Drew

I have been an internet reader rather than a print one, but still want to voice my appreciation for the entire project. I will be very happy to continue to check out the online version!

I thought Bouder was fantastic in Square Dance Friday night (it was my first time seeing her dance it)--I liked the way she "built" the role, too, moving with greater and greater freedom and playfulness--musical playfulness too--as the ballet continued. It was a dazzling performance but also one with variety and charm. It was interesting to see Everywhere We Go on the same program as Interplay (Sat afternoon) because Justin Peck's ballet is like Robbins on steroids. For one, It seems to have something like 4 different finales. I guess the ballet's flaws have been pretty well aired on this website, but I enjoyed getting a look at Peck's work and, more than that, enjoyed the ballet's overflow of high spirits and its affectionate portrait of dancers. And I most especially enjoyed Sterling Hyltin's vivid, high energy performance--she looked like she was having fun and was certainly fun to watch. I thought Krohn, too, looked very good. She also looked lovely in Peck's new ballet Belles Lettres--and, in my eyes, she looked more than lovely in Morgen esp the Sat night performance. Though she was already compelling to me in her debut on Thursday, Saturday I found myself waiting for her to return to the stage. I have seen her a few times before, but never had that reaction to her...so that was quite nice. I thought Scarlett's Funerailles looked like an outtake from an unknown Macmillan ballet, but Thursday night Tiler Peck and Robert Fairchild were so intense and so sensual and so...well...beautiful it scarcely mattered. (Uh...I am something less than a fan of Macmillan.) The "Sarah Burton for Alexander Mcqueen" gown for Peck gets my vote for most gorgeous gown designed for a ballet EVER. At the beginning of the ballet, the gown itself made it seem as if the ballerina were rising from the mists--and better than any dry ice could do. Zachary Catazaro and Gretchen Smith brought intensity to the same number as well Saturday night and when I heard the audience cheer them wildly I wondered if there were some unconscious yearning among NYCB-goers to see the company dance Mayerling. (That's a joke, but still...and since there is no "spit to ward off the evil eye" icon, please imagine one.) Anyway, I'm only able to see the company in spurts--the last time was in January--but certainly in the four performances I saw, they seemed to be dancing (mostly) spectacularly: Chaconne Sat afternoon was a partial exception, marred by uneven performances up and down the ranks...but Mearns, making her debut in the ballerina role, was simply fabulous. (I tried to write about it above...) Mearns, Peck, Bouder, and the retiring Whelan: these seem to me to belong to any list of the best ballerinas in the world today.

I don't think it's comparable--whether or not there are other ballet adaptations of Taming of the Shrew. Taglioni's La Sylphide and Bournonville's--for me that's two versions and I would have no problem with a company doing Taglioni's if we had the choreography. (We don't though we do have Lacotte's imagining of it). Cranko's Romeo and Juliet and Macmillan's and Lavrosky's (and Nureyev's and Ashton's and Ratmanksy's and Maillot's and Pink's and Araiza's and Neumeier's etc.)--just to stick to versions done to Prokofiev's score--this would be an example of people being happy with multiple versions, but it's not multiple versions of the same choreographic text at all, not even in the rather loose sense that Mckenzie and Martins are both doing versions of Petipa/Ivanov when they stage Swan Lake. It's just the same source material and the same score. I don't think anyone objects in principle to a company doing one version of Romeo and Juliet or another...though people may have favorites and think a company should be doing version x or y. But what if one said one was staging Macmillan's and then redid one of the big pas de deux to make it sexier or because it suited the dancers better? Or, perhaps a more realistic notion, just cut some portions of Macmillan's crowd scenes because many critics seem to agree that they go on too long? That's bound to be more controversial and, in my opinion, should be because there is a choreographic text that is being claimed as the basis of the production. By controversial I don't mean "bad" or that it should never happen, but something different seems to me at issue than is the case with different versions of a particular story that happens to draw from the same source material or even drawing the same title from that source material (eg Taming of the Shrew) or different ballets to the same score. When there is a version of Bournonville's La Sylphide that revises and rechoreographs--whether you are for the changes or against them or neutral--the 'text' matters: when the Royal Danish Ballet in particular, does La Sylphide, Bournonville's choreography is at stake. Revising Bournonville's La Sylphide, while basing your work on it, is (I think) in that sense something different than Maillot doing a completely new version of Taming of the Shrew to a fresh (well, freshly assembled anyway) score...

From the Guardian article--and alluding to a theory that should not be dismissed out of hand (cough): "There are lots of theories about Nobel 'bias', few of them involving the possibility that writers from non-English speaking countries...might actually be quite good."

Very much enjoyed reading about this--I would love to see the ballet and esp. Krysanova's Katherine.

