I loved Ratmansky's new Firebird at American Ballet Theatre. The controversy it has stirred up among critics and balletomanes--many are ambivalent, some downright despise it--also makes sense, given the local, Balanchine production's regular outings. In the Balanchine and Fokine, the firebird is the only character that matters. Balanchine's choreography for her--early and late--is … [Read more...]
Rites of passage
From my Financial Times review of Tchaikovsky Suite no. 3, playing only until Sunday at New York City Ballet: Balanchine discovered in Tchaikovsky, his fellow Petersburger, romance and imperial elegance entwined - or at least following fast on one another. But in this odd, late ballet, the choreographer kept them apart.Tchaikovsky Suite No. 3 begins in a swoony state. Behind a foggy scrim, Ask … [Read more...]
Form and functionaries
There are Petipa ballets in which nearly every step conveys character, but La Bayadere is not one of them. Wednesday's fielding of three promising dancers in nearly new roles confirmed how hard the ballet proves for demonstrating theatrical chops. Petipa's typical structure--interrupting the story for dance "entertainments" -- used to drive me crazy. It felt so archaic and … [Read more...]
This year’s model (Giselle)
I've seen two Giselles at American Ballet Theatre this week--Alina Cojocaru and Angel Corella; and Natalia Osipova and David Hallberg. Both sets of dancers were great together and individually compelling--in part or in whole. It's that "part" that I'm wondering about--particularly for the title character, given the vast changes she endures. In the first act, young comely peasant … [Read more...]
Participatory Art and its Discontents
What's participatory art good for? I consider the question in the Village Voice. Check it. … [Read more...]
Old masters looking back as we wonder about looking forward (revised already)
(Note: Somehow a couple of paragraphs got disappeared last night--not erased but buried in computer code and thus invisible. I've put asterisks by them, newly restored...] Late February and March were chock-a-block with venerated masters of modern dance, from graying to old to dead. The plethora of offerings forced us to think again about what we will be left with in their … [Read more...]
The dancer and the dance (on the occasion of Balanchine and kin)
Over Christmas, I deflowered a middle-aged friend of his Nutcracker innocence. A typical European, he'd seen Pina Bausch but no Petipa. Though I suspect he found the whole thing childish, he responded gamely (this was to ABT's new Ratmansky version) except to the pas de deux. These moments of slippery idealized romance made him itch. In fact, he decided BAM was infested with bed … [Read more...]
Step sisters (NEW! comments, and comments on the comments)
[Ed. note: while I am slow to get a new post up, check out the comments to this one. I have some questions for you, dear reader.] For reasons good and bad, choreographers Andrea Miller and Sidra Bell are not typical fare at New York's longtime incubator for new performance, Dance Theater Workshop. On the one hand, their work doesn't question performance's frame: not much … [Read more...]
Tuning in to tone with five dances and one movie
By the time I was nine, home was my mother, my sister, and I. We bickered in twos, with the third as chorus and tie breaker. Sometimes my sister would cut me off or my mother her with a complaint about "tone"--how she didn't "like it." It's a dread phrase, "I don't like your tone," because it implies that there isn't anything behind the tone to have excited it--or that there shouldn't … [Read more...]
Nutcracker suite
Yes, ridiculous: now that all the nuts are cracked, I get around to posting these. It was an especially bountiful Nutcracker season here in New York. Besides the glorious perennial, New York City Ballet's Balanchine production, Ratmansky mounted his very own version for ABT and Mark Morris's Hard Nut made a rare (too rare, I say) East Coast appearance. The Ratmansky excited me so much, I hardly … [Read more...]