Do you ever wonder how choreographers choose their titles? After seeing James Whiteside’s New American Romance on the last day of American Ballet Theatre’s fall season at the former New York State Theater, I spent some time pondering that. The five women in its cast of eight wear dark blue, swirling, ankle-length tutus (provided by Primadonna). The music to which Whiteside set his ballet, … [Read more...]
Speaking of Love
Alexei Ratmansky introduces Plato to American Ballet Theatre in its Lincoln Center season. Serenade after Plato’s Symposium is the twelfth ballet that Alexei Ratmansky has choreographed for American Ballet Theatre in the past seven years; clearly he takes his position as the company’s artist in residence seriously. This beautiful new chamber ballet is subtly different from anything of his … [Read more...]
The Sleeping Beauty Wakes Up
Alexei Ratmansky brings an 1890 ballet to new life for American Ballet theatre. American Ballet Theatre is no stranger to The Sleeping Beauty. As Ballet Theatre, the new company in town in 1941, the dancers performed Princess Aurora, Anton Dolin’s mash-up of elements from the Prologue and Act III of Marius Petipa’s 1890 masterwork. ABT presented its first full-length version in 1976, its … [Read more...]
In Season
Hello! Goodbye! American Ballet Theatre’s City Center season came and went with dispiriting speed—seven performances in five days (October 16 through 20). The pleasures outweighed the disappointment. New Yorkers could rendezvous with revivals of three ballets in the company’s history: Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo (1942), Antony Tudor’s The Leaves Are Fading (1977), and Mark Morris’s Drink to Me Only … [Read more...]
Astray in Summer Dreams
If you can’t see a production of Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a woodland setting during a long June twilight, as I once did, you can be enthralled by a different sort of magic conjured up by the Bard’s plot. George Balanchine’s 1962 ballet of the same name ended its week in the New York City Ballet’s season before American Ballet Theatre hit the solstice dead on with Frederick … [Read more...]
Love and Death in an Imagined India
People interested in ballet history can entertain themselves with unlikely questions. What, for instance, would Marius Petipa think of the production of his 1877 La Bayadère that the great ballerina Natalia Makarova constructed for American Ballet Theatre in 1980? If he were sitting in a seat at the Metropolitan Opera House during ABT’s current season of classics and new works, how much of the … [Read more...]