As soon as I heard Ratmansky would be choreographing a new ballet to Pictures at an Exhibition, I knew I would try to see it during its first season and fortunately I was able to come up to NY this past weekend when I could see it twice alongside two different Justin Peck ballets (my first exposure to Peck's work) and other premiers as well as getting the chance to see some Balanchine that I have not seen recently including an entirely delightful performance of Tombeau de Couperin. I'm not sure what I will be able to write, but did want to be sure to write that I am deeply grateful I was able to see Sara Mearns' gorgeous and, I think rather extraordinary, debut in Chaconne. Mearns in Chaconne is not the reason I made my trip; I bought tickets based on repertory months ago, long before casts were announced (though of course hoping to see Mearns in something). I feel more than lucky. She combined a kind of subdued (for her) grandeur with joy, dancing with wit and sexiness--including a series of double pirouettes performed as subtle seduction--and also had the Farrellesque quality of dancing at times as if she were making it up as she went along. And always with complete, breathtaking security. She managed to look centered even when she was riskily 'off center.' Just amazing. Since I will not be at Whelan's farewell NYCB performance, I also hoped for this long weekend to serve as my farewell to Wendy Whelan at NYCB--I'm hoping to see "Restless Creature" in January--and the ballet gods were smiling...and/or NYCB was making sure lots of people got to say farewell because she danced at all four performances I attended. (All four appeared to be very well sold and audiences erupted for her at curtain calls.) Sat afternoon with Craig Hall she gave a particularly moving performance of After the Rain, a performance in which her ability to draw one into something like a private world onstage was at its most sure and beautiful. I also found it moving after Sat night's performance of Pictures at an Exhibition to see the other dancers applaud her and then, after they had all taken their additional bows in front of the curtain, see Whelan take a brief solo bow, almost immediately joined (I believe) by Ratmansky who appeared for just a few seconds before the rest of the company joined her. I found Ratmansky's pas de deux for Whelan and T. Angle towards the beginning of the ballet -- the "Old Castle" section of the music -- to be a miniature summa of her beauty as a ballerina at this very final stage of her ballet career and one of the ballet's highlights.

If the company is going to develop new relationships with outside artists, then I think that is a great idea! Obraztsova has danced in NYC (Most recently I think in Little Humpbacked Horse and Symphony in C with Mariinsky), but it would be fabulous to see her dance with ABT and with Cornejo. I would, though, like to see Lane get more opportunities as well...

In what I have read in English I have never seen anything I would consider evidence that Stepanova sanctions let alone encourages any of the polemizing around her. And indeed she would have to know English to know the stuff I'm reading. I do think it can only hurt her for the Mariinsky even to suspect she does (and they may), especially since the rhetoric often goes way beyond "why aren't they casting her?"

You may be remembering Fokine's Firebird...

This is true when it comes to favorite flavors, yet some ice creams do really have more fat content than others. That is, judgments of taste are less provable than a mathematical formula but also more than just "what I like"--that's what makes them so debatable. You can't have a debate about what you like--you can share it or even discuss it, but not (rationally) argue about it. (That's why Arendt thought judgments of taste modeled what should happen in politics--or at least that was one of my take-aways though I'm not a scholar of her work.) Of course, many of us--including myself--colloquially use the word taste just to mean our individual likes/dislikes. And I'm alway happy tor read about or discuss those on this website as well as occasionally get into more 'debate.'

Just as it probably doesn't help most young choreographers to be hailed as the next Balanchine or next Ashton before they have reached any kind of maturity, it probably doesn't help most young dancers to be hailed as the next Ulanova or Lopatkina. I'm myself a huge fan/admirer of Lopatkina and do consider her a genius though, from what I can tell not having seen Ulanova dance live, Lopatkina is a genius of a very different kind. (Oh--and as widely admired and hailed as she is, you can tell just by reading this thread that there is no complete agreement about her either.) One can think of exceptions (people whose careers and accomplishments seem to have been on fire and recognized as such from the beginning)--but as great as those exceptions may be thought there were probably elements of luck in those careers as well. (Kaitlyn Gilliland was being hailed as the next Suzanne Farrell more or less before she left SAB--I saw her in the ensemble of one performance and was quite intrigued; injury seems to have stopped her NYCB career short before it had really begun. Bad luck plays a role as well.) As I mentioned above, I actually like what I have seen of Stepanova enough (video and a teensy bit live) that I would be happy to see some of her actual performances in major roles--but at this point I sometimes fear it would be hard to "see" her properly through the haze of polemics that have accrued around her. (Fans who spend less time on the internet or youtube than I do are largely spared those polemics, so I guess I have no-one to blame but myself.) Of course, I can hope that the intensity of a live ballet performance would break through any such haze, and in ballet it is live performance that matters the most. I absolutely wish Stepanova well wherever she dances.

