A new Giselle? A new Swan Lake? Another day, another dollar. But a new Sleeping Beauty is always an event, and for many reasons. Its score is Tchaikovsky’s greatest, which means ballet’s greatest. Its demands on a ballet company are enormous: huge cast, opulent sets and costumes, a special brand of ballerina, a rigorous and 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
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
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
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
It’s easy-and fun-to drop in on the Kirov Ballet these days: interesting productions, first-rate dancers, and the fascination of watching a major ballet company reinvent itself. It’s hard, though, to figure out exactly what the company is, because what we get to see is only a modest part of its repertory, and so many of Read More
The Kirov-the world’s premier dance company, the company of
Petipa and Fokine, of Nijinsky and Pavlova, of Balanchine and Danilova and
Spessivtseva, of Nureyev and Makarova and Baryshnikov-is finally lurching into
the 20th century (forget the 21st). Having missed modernism and postmodernism,
and with the West now available both as inspiration and cash cow, it’s Read More
Something weird happened at the New York State Theater the other night–we slipped through a crack in time. Or was it a crack in space? The event was billed as the “Millennium International Ballet Gala: Stars of the 21st Century,” but it was mostly non-stars of the 20th century dishing up warhorses of the 19th, Read More
