ABT nailed its contemporary colors to the mast for its recent one-week season at the City Center—no imported stars, no full-evening classics or faux-classics. Instead, Tharp (three pieces), Taylor (two), Cunningham, Ratmansky, Clarke (Martha) and Volpi (one each). Volpi? He’s the 25-year-old dancer from the Stuttgart Ballet, originally from Argentina, who was commissioned to create a new piece for the occasion. Read More
This year the five Fall for Dance events—two performances each—sold out in five hours: a record. Hurrah for the series, hurrah for dance (sort of) and hurrah (definitely) for the immaculately refurbished City Center, which already looked scruffy when I started going there, in 1948. (I was pretty scruffy then, too, and no one has refurbished me.) Read More
Romeo and Juliet is easy—we know the story, after all. Still, choreographers can’t resist it, and the latest of them—Edward Clug (Romanian), head of Ballet Maribor (Slovenian)—does offer a new slant. First of all, Juliet survives. (Actually, we’ve encountered this approach before, in a spoof in which R. & J. both live on, in nearby Mantua, trapped in a bickering, after-the-bloom-is-off, you-take-out-the-garbage kind of marriage.) The new work—tricked out with handsome Renaissance-y back projections—also pulls a switch musically: not Prokofiev, not Delius, not Tchaikovsky. Instead, we have Radiohead, that portento-pop supergroup—which explains why the name of this ballet is Radio and Juliet. (Among the Radiohead numbers deployed: “Idioteque,” “Like Spinning Plates” and “We Suck Young Blood.”) Read More
In the mid-’90s, Arlene Croce brought down the wrath of the P.C. gods on herself when she refused to review a Bill T. Jones work called Still/Here on the grounds that it was victim art, and that “by working dying people into his act, Jones is putting himself beyond the reach of criticism.” Today, long after the fuss has died down, the lesson is worth remembering. When confronted with AIDS, torture, the Holocaust, we can’t (and shouldn’t) turn off our human reactions, which means, however, that to a certain extent we have to turn off our critical faculties. Read More
Ballet in September used to be dead as a dodo. Now, with City Ballet’s ingenious decision to give us four weeks of repertory in the early fall, having cut down on the relentlessly long spring season when dancers, critics and audiences droop on the vine, we wake up after the dog days of August with something to look at. It’s unfortunate that this became possible only when the financially floundering City Opera was forced to decamp from the David H. Koch Theater. (To be fair, this is one thing we can’t blame on David H. Koch and his politics.) But at least the opera’s loss is dance’s gain. Read More
The cows in Stella Gibbons’s immortal Cold Comfort Farm are named Graceless, Aimless, Feckless and Pointless, and that more or less is the verdict on Ocean’s Kingdom, the wildly hyped and wildly uninteresting collaboration between Peter Martins and Paul McCartney. (Sorry—Sir Paul McCartney; no P.R. release or press mention omits the knighthood.) If only Gibbons had given us a fifth cow: Endless. Read More
A few years ago, the Bolshoi turned up in town with a program of four ballets, including the Stalin-approved (and ghastly) Spartacus, and something called The Bright Stream, which Stalin had banned in 1935, even punishing some of those responsible for it. Its entrancing Shostakovich score was buried in the Bolshoi archives until, in 2003, Read More
Whatever crimes ABT may have committed through the years–however many Cinderellas, Ladies of the Camellias, Snow Maidens, Pied Pipers, gimcrack Swan Lakes and Sleeping Beauties–they’ve made up for it this season by giving us another brief taste of the Royal Ballet’s supremely gifted Alina Cojocaru in her greatest role, Giselle. Her one performance of it Read More
City Ballet is having a schizophrenic season. The opening black-and-white Balanchine week was a triumph, and the further rush of Balanchine in the following weeks has given us the most satisfying programming in many years. Equally, the overall level of performance compared to what we’ve been experiencing for 20 years has been dazzling: not only Read More
You could say that City Ballet’s opening “all black and white” week was a marketing gimmick, and you’d be right. But you could also say it was a highly instructive, even impressive, event, and you’d be right again. On the most basic level, it gave us seven programs with absolutely no dross–no second-tier Robbins or Read More
