Many of the solos, duets, and small-group vignettes that constitute [Landmarks of Dreams] have a colorful, playful air typical of a circus with theatrical aspirations, their vocabulary cheerfully mixing acrobatics, ethnic dance, and the ingenious cantilevering of contact improv. Village Voice 2/13/04
BALANCHINE AT HOME #7: DARLING
New York City Ballet / New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / January 6 – February 29, 2004 The evening before Valentine’s Day, Megan Fairchild, whose charming looks and diminutive stature echo her surname, made a notable local debut as Swanilda in the New York City Ballet’s Balanchine-Danilova Coppélia and was promoted to the […]
BALANCHINE AT HOME #6: RESETTING GEMS
New York City Ballet / New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / January 6 – February 29, 2004 At the time of its creation for the New York City ballet in 1967, Balanchine’s Jewels was much touted as the first program-length plotless ballet ever. The claim—good marketing fodder, like the anecdotes about the choreographer’s […]
BALANCHINE AT HOME #5: A WORD ABOUT “CONCERTO BAROCCO”
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 […]