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
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
You know where you are with Giselle. The text is clear (unlike that of Swan Lake, say); the only real interpretive question is whether Albrecht is a wicked aristocratic seducer (the preferred Soviet slant) or a well-meaning young man whose love for a peasant girl blinds him to his responsibilities back at the castle. Today’s Read More
We know how Merce Cunningham works and how he thinks—we’ve been told, over and over again, by him and by others. We know that the dance is a thing apart from the music; that elements of the dance have been determined by chance procedures, often involving the I Ching; that we’re meant to concentrate on Read More
We know how Merce Cunningham works and how he thinks—we’ve been told, over and over again, by him and by others. We know that the dance is a thing apart from the music; that elements of the dance have been determined by chance procedures, often involving the I Ching; that we’re meant to concentrate on Read More
That
American Ballet Theatre is today a more interesting company than New York City
Ballet is an astonishing reversal—who could have dreamed it? Not that A.B.T. is
cutting edge, unless you think that warmed-over Fokine and Kevin McKenzie’s
wrong-headed Swan Lake are on the
edge of anything except Read More
That American Ballet Theatre is today a more interesting company than New York City Ballet is an astonishing reversal-who could have dreamed it? Not that A.B.T. is cutting edge, unless you think that warmed-over Fokine and Kevin McKenzie’s wrong-headed Swan Lake are on the edge of anything except tedium. But this has been an A.B.T. Read More
The American Ballet Theatre spring season ended in a flock of Swan Lakes -11 of them. That’s what the Met audience seems to want: name classics, the more the merrier. And, of course, anything with the word “swan” is an automatic audience grabber: Swan Lake , The Dying Swan -when do we get Swann’s Way Read More
