Kathleen O'Connell

Agreed. I'm sad to see Fairchild go, but better to end the season looking forward, not back. It's forward for both NYCB and Fairchild, after all. ETA: I think it's fine for NYCB to make a little fuss over Fairchild's final performances, even though he's departing rather than retiring: he's an audience favorite and has put his artistry at the company's service for many years. He -- and the audience -- deserve as much.

I realized after I hit submit that my comment might look a bit ... odd ... given that he was married to a different ballerina. But I did mean their stage partnership, not their personal lives. The latter really doesn't matter in theater at the end of the day: if people are pros and invested in their art, they make the fantasy work regardless of how they feel offstage.

I do agree that R. Fairchild and T. Peck were terrific in "The Man I Love"! They both have a certain kind of Broadway sheen that makes that pas something special. (It may be because neither has any particular qualms about being Broadway, rather than just evoking it: i.e., they understand the difference between a performance and a show.) I really don't expect to see it done any better during my lifetime. Since I prefer Stravinsky Violin Concerto as a ballet overall, and because I am particularly taken with the way Hyltin has (to my eye) re-imagined Kay Mazzo's role -- with Fairchild's full participation, without a doubt -- it's still the performance that will shine particularly bright in my memory. Well maybe that smokin' hot Intermezzo, too ...

First things first - she was his truest partner, which is not quite the same thing as the other way around. Anyway, I mean simply that their stage chemistry was exemplary and that he looked his absolute best when he was dancing with her. (I think Hyltin makes all her partners look good, but Fairchild especially so. IMO, he needed her more than she needed him in that regard, but I will still very much miss their special chemistry.) I still remember their genuinely electric performance in the Intermezzo of Balanchine's Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet, not to mention Aria II of Stravinsky Violin Concerto.

Sterling Hyltin is Robert Fairchild's truest and best partner, and the thing that makes me saddest about his departure is the simple fact that she won't be dancing with him anymore. I'm glad he'll share his final NYCB performance with her.

Good. Re Farley: he was one of Aurora's four suitors way back when he was still (I think) an apprentice. He was hands down the most princely prince on the stage, and not an obvious candidate for Von Rotbart.

All four choreographers are young - very young in the case of Gianna Reisen, who was still an SAB student when the gala commission was announced in April. Who knows what kind of choreographer she is or will become? Lauren Lovette, who is an NYCB principal and an alum of The New York Choreographic Institute, has only recently begun to refocus her attention on choreography. The work presented at the gala will be her second for NYCB. Her first , For Clara, premiered at last year's gala. My take, based on For Clara: her work shows real promise. I got the impression that she didn't want to leave anything on the cutting room floor, however: the ballet seemed more than a bit overstuffed for a 15 minute work. (The music Lovette chose — Schumann's Introduction and Concert Allegro — seems to change tone and texture about every 16 bars, and may have compounded matters.) I'm happy to write it off as a novice's mis-step, and a not at all unusual one. I don't think I need to see For Clara again, but I would like to see another Lovette ballet. Although Troy Schumacher is an NYCB soloist, he built his choreographic career outside of of the company: he started his own arts collective in 2010 which evolved into his current company, BalletCollective. To my eye, Schumacher's work is characterized by a strong sense of community amongst the dancers on stage. (This is one of the things that characterizes him as a dancer, too: he always seems to be deeply present in the world being created on stage. If you want to know who or what to look at in a sea of dancers, follow his gaze.) I've enjoyed what I've seen of his work, both for BalletCollective and NYCB; my biggest reservation is this: a lot of his ballets, in one form or another, seem to take place on a playground full of overgrown kids and I'd like to see him explore a different kind of community. Every now and then I think he needs to change up his palette of textures too, or at least slow things down. I'm a Peck fan. Even his misfires give me something to think about. I never mind it when one of his ballets is on the program, even if it's one I wasn't crazy about. I am absolutely crazy about the second movement of his Rodeo, however. PS: if the past is any guideline, all four gala premieres are likely to be on the short side.

I'll see your Flintstones theme and raise you the Jetsons Even if you're not a comics fan, I do recommend checking out DC Comics' 2016 - 2017 Flintstones reboot, which mines both the original franchise's playful riffs on 20th century technology and the current discontents of 21st century late-stage capitalism for all they are worth.

It looks like an ad for Swarosvki. They even have a Swan Collection. And of course they did the tiaras and, if I recall correctly, the costume beading for the new Symphony in C costumes. The promotion of the latter featured Sara Mearns; coincidentally (or maybe not) the Swan Queen depicted in the new ad does resemble her. Just sayin' ... PS: I wouldn't mind a tie-in with Swarovski if the ad did a better job of selling NYCB's Swan Lake. I find the ad pretty, but rather inert - and it's not something I'd be inclined to watch again.

Even worse, about inert statues in tiaras! Still, it's prettier than the production ...