As perhaps should be clarified: that's a fan page...(and notes only that she is still on the roster). That is, whatever it says is not an announcement from the artist. (Even if she was/is leaving the company, it would be gracious for the Mariinsky to list her prize and not exactly inappropriate, and I'm glad they did. She did win as a Mariinsky artist.)

Oh yes...that makes perfect sense to me. I remember an atmosphere in which people were positively rooting for Gordeyev and Pavlova to defect and security around the company was very tight. Someone else once told me that when the Kozlovs defected later during the same tour and it was reported some places that a "couple" had defected, that she had been assuming/hoping the "couple" was Gordeyev and Pavlova. (I am sure many ballet fans remember the crazy atmosphere immediately after Godunov's defection, his wife held at airport etc. I'm less sure that all fans--well, speaking for myself here--always took the full measure of the costs of defection, but that was a bit of an eye opener.)

I was wondering who was coaching the Sylphide--she looked familiar to me but I couldn't place her.

Video of Stepanova suggests that she is, as her admirers also say, very much a Mariinsky dancer, if anything rather old school. (The teensy bit I have seen her dance live would cohere with that as well...) I may wish that style to be one that translates into an international career but there are no guarantees. As it happens, the MIkhailovsky just lost two leading women dancers to the Mariinsky and may be looking for new principals as well...Anyway, will look forward to hearing what happens.

Is it possible that ABT will take a week off while the Royal Ballet performs in New York? Maybe the RB will perform in the Met rather than the Koch? (Wishful thinking, I know...) I think just as likely or even likelier a reason to push the ABT season later might be the thought of fewer weeks competing with NYCB...though I don't know how many New Yorkers clear out after July 1st which may counter-balance that... Regarding the Royal: I had thought the Royal was coming later in season, but whenever they are coming, I personally would rather see them at the Koch/State theater than the Met... Promotions? I don't see how anyone can/should be promoted to principal at ABT if they have not proven themselves able to carry the major full length roles that dominate much of the company's repertory--especially at the Met. One doesn't expect someone to be strong in every full length especially early in a career, but in a number at least. If dancers haven't been given the opportunities in those roles (and preferably with ABT or a company of at least comparable caliber), then I don't really see how responsibly to promote them or even call for their promotion no matter how talented one may judge them to be. I suppose the retirements may force the director's hand in terms of giving some new opportunities to soloists--or making clear his intentions if he doesn't. Put a little differently: ABT needs principals, but more than that it needs ballerinas: I think these retirements make clear what some perhaps were already feeling--that this is a transitional time for the company and perhaps likely to be rough in patches, if also at least potentially exciting. Edited to add: I don't begrudge Kent her long career or Reyes hers (a little less long I think?), but it says a great deal about Herrera's choice of moment to retire that she can plausibly announce Aurora as her farewell performance. Don't know if I will make it to NY for that or not, but I would enjoy being there for sure.

I enjoy going on Twitter and seeing what people say about #WorldBalletDay...it's the tweets over the live-stream that I have found very irritating. During the National Ballet of Canada Manon rehearsal there was a lot of talking over the ballet master (who was giving corrections) which I wasn't crazy about. I get that they are trying to reach a large audience; it's just a question of balance and trusting the material.

For the rehearsal of Neumeier's Nijinsky they cut way back on showing the tweets (also on the talking over the ballet master and music). I confess I have been complaining all over social media including on twitter itself in the hope of sending a message. Unfortunately, must return to...uh...my job. But hope to catch some of San Francisco Ballet later. What I saw of Royal Ballet -- Acosta rehearsing Muntagirov in Don Quixote -- was just fantastic: Acosta gave some very precise and detailed coaching and Muntagirov (whom I know only by reputation) looks a wonderful dancer.

Able to break from work to watch a bit--but am so irritated/distracted by the tweets they are showing on the live-stream screen, that I am about to give up.

I have happy memories of performances by all of these ballerinas -- including some very recent! Anyway, big news--for the company and its audience.

Thank you --

I was wondering about this...A side-effect of having so many heavy-weight programs (as wonderful as they may be) is that I notice there are a number of what I can only call lightweight programs. I'm coming in for performances in two weeks (barring natural or other disaster) -- I chose the dates so I could see the season premiers, and even experience them more than once, but my other programs are all kind of odd mixes. Not bad ballets necessarily, but not...well...the greatest balance.

If Agon did in fact look like a "workout" type ballet, then it can't have looked much like Agon or Balanchine at all. In that respect, costumes aren't really the issue. Which version of Firebird was the company dancing?

Very interesting to read about this production. Thanks for the report.

When one reads Macaulay's whole review, it is clear he is at least somewhat sensitive to these changes at the RDB and the RB, though he is really focused on making his point about NYCB...