talk with others about what you’ve just seen. It helps if the weather isn’t … [Read more...]

11/3/11 4:17 PM | filed under: mixed bill |

Morris, the Night, and the Music

August 30, 2011 by 2 Comments
Fox attacks Cock, all react. Photo: Stephanie Berger

When it comes to selecting music to spark choreography, Mark Morris is an omnivore. He gives loving, uncondescending attention to popular songs like George Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me,” Jerome Kern’s “Two Little Bluebirds, or (once) Yoko Ono’s “Dogtown,” as well as digging into scores by Bach, Stravinsky, Schumann and other musical giants. To Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, from August 18 through 20, the Mark Morris Dance Group brought new and recent dances set to compositions by Stravinsky (Renard), … [Read more...]

08/30/11 4:26 PM | filed under: contemporary dance |

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