Peter Martins has been making ballets for 36 years now, ever since Calcium Night Light, in 1977. As I remember it, City Ballet’s orchestra was on strike, the company was shut down, and somewhere in Brooklyn Martins previewed this startling duet (to Ives) for Heather Watts and Daniel Duell. Everyone trooped out to see it, everyone was knocked out by it, and soon it was in the company’s repertory. Arlene Croce described its climax as “a staccato, nonstop, seriocomic pas de deux in which limbs become hinges and handles, bodies are clamped together, then slid part. The choreography,” she went on, “makes not one superfluous gesture, everything stands out with bright-edged clarity, and the flatly factual tone communicates an instantaneous emotion.” Balanchine liked it enough to insert it into his own Ivesiana, where it didn’t belong, but the compliment to Martins was immense. Read More

Of all the hit Rodgers and Hart shows, only Pal Joey and On Your Toes—well, maybe A Connecticut Yankee—seem to be revivable. We know dozens of the songs from Jumbo, Babes in Arms, The Boys from Syracuse, By Jupiter and the rest, but we don’t know the shows, unless we think we can infer Babes in Arms from the Mickey and Judy movie version (which—thank you, M-G-M—managed to omit most of the sublime score, including “My Funny Valentine”).

Why has On Your Toes survived? Apart from the terrible movie from 1939, three years after the show, there was a Broadway revival in 1954 (a flop), and another one in 1983 (a hit, with Natalia Makarova as the Russian prima. Well, she was a Russian prima). And now the City Center’s Encores! series has unleashed it again, and we can confirm that it’s definitely not the dopey plot that keeps it turning up again and again—the backstage and on-stage antics of a Ballets Russes-like company don’t constitute a plot. Nor can the ups and downs of a pallid romance between an ex-Vaudeville hoofer and a sweet young thing of a wannabe songwriter hold your attention longer that it takes the two of them to sing the show’s biggest hit, “There’s a Small Hotel.” Read More

In the small theater on the fifth floor of his Dance Center across from BAM, Mark Morris is presenting a smorgasbord of four chamber pieces, three of them to live (and beautifully played) chamber music—and three of them new to New York. Read More

Bill T. Jones is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company with a two-week season at the Joyce. He’s been a MacArthur “Genius” and a Kennedy Center honoree. He’s won two Tonys—for Spring Awakening and FELA!—plus countless other awards and prizes and honorary degrees. He’s collaborated with Toni Morrison, Jessye Norman, Peter Hall. Most importantly, he knows how to put a dance together. So why, ultimately, is an evening of Bill T. Jones (let alone two evenings of Bill T. Jones) so depleting? Because despite the kinetic excitements he can provide and his sheer facility and the Big Ideas he sometimes unleashes, you don’t end up feeling his work is really about anything—certainly not the music he chooses to use for it. Read More

How gratifying that Paul Taylor’s current season—it runs until March 24—is packing them in at the Koch. I’ve never seen such large and enthusiastic audiences for his work, and I go back with him almost 50 years. It’s as if last year’s move from the City Center to Lincoln Center has woken people up to Read More

For eight weeks, the only music heard at the Koch Theater has been Tchaikovsky. First, the annual six-week Nutcracker-fest; then, a fortnight of other Tchaikovsky-Balanchine masterpieces, disfigured only by Peter Martins’ Bal de Couture, which is about to make its return appearance after its unfortunate preview at last season’s gala—a glitzy tribute not to Tchaikovsky or Balanchine but to the fashion designer Valentino. It was the company’s dreariest attempt to juice up the box office since Martins’ equally ghastly collaboration with Paul McCartney. Read More

The big event at the Trocks’ season at the Joyce (the Trocks, of course, are Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo), was a restaging of Laurencia. Well, not the entire Laurencia, which is a 1939 multi-act Soviet piece of what they used to call choreo-drama—all heroism and uplifting patriotism, the kind of thing that led to Spartacus and Stone Flower—but of its non-narrative finale, 17 minutes of classical dance with colorful Spanishy costumes and a strong infusion of Spanishy folkiness. Like most of the Trocks’ Russian repertory, it was staged by Elena Kunikova—exact in steps and style, so you know you’re getting the real thing, with the guys disciplined to the tips of their pointe shoes. They do a terrific job, but you can’t help wondering what they could do with the story itself—the peasant uprising that turns on an attempt by the local military Commander to snatch the passionate Laurencia from her boyfriend, Frondoso. (The tyrant, you’ll be stunned to learn, is done away with: The People triumph!) Read More

After all these years of saying the same thing about the Alvin Ailey company—terrific dancers, awful repertory—I’m finally accepting the inevitable: I’m not going to change my mind, and they’re not going to change their ways. And why should they, given their juggernaut success all over the world? Audiences just love them, the way they love Cirque du Soleil and Béjart and Riverdance (the latter recently deceased, and not a moment too soon). Read More

’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