New York City Ballet / New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / January 6 – February 29, 2004 Dancing, which happens in space and time, is three-dimensional. (For this reason, the camera can never quite seize it.) At the New York City Ballet, in the two decades that have elapsed since George Balanchine’s death, […]
DOUBLE TIMER
New York City Ballet / New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / January 6 – February 29, 2004 George Balanchine (Mr. Neoclassicism) did time on Broadway and in Hollywood and—always one to rise cheerfully and inventively to the particular nature of an occasion—produced some fetching work for the popular theater. As a souvenir of […]
Vintage Russian Ballet Stars Via DVD
Classical dance fans in the West are perennially thrilled to hear that the Russians are coming. Via the burgeoning DVD industry, they’re traveling across space and out of the past—on small, shiny disks designed to last forever. Village Voice 1/21/04
THE DANES ON TOUR
Royal Danish Ballet / Kennedy Center, Washington DC / January 13-18, 2004 Frank Andersen, artistic director of the Royal Danish Ballet, has a mission. In a campaign that will climax with the 3rd Bournonville Festival in Copenhagen, June 3-11, 2005, celebrating the 200th anniversary of the great Danish choreographer’s birth, Andersen is aiming to make […]
BALANCHINE AT HOME #4: TELLING TALES
New York City Ballet / New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / January 6 – February 29, 2004 You are a woodcutter, a swimmer, a football player, a god. —George Balanchine, instructing Lew Christensen, who danced the title role in Apollo at the ballet’s American premiere When I was a child, I never read […]
BALLET BOYZ, DANISH STYLE
The Royal Danish Ballet is performing at Kennedy Center, Washington DC, January 13-18, 2004. Denmark is a very small country compared to Russia, France, England, and America, yet, like those dance superpowers, it boasts a world-class ballet company with a venerable academy attached to it. Danish dancers trained from childhood at the school housed in […]
BALANCHINE AT HOME #3: SCOTCH ON THE ROCKS
New York City Ballet / New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / January 6 – February 29, 2004 Scotch Symphony and Donizetti Variations are thought of as Balanchine’s Bournonville-influenced ballets, the first because its situation borrows from the Danish master’s Romantic-era La Sylphide, the latter because its buoyant step combinations with their petite batterie […]
BALANCHINE AT HOME #2: DREAMS
New York City Ballet / New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / January 6 – February 29, 2004 The trap in talking about Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream—with which the New York City Ballet has just opened the winter repertory season of its Balanchine 100 Centennial Celebration—is comparing it to Frederick Ashton’s The Dream. […]
George Balanchine: Centennial Celebrations
This season marks the 100th anniversary of George Balanchine’s birth, and the dance world is rushing around commemorating it with productions of the ballets, exhibitions in multiple media, symposiums, lecture-demonstrations, and so on. Some of the activity will be wonderful. Some of it, inevitably, will be mediocre or, worse, merely bandwagon behavior. Village Voice 1/7/04
HAVE I GOT A GIRL FOR YOU!
Kirov Ballet of the Maryinsky Theatre / Kennedy Center Opera House, Washington DC / December 30, 2003 – January 4, 2004 Daria Pavlenko, dancing Odette-Odile, was far and away the best thing about the three performances I saw (all three casts) of the Swan Lake the Kirov Ballet brought to Kennedy Center. She has, beside […]