Author Archive
Preserved Expectations
Ballet’s Perilous History on Video Not enough of Natalia Makarova’s high artistic quality nor her particular qualities were on view at the tribute to her staged by Youth America Grand prix late last month. The videos shown of her performances existed almost in a class of their own. I don’t think that this was deliberate,...
I Come to Praise
Anna Liceica and The Joffrey Survive I want to give high praise to ex-American Ballet Theater soloist Anna Liceica, now a member of Ballet Verité, who danced recently month at a concert honoring Levi HaLevi. He was a rabbi and civil rights activist who was the father-in-law of Verité choreographer Seth Gertsacov. In Manhattan Movement...
Designing Movement
The Body Revolution at ‘Youthquake’ Some profound connections between dance, fashion and individual as well as social transformation emanate from Youthquake: The 1960s Fashion Revolution, the exhibit of 1960s ready-to-wear now at the Fashion Institute of Technology. In the same way that dance wear usually does, minimally constructed clothes like those that roiled the ’60s...
Smart Moves
Ballet Arizona and the Graham Tradition “I hate dancing that is just sort of dumb,” Ib Andersen, artistic director of Ballet Arizona said in New York last week. Andersen was in town for his company’s local debut at the Joyce. Formerly a star of the Royal Danish Ballet, when Andersen joined New York City Ballet...
Preview: Gerald Finley In Concert
Darkness and light resume their eternal dance in bass-baritone Gerald Finley’s recital Feb. 27 at Alice Tully, part of Lincoln Center’s “Art of the Song” series. Finley’s recital at Zankel Hall two years ago was a knockout. Now he’s returning to the New York recital stage with an entirely different program of 19th-, 20th- and...
Sin-sational: NYCB Mixes Brecht and Balanchine
Thought-provokingly revived at New York City Ballet earlier this month, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s 1933 The Seven Deadly Sins is mercilessly unsparing of its audience’s feelings. It parades before us every act of compromise and hypocrisy, both individual and collective, of which we—spectators, society—may have been guilty. Just as when it was new last...
The Takeover
When guest stars rule dance It sometimes seems today as if every ballet company in the world is fronted by a representative sampling of about a dozen perpetual guest stars. Each has a company that they at least nominally call home, but they are continuously orbiting out on their own. Sometimes they need no more...
Up, Down and Sideways
The year 2012 can wait until my next column. But let’s hope for—let’s go so far as to look forward to—dance events as memorable as those that took place in the closing week of 2011. Winding up its annual City Center season, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater gave an admirable rendition of Paul Taylor’s...
Dancing in Character: Pina Recalled, Gelsey Returns
In Pina Bausch’s choreo-stagings, outside and indoors trade places; in Wim Wenders’ new 3-D documentary, Pina, we see in the crispest of photographic detail her deep-pile stage floors, where dancers are forced to rise in relevé in the loam. Her troupe braved elements that were punishing, even if simulated. We watch them get soiled in...
Marilyn Assoluta: Tribute to a Bountiful Horne
The Metropolitan Opera Guild’s luncheon honoring Marilyn Horne Oct. 31 was admiring, affectionate and moving, but not syrupy—Horne herself wouldn’t have stood for that. The mezzo-soprano has been an irrepressible comedienne on stage and off, and is just as apt to be wry at her own expense as about any other topic. At the Guild’s...
Mind and Body Math
The Cunninghams carry on You wouldn’t know it from watching him on stage, but Merce Cunningham dancer John Hinrichs “would describe [himself] more as a math guy than as a dancer,” he recently informed me by email sent while on the company’s “Legacy Tour,” its final circuit around the world. The company will be at...
Robbins’ Road to Hollywood
The ultimately disappointing journey of Jerome Robbins from Broadway to soundstage Jerome Robbins, director and choreographer as well as primary conceptualist behind Broadway’s West Side Story in 1957, knew that filming it in 1960 was going to be problematic. He was more than aware of how easily his brainchild could devolve into cinematic cliché. The...
Joan Sutherland: Becoming and Remembering
Last May, seven months after Dame Joan Sutherland died at age 83, the Metropolitan Opera Guild held a memorial tribute to her at Town Hall. It’s been at the back of my mind ever since: there was a lot to take in. A short video biography was aired. There was footage of live and television...
Coming Attractions: A Look at What’s to Come in Dance
“I was thinking The Mists of Avalon, but there was a couple necking in my sightlines and a speedboat and I was like, no, this isn’t The Mists of Avalon!” So said a dancer overheard at Wave Hill, which overlooks the Hudson River in Riverdale, on a July night a decade ago, when I attended...
Democratizing Dance
Plus, Farrell revives Divertimento City Center’s eighth annual 10-day Fall for Dance Festival, Oct. 27–Nov. 6, reaffirms the home truth that, in New York City, people’s interest in seeing dance increases in direct proportion to its affordability. Uniformly priced at $10, tickets went on sale Oct. 2 and the sold-out shingle was up by the...
Dancing Through Five Centuries in Three Days
BAM Breathes New Life into the Baroque Last week, ballet went back to its source with a concentrated dose of Baroque dance—as well as 20th-century Jazz Age response. At the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Jean-Baptiste Lully’s 1676 mythological opera Atys was saturated with dance, befitting its creation under the patronage as well as supervision of...
Troupers Retrench
How New York’s dance world rebounds and recovers What I would like to be writing: after the cataclysm of Sept. 11, 2001, New York dance awoke with a new sense of purpose. Dancers moved as if every performance would be their last, artistic and administrative directors began to consistently make sensible and judicious decisions, critics...
Move Like an Animal
Mark Morris takes on Stravinsky’s ‘Renard’ as part of Mostly Mozart This year, Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival is letting some Stravinsky sneak in. His ballet-opera Renard, populated, or rather creatured, with Fox, Cock, Cat and Ram, arrives courtesy of Mark Morris, who has choreographed a new version of this short ballet-opera that was first...
The Home Team
To say that Hee Seo’s debut Giselle at American Ballet Theatre was exceedingly respectable sounds like faint praise but that’s not the way I mean it. Debuts are necessary, they’re crucial, but one has to come to them with tempered expectations. Very few debuts reveal something new about a role, but they hopefully reveal that...
Riding the Waves
The career ups and downs of The Mariinsky Ballet’s stars Ballet is a rough, wild ride! Administration support, the dancer’s position in the casting pecking order can turn on a dime, and nowhere more visibly than at St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Ballet, which is playing the Metropolitan Opera this week. Few dancers have had such a...
Stranded in Neo-Classicism
When you get right down to it, much of ballet choreography could be considered simply a matter of putting venerable folk dance steps and patterns on pointe. And also when you get right down to it, much of Western literary and theatrical narrative over the last twomillennia can be viewed as a chronology of Greek...
