ABT's Experiment

American Ballet Theatre / Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, New York City / October 7-10, 2009

Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center's main concert venue, lacks an orchestra pit, wing space, and a floor suitable for dancing. Musicians performing there stay put once onstage, limiting their motion to decorous walks to and from their places. Not for them phenomenal steps requiring a floor that cushions sleights of foot or a safe landing spot for leaping exits at race-car speed. Nevertheless American Ballet Theatre was installed at Avery Fisher for a four-day engagement, October 7-10.

Xiomara Reyes, Herman Cornejo, and friends in Alexei Ratmansky's Seven Sonatas

Photo: Rosalie O'Connor

The full article appeared in Voice of Dance (http://www.voiceofdance.org) on October 14, 2009. To read it, click here.

October 16, 2009 2:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

2 Comments

By Tom Phillips on October 27, 2009 8:44 PM

Masterful review. I was there, and saw it all, and now I see more. Thanks TT!

By Martha Ullman West on October 20, 2009 2:24 PM

I did not see the concert Ms. Tobias reviews here with mine own eyes, so to speak, but seeing it through her eyes--she has that rare talent of making her readers see what she saw, joining such idiosyncratic writers as Agnes de Mille and Marcia Siegel--is something for which I am profoundly grateful, particularly her description of the Ratmansky. I feel gypped that I didn't get to see it myself, in fact. Because Ratmansky is these days much more the talk of the town than Forsythe, not my town, which is Portland, Oregon, but New York, my home town. A slice of Ratmansky however, recently performed here by Baryshnikov, a Chekhovian work to very Russian music, made me understand what the fuss is about, an understanding bolstered by Ms. Tobias's review of ABT.

. . . and while I know a woman who learned Greek at ninety there are nevertheless some skills, like ballet dancing and gum chewing, which can only be mastered by the very young.
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Now that my hair is white, and my years of life ahead are growing fewer, I think that the pains I have taken over dancing have not really been pains, and I must study harder, much harder.
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