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On Balanchine’s “Ivesiana”
“I don’t have to tell you that Mr. B is with Mozart and Tschaikovsky and Stravinsky,” Lincoln Kirstein announced to the New York City Ballet audience, exactly 30 years before the company’s April 30 opening night this season. The program, which inaugurated City Ballet’s three-week American Music Festival attracted a good house and fervid audience […]
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Onward
Wendy Whelan knows how to make her “sunset years,” so to speak, work well as a much-admired principal dancer—a veteran of over a quarter-century with the New York City Ballet. With this company, astute technique has become an essential—indeed the foremost—of a star dancer’s attributes, competing only with musicality, which is not Whelan’s primary forte. […]
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Life Lessons
Mark Morris Dance Group / James and Martha Duffy Performance Space, Mark Morris Dance Center, Brooklyn, NY / April 3-14, 2013 Jenn and Spencer, being given its world premiere on the opening night of the Mark Morris Dance Group’s run at the company’s studio/theater in Brooklyn, refers to two of the company’s splendid dancers, Jenn Weddel […]
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Folk Tales
Paul Taylor Dance Company / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / March 5 – 24, 2013 Paul Taylor, having boxed in the stage of Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater so it won’t look outlandishly large for a modern-dance group—it was built, first and foremost, for the New York City Ballet—has added two […]
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Ballet’s Sweetheart
Pacific Northwest Ballet / City Center, NYC / February 13-16, 2013 The Pacific Northwest Ballet, whose home is in Seattle, has just made a rare visit to New York. It offered two programs, one an acid-test rep of three top-of-the-line Balanchine classics; the other, Jean-Christophe Maillot’s take on Romeo and Juliet, to that Prokofiev score […]
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Youth’s Sweet Dream
New York City Ballet: Justin Peck’s new work, Paz de la Jolla / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / January 31, February 2, 6, and 8, 2013 Justin Peck, choreographer of Paz de la Jolla for New York City Ballet Photo: Paul Kolnik Justin Peck, a 25-year-old member of New York City Ballet’s […]
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Bliss!
New York City Ballet / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / January 15 – February 24, 2013 The New York City Ballet’s two-week festival (January 15-27, 2013) of Balanchine’s choreography to music by Tschaikovsky came with a guarantee: no duds, no Eurotrash or other Terpsichorean fads, no feeble imitations of the greats. How […]
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Tschaikovsky, a Balanchine Muse
New York City Ballet / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / January 15 – February 24, 2013 The New York City Ballet opened its six-week Winter Season at Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater with George Balanchine’s Serenade, created in 1935 and set to Tschaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings. It was the first ballet […]
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On Soledad Barrio
Soledad Barrio, one of the greatest dancers of our time, in any genre—hers is flamenco—is giving class. The venue is a modest studio over a ground-floor church on West 86th Street. The dancing arena must boast a very resilient floor in addition to its three chandeliers, the only hint of “décor” in sight. Soledad Barrio, […]
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Diaghilev Smiles
Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo / Joyce Theater, NYC / December 18, 2012 – January 5, 2013 The trouble with the Trocks—Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, the men-only troupe that parodies classical ballet—is that their dancing gets better and better. None of the dancers is qualified for a place in the higher echelons […]