AARGHHH! Where are the national dance education and advocacy organizations?

The advent of live / high definition broadcasts in local movie theaters surely has the potential to expand the reach of the performing arts to places that might not ever host a large touring ballet or opera company. For example: you can buy tickets now for the April 8, 2018 screening of the Bolshoi Ballet's Giselle in local cineplexes in Billings MT (pop 110,323), Fargo ND (pop 120,762), and Kennewick WA (pop 73,917). These same theaters are also screening the Metropolitan Opera's HD broadcasts. How to get folks there? All of these smaller cities have dance academies who could help promote it as a festive, must-see family event. So could the local schools. They might even persuade a local philanthropist or civic group to subsidize the ticket price for needy students. Honestly, if I were a foundation with an interest in promoting the performing arts I'd be all over opportunities like this -- not as a replacement for live performance, but as a way to serve audiences who might not have the easy opportunity to see something live.

Ummm ... not mine. My parents gave me what opportunities to engage with the arts that they could, but honestly, sitting down to watch a "quality TV event" was not one of them. Our 60's family TV watching was mostly Walt Disney, the Flintstones, the Jetsons, and Perry Mason.

A parent, or grandparent, or aunt, or uncle, or any adult who wanted to introduce a child to the performing arts has a wealth of tools with which to do so, none of which were available to my parents: 1) Buy some DVDs. 2) Borrow some DVDs from the library. 3) Stream something from YouTube or Vimeo or an arts' organizations own streaming service on any device with a screen, including a TV (either a smart TV or a not-so-smart one hooked up to a Roku box, or a Firestick, or a Chromecast device). 4) Attend a live HD broadcast in a movie theater, or, depending on the municipality, at a local library or school auditorium. All it takes is wanting to do it.

Even a cursory look at the dancers' bios suggest that that is indeed the case.

la Cour = 2002 - joined as corps, previously corps at RDB De Luz = 2003 - joined as soloist, previously soloist at ABT Garcia = 2007 - joined as principal, previously principal at SFB I think maybe that's it on the current roster?

Charles Askegard joined NYCB as a soloist from ABT, where he'd danced for 10 years. He did train for one summer at SAB, however.

No worries - I'm an old who codes. The cookies and cashes are flushed regularly; all the back-ups are encrypted; the trackers are blocked; the passwords are managed; the hard drive is cloned regularly; and a VPN invoked when appropriate. And still, I'm vulnerable. I'm a board member and the volunteer administrator of a small performing arts non-profit. We use MailChimp to distribute our concert announcements; we don't even turn on all the tracking that we could, and we know a surprising amount about what happens when someone receives one of our emails. Oh, yeah - no Facebook.

Saskia Beskow, who retired from the NYCB corps in 2009, was trained in Denmark joined NYCB as a corps member from the Royal Danish Ballet. She was a truly lovely dancer and one of those corps stalwarts you'd see in three ballets on the same night, night after night.

Naturally, there is an app for that: http://runpee.com

Here's a full synopsis: http://en.tchaikovsky-research.net/pages/Swan_Lake#cite_note-note20-1

I realized this when I first read Stendahl's The Charterhouse of Parma. I think half the meaningful dialogue takes place in an opera box while an opera is in progress!

By "their site" do you mean Facebook's? I'm under the impression that Facebook's user identification and tracking tools allow it to follow users all over the web. When one logs onto Facebook, it creates a "signature" that combines one's Facebook ID, browser, IP address, and device and stores that signature on its servers. It will even build up a dossier of all of the IP addresses and devices via which users accesses their Facebook accounts so they can be tracked from all their devices, browsers, and IP addresses. Whenever that user visits a webpage with a Facebook tracking pixel or some other Facebook tracking tool on it, the tracker sends the data back to Facebook. Doesn't this generate a pretty comprehensive map of where that user has been and what they did there? If I log on to Facebook, click on (or even just view) an ad, then leave Facebook to wander around the web and eventually land on the advertiser's site, unless I'm using a tracking blocker (such as Ghostery, eg) , Facebook is going to know. It's also going to know what I did when I got there - including not doing anything. Am I missing something?

I think you gave my rant more thought than it deserved! Yours is a helpful reminder that at a certain point in time, a ballet was intended to be a SHOW: spectacle, pyrotechnic display, melodrama, nods to the memes of the day (spectral maidens), specialty acts (national dances) etc. The formal elements -- the standard pas-de-deux with alternating variations and a coda; the entertainment-within-an-entertainment divertissements; the white acts; happy peasants dancing for the royals; etc. -- kept the proceedings legible: everybody knew what to expect when. I wonder if we've lost some of that legibility as directors have pushed and pulled some of these story ballets out of shape? I wonder if there was a ballet equivalent to opera's aria di sorbetto: an aria for a secondary character that does nothing to advance the plot but does give you a chance to grab a snack before the evening ends.

Absolutely!