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Tiler Peck
Everything that Tiler Peck presented last weekend at City Center, as dancer, choreographer, and curator, was a first of one sort or another, two New York premieres, one live premiere, and a world premiere. She is brilliant, and the achievement was exhilarating. The world premiere of Time Spell was the crowd-pleaser, a mad mix-and-match of…
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The Taming of the Shrew
People forget that Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew starts with an induction in which a drunken vagabond is to be regaled with a theatrical performance of what is sometimes mistaken for the whole play. The Kate-Petruchio shenanigans is, in short, a play-within-a-play, an imagined world of sex-play and power relations, perhaps challenging to, but…
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Cinderella
There was, I thought as I listened to Valery Gergiev conduct Prokofiev’s music to the ballet of CINDERELLA, something radical about it. It seems actively to resist Romanticism, despite the fairy tale it depicts, and to veer full scale into the abstraction and self-consciousness of Modernism. It is only at the moments of literal romance…
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Manon
I went to MANON to see Diana Vishneva, whom I have seen before, but too long ago and not often enough. This was her 10th season with the American Ballet Theatre, her second home along with the Mariinsky in Russia, and cause for great celebration at the weekend close. The ballet itself is of interest,…
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Midsummer Night’s Dream
George Balanchine’s balletic rendering of A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM (1962), in revival at the New York City Ballet, captures less the Shakespeare of the popular theater, and the modern nostalgia for it, than the Shakespeare of the court, the one associated with Blackfriars, Ben Jonson, and the masques of Inigo Jones. There is a great…
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Jewels
Last week at the New York City Ballet I saw George Balanchine’s JEWELS, a full-length ballet in three parts, “Emeralds,” “Rubies” and “Diamonds”, created in 1967. There is a sense in which, when we see a Balanchine at the NYCB, which he co-founded, we are seeing a work “from the repertory”, and another in which…
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Then, 1000 Years of Peace
You can never read all of the books, or see all of the films, or visit all of the places, or speak all of the languages, or see all of the theatre and the dance and the opera, or listen to all of the songs, or sing them, or embrace every lover, or wonder at…
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Sleeping Beauty
Michael Bourne subtitles his dance to Tchaikovsky’s SLEEPING BEAUTY – “A Gothic Romance.” He turns the tale, first told by Perrault, then by brothers Grimm, later by Petipa as choreographer, and yet again by Disney, into a vampire love story set around the fin de siècle. This is not completely inappropriate. An overlap may be…
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Balanchine Short Stories
Of the multifarious branches of the theater that I have followed, and now and then even practiced, it is probably the classical ballet of which I have been the most neglectful. This is not as it ought to have been, particularly here in New York, where the ballet achieves an amplitude matched in few if…