New York City Ballet married Broadway and Balanchine at their annual Spring Gala, which featured the premiere of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's The Seven Deadly Sins, a collaboration between the ballet's company and the Tony Award-winning singer Patti LuPone. The veteran Broadway actor Victor Garber (best known for his role in Titanic and soon Read More
Okay, dance people, buckle up--March is going to be a bumpy month. It's a modern-dance invasion. (Paul Taylor's come and gone; everyone else is on his/her way.) Start figuring out your priorities now ... next week will be too late.
To begin with: You're going to be spending a lot of time at the Joyce.
First up, Read More
Premieres, revivals, debuts ... With our two major ballet companies both in residence at Lincoln Center (as they are every May and June), the last few weeks have been a revolving door of sensational triumphs, disappointments and fiascoes.
Let's get the worst over first. Melissa Barak, an ex-City Ballet dancer and sometime choreographer, Read More
"Bugsy Siegel. As soon as I thought of it, I knew that was my story," Melissa Barak said. She was speaking of her newest, yet-to-be-titled City Ballet commission-which will premiere in the company's spring season, on June 5. Though Ms. Barak left the New York City ballet in 2007 to join the newly formed Los Read More
Several months ago, I received a letter from a New Jersey couple who were distressed over the schedule for City Ballet’s current season. (“I reviewed it with disbelief and shock.”) Out of the 56 upcoming performances, they specify, 37 are of five full-evening ballets. “What’s going on? Why this concentration on such a narrow range, Read More
The City Opera has ceded shared theater space to the City Ballet for an increased portion of the fall season, The Times reported yesterday. The four weeks in September and October will allow the ballet to stage its first fall repertory season in 45 years. Meanwhile,f giving up time in the Read More
The big news at the City Ballet gala on Nov. 24 at the David H. Koch (nee State) Theater was the theater. The most dramatic change, predictably, is the reconfiguration of the orchestra seating: Two new side aisles mean no more wiggling past dozens of irritated seat-holders to get to your own seat, and no Read More
“It’s not like a hoedown; c’mon, girls, it’s the ballet!”
Two weeks before the New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker was set to open, Garielle Whittle, the ballet mistress who teaches all the children’s roles, was still drilling the basics. “None of this—” Ms. Whittle mimed a square dance, dipping her shoulder down and Read More
It was a disappointing spring at City Ballet. Part of the problem was no one’s fault: Two of the company’s crucial dancers were out for almost the entire time. The absence of Ashley Bouder, the strongest and most brilliant of the younger women, and of the always interesting Sara Mearns meant that the rest of Read More
Why do so many of us still go obsessively to the New York City Ballet? Not, alas, to see Balanchine danced fully and expressively; it happens on occasion, but not nearly often enough. Not, certainly, for the procession of new works—“novelties,” as they’re called in the ballet business—that crop up every season and, with a Read More
It’s a new year. The Aileys and the Nutcrackers have come and gone, and so, alas, have Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo—the Trocks, to their friends. They recently spent almost three weeks at the Joyce, and it wasn’t enough. It’s never enough.
No company has evolved more conspicuously than this group of male Read More
The climactic moment—the defining moment—of City Ballet’s exhausting spring season came two nights before it official- ly ended. The occasion was a gala performance staged for the benefit of the Dancers’ Emergency Fund, a worthy project dreamed up years ago by Jerome Robbins and now revived by Peter Martins. The program was the usual gala Read More
Why would the world’s foremost classical ballerina choose to turn up in New York leading a small company performing three works newly choreographed on and for her? Idealism? Vanity? Artistic ambition? Chutzpah? Her program was called “Beauty in Motion,” a real misnomer. How about “Vishneva Goes Contempo”? Or “A Long Night at the City Center”? Read More
Alexei Ratmansky, the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet (one of the premiere Russian companies), has confirmed that he is not renewing his contract at Bolshoi and is in negotiations with New York City Ballet to become its resident choreographer. He would replace Christopher Wheeldon, who is leaving at the end of this month to Read More
I’ve been seeing Balanchine’s Jewels for more than 40 years, and that’s a lot of jewelry. In the beginning it seemed to many of us unique in its ambitions and its splendor; to others it seemed gaudy—paste. But no one thought it would ever travel. Too expensive, too many styles to absorb and what company Read More
