The social swans are strapping their megabucks jewels around their necks, wrists and skinny fingers for The School of American Ballet’s benefit, the 2013 Winter Ball: A Night in the Far East, the theme of which is inspired by Van Cleef & Arpels’s collection Le Bal Oriental—which was also the name of a party held Read More
“Honestly, there is nothing like it,” Dianna DiMenna told The Observer Monday evening. “The beauty, the discipline, the lineage, the heritage, the history!” she gushed. While Ms. DiMenna’s lavish words may have applied to a great many ventures beloved by the city’s gentility, she was in fact referring to ballet. As the evening’s prima, she greeted guests in the marbled lobby of the David H. Koch Theater with that particular hostess’s élan, kissing elegant consoeurs and their bow-tied husbands. The decorous crowd had gathered for the School of American Ballet’s Winter Ball, and there was surely no shortage of pomp or circumstance. Read More
Party photographers didn’t always know how to distinguish Melissa Berkelhammer. “I was once identified as a girl named Stephanie Monahan,” Ms. Berkelhammer said the other night. “I first moved back to New York, and I was at the Whitney Art Party, and it was in a magazine called Manhattan Style, which does not exist anymore, Read More
What’s wrong? Why do Balanchine’s ballets grow fainter by the season? Why aren’t City Ballet’s dancers more expressive? Is this an American failing? With the exception of Ethan Stiefel, those terrific A.B.T. boys are all either Latino or Russian, and Mr. Stiefel himself isn’t particularly expressive, he’s just phenomenal. Or is the failure specific to Read More
We’re in the middle of the City Ballet and American Ballet Theater spring seasons, and although there’s a lot going on of interest, not much of it is taking place at Lincoln Center, unless you count the School of American Ballet’s annual workshop performance at Juilliard. As always, S.A.B. gave us a superb Balanchine staging Read More
Nutcracker ticketholders are undoubtedly relieved that the New York City Ballet reached a settlement with its orchestra. But the musicians’ two-week strike seems to have had little effect on the morale of the cast’s mice and bunnies and tin soldiers. “It’s still Lincoln Center,” observed 11-year-old Isabel Magowen, one of the Polichenelles who pop out Read More
Jerome Robbins was known as one of the great choreographers of all time, as a genius, as a friend to the rich and famous (and, indeed, “one of them”: He danced with Lauren Bacall at Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball), as one of the four closeted gay Jewish men who made West Side Story Read More
