NYCB Week IV

[kfw]

hbl, thanks for the recommendation. You can find a thread devoted to Barbara Milberg Fisher's "In Balanchine's Company" here.

[bart]

Unfortunately I don't remember seeing Villella doing the role.

It's been a long time, and I suspect that few of us have had that experience. It's interesting the way that, when Villella does his pre-performance talks, audience members of a certain age raise their hands hesitantly, even blushingly, to tell him: "I remember seeing you in Prodigal Son."

The famous photos -- for example, of the big jump -- don't really tell the story of the impact that Villella's performance made. (Everyone can do a big jump nowadays.) I've just been looking at the photos in EV's book, Prodigal Son. Two photos with Suzanne Farrell's Siren make the point very well: the one in which she is snaking down Villella's legs; and the one where both of them are taking their bows, she serenely, he in what appears to be a state of exhaustion and semi-shock. Look at EV's face. Both photos, unposed as they are, give a hint of the performance I remember seeing and feeling.

Closest to that impact in Villella's own company was the young Jeremy Cox in 2005. I'm delighted that Ulbricht has impressed so much at NYCB. Villella had many opportunities to work on this role over the years. I hope Ulbricht gets the same consideration.

[drb]

So far I've not seen a review in the local papers of Mr. Ulbricht's Prodigal Son, yet many of us seem to have found it a very special event. I found an early mention of him (by Harris Green) as one of 25 dancers to watch in Dance Magazine, exactly seven years ago:

Ballet has a budding superstar in Daniel Ulbricht, a 17-year-old student at the School of American Ballet. At five feet five and one-half inches--he scrupulously stresses the "one-half"--Ulbricht is a remarkably compact package of burgeoning pyrotechnics and innate musicality. In February 1999, while on tour with Les Jeunes Dancers, a troupe from his hometown of St. Petersburg, Florida, he dropped by SAB to take class as a visitor. He doesn't recall doing anything out of the ordinary, but New York City Ballet principal Peter Boal, who teaches at the school, says, "All our jaws dropped open when we saw how well prepared he was." (Ulbricht was a product of the Judith Lee Johnson Studio of Dance and a student of Javier DuBroq.) He first dazzled NYCB subscribers last winter with his springy splits in the jester pas de trois in Peter Martins's Sleeping Beauty. SAB's spring workshop found him dominating the fourth pas de trois of Balanchine's Danses Concertantes and in command of the men's regiment in Stars and Stripes. "Just to have fun onstage" is his goal. His already marked concern for formal discipline should guarantee joy for audiences as well.

That particular issue also "discovered" a couple of other locals: Marcelo Gomes (by Gus Solomons) and Adam Hendrickson (by Clive Barnes, who compared him to a young Jean Babilee).

[sz]

>So far I've not seen a review in the local papers of Mr. Ulbricht's

>Prodigal Son, yet many of us seem to have found it a very

>special event.

Alastair Macaulay was at Tuesday's performance...Maybe NY will get a review from him tomorrow....

In the meantime, check this out, Anna's review of Ib and Suzanne:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html...;pagewanted=all

Back to Sirens of yesteryear....

I can well imagine Diana Adams as the perfectly cast Siren!! What a line up too, the others named as Eddie's Sirens!

[Farrell Fan]

I have no direct knowledge of this, other than watching him dance, but it seems to me that in the seven years since he was still a promising teenager at SAB, Daniel Ulbricht has gotten a bit taller. Certainly he has grown considerably in artistic stature.