’Tis the season when they’re cracking nuts at City Ballet and dispensing Revelations at Alvin Ailey, but let’s take a look at some other stuff that’s been going on around town, all of it “modern,” or “postmodern,” or something. The liberating shake-up that the Judson Dance Theater administered in the 1960s in the wake of the Merce Cunningham revolution is still reverberating—in some cases, with the same people! The choreographer Deborah Hay, for instance, was on the first Judson program in 1962, and half a century later, she’s among us again with a work called As Holy Sites Go/duet at the holy site of St. Mark’s Church. Read More

A.B.T. just dropped into the City Center for a week—all the time it could get, and not nearly enough. The fall season is when the company is free to mix and match, focusing on one-act works and younger dancers who don’t get much of a chance during the Met’s spring marathon of full-evening classics (and bores) that demand Stars, however faded. Read More

HAVING EMBARRASSED ITSELF (AND US) with its horrible Valentino gala, City Ballet pulled itself together later in the season and gave us many pleasures, as well as much hope for the future. Let us for once dwell solely on the positive. Read More

FOR A FEW DAYS, you could let yourself believe that City Ballet was a serious organization. After all, who can quarrel with the austere Balanchine-Stravinsky triple-bill of Apollo, Orpheus and Agon—the “Greek trilogy,” as it’s being cannily labeled?

Then, last Thursday, the Gala struck, and there we were again, trapped in Gimmicksville. Read More

BAM HAS UNVEILED its new $50,000,000 performance space, configured for 250 viewers, with a commissioned work, Eclipse, by the ex-Cunningham dancer Jonah Bokaer and his collaborator, the visual artist Anthony McCall. For this event, the space is square, seats all around with some more on a second level, and highly intimate—at times, if you’re sitting in the front row, you’re practically brushing knees with the dancers. Daring—yet in a way, that very closeness pushes you back from them: As they dart toward you and past you, you can’t help bracing yourself. And there are no seatbelts. Read More

The Paris Opéra Ballet, which recently vacated the Koch theater, put its worst foot forward with its opening program. But what a pretty foot it was—so glamorously arched, so delicately pointed! That, indeed, is to a large extent the story of the company: exquisite technique for its own sake. Look, I go into arabesque! Behold, I balance on pointe! (Balancing is one of the dancers’ most cherished accomplishments: They get ready to get up there, they get up there, they stay up there. Applause!) Well, their training is immaculate, and since they have it, why not flaunt it? A few years ago I spent a day at their school, observing not only the perfect manners of the kids—they stop and bow or curtsy to grown-ups they pass in the halls—but the perfect manner in which they’re taught to produce steps. It’s beautiful to watch, but after a while I realized that something was missing: no one was connecting step production to musical impulse. Read More

Through the ABT season just ended, the company had 10 female principals. (It has just added an 11th, the Korean Hee Seo.) Of the 10, six are Russian—well, Alina Cojocaru is Romanian—and three of them, Cojocaru, Vishneva and Osipova, are the biggest ballerina drawing cards. In other words, we’re back in the good old Ballets Russes days, when “ballet” meant “Russian.” Is it this lingering Russophilia that explains the company’s loyalty to the artistically irrelevant Irina Dvorovenko, its partiality for the odd mixture that is Veronika Part, and its recent welcome of Polina Semionova? Read More