Lar Lubovitch Dance Company / Florence Gould Hall, NYC / November 14-18, 2012 I hadn’t written about—or, for that matter, even seen—Lar Lubovitch’s choreography for a good many years. Attempting to remedy that, I trekked over to the East Side—in Manhattan, hardly the hotbed of dancing—to Florence Gould Hall, where his popular troupe was opening […]
Valda
Valda Setterfield Photo: Andrew Eccles “At what point in the day does Valda become ‘Valda?’” asked my dance writing colleague as we shared a cab to the theater for a program we were both slated to review. “Is it,” she continued, “when she puts on her aquamarine earrings?” We were coming from a party enhanced […]
Untitled
American Ballet Theatre / City Center, NYC / October 16-20, 2012 American Ballet Theatre, financially afflicted like many a dance company in these stringent days, gave a Fall “season” consisting of just one “week”—October 16-20. Did the brevity of the run ensure the excellence of the repertory? Presented at the City Center, it consisted of […]
Making It New
New York City Ballet: Premiere of Justin Peck’s Year of the Rabbit / David H. Koch Theater. NYC / October 5, 2012 Old-time followers of the New York City Ballet used to yearn for “another Balanchine”; today’s fans are more realistic. They count themselves lucky to discover “another Christopher Wheeldon”—an astute practitioner of the classical […]
Preview from Seattle
Works & Process: Pacific Northwest Ballet / Guggenheim Museum, NYC / September 9 & 10, 2012 The dance programs in the Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process series, each a 90-minute presentation that shunts between dancing and talking, are viewed, live, two or three times, in the museum’s tiny theater, and telecast simultaneously from sea to […]
Glimpses #11: Jean Renoir
I have too many things to do; in New York—my home town, thank the fates—the situation is self-perpetuating if, as so often occurs, your interest lies in the arts. Yesterday I allowed myself to fit in—in broad daylight!—not just one but two movies, being shown back to back in our town’s inexhaustible revival house Film […]
Baryshnikov’s Choice
In Paris / Gerald W. Lynch Theater, NYC / August 1-5, 2012 In Paris: It’s the quietest production imaginable, built—by Dmitry Krymov—through words (in Russian, French, and English), grainy black and white projected images (most often of words), haunting song, and a flying rig. It dramatizes a short story by the Russian writer Ivan Bunin. […]
Glimpses #10: “Bayadère,” the movie
Just when I thought I needed to go to France to see the Paris Opera Ballet in a worthy repertory beyond Giselle, the invaluable Emerging Pictures screened the company’s production of La Bayadère, in Rudolf Nureyev’s final version of the 1877 ballet by Marius Petipa. (New Yorkers are more familiar with the Natalia Makarova treatment […]
Glimpses #9: Parisian Modern
The Paris Opera Ballet, in its determined non-classical guise, closed its New York visit with the late Pina Bausch’s 1975 Orpheus and Eurydice. In a post-modern, glossy-mag décor, Bausch’s take on the subject mingles the ravishing dancers with the solo singers, giving Terpsichore’s favorites little better to do than undulate their supple spines (ladies), run […]
A Ballet Romance
Paris Opera Ballet / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / June 11-22, 2012 Say that, as a dance fan, you happen to have a young child in your life who’s showing a burgeoning interest in—perhaps even an instinctive love for—dancing. If you take her or him to the ballet to see one of […]