flipsy

A bracing festival of dance and performance art from eastern Europe -- unfortunately scheduled for Thanksgiving Week when audiences are hard to come by. Somebody gave me a ticket and I'm glad I went! http://occupythearts.blogspot.com/2017/11/croats-and-poles-poking-holes.html

Three years ago, mad as hell about New York City Ballet’s plan to triple and quadruple ticket prices, I and a few other balletomanes declared an audience strike against our long-time beloved ballet company. We hoped a boycott would shake up the management, and force a return to popular prices. Three years later, they win. Drawn by rave reviews and gorgeous pictures in the paper, I finally slunk back across my invisible picket line last week. I paid 62 dollars for a seat in Row G on the side in the fourth ring – three times what I would have paid just a few years ago. The reward was a brilliant triple bill of Balanchine classics – Serenade, Agon, and Symphony in C – from a company dancing better than it has in years. Is this the effect of prosperity? If so, you can’t argue with success. To read more, go to http://occupythearts.blogspot.com/2015/01/heart-and-spleen-confessions-of-strike.html

Yes, indeed. The link above is my summary of it. I'd add that it's not a great documentary -- as one reviewer said, it's not as nimble as its subject. But Doris Payne is an original, a character with an amazing story, and she gets to tell it here. Well worth seeing.

When Doris Payne was a little girl, in the coal country of West Virginia, she wanted to be a ballerina, but someone told her she couldn’t, because “they don’t have black ballerinas.” All right, she thought, if I can’t be what I want to be, I will be something else. more at http://occupythearts.blogspot.com/2014/06/a-dream-deferred.html

On my way into Lincoln Center Saturday night I saw a poster for a ballet company with a quote from a critic: “At this level, ballet is a belief system.” The sentence flashed back during Serenade, as a girl arched into a full arabesque, bounding across the floor. Serenade is an initiation, for performers and audiences alike, into a great mystery. For better or worse, this girl was becoming a believer, in an art form that goes beyond normal human experience. SAB’s performance was full of little flaws, but they didn’t matter, they even added to the spell. Here, in every sense, were human beings in the process of becoming angels, messengers of the divine. More at http://occupythearts.blogspot.com/2014/06/serenade-at-eighty.html

What macnellie said. My thoughts and feelings, exactly. It's quite a contrast to a newer movie about a struggling artist in New York, the Coen brothers' "Inside Llewyn Davis." But then their movies never have happy endings. I wrote a review which you can read here

Frances is a dancer, a dancer and a choreographer, six or seven years out of the Vassar College dance department, living in New York and trying to make it in the modern dance scene. She’s an apprentice with a modern dance company, and both she and the company are strapped for cash. But she doesn’t even want to think about giving up her dream. Frances shares her dreams with her roommate, a brainy classmate who’s trying to make it on the literary scene. Together they are going to sweep the world off its feet, they’ll have an apartment in Paris, they’ll collect lovers and dozens of honorary degrees. But when roommate Sophie finds a rich new boyfriend, her life changes and she moves out, leaving Frances alone in an apartment she can’t afford. Frances moves in with a couple of guys, promising to raise her share of the rent once the company starts its Christmas show. But then she gets cut from the Christmas show. Thus begins her painful slide through increasing layers of desperation, toward realizing who she really is. Who she really is is a beautiful, compassionate, deeply intelligent and funny person who really does have a talent for choreography, but who isn’t going to be famous or rich in this world. Frances coming to terms with this world is the simple plot of this complex character study. Noah Baumbach is the director and Greta Gerwig is his co-writer, muse and star in this deceptively modest black-and-white flick. It’s a sometimes harrowing look at upper-middle-class college graduates looking for work, love, sex, home, and artistic fulfillment in New York. Most of the dance scenes are shot at a real Manhattan studio, with a narrow hallway strewn with the stretching bodies of twenty-something dance hopefuls. The company director is played by a real dancer, Charlotte D’Amboise, who has the look of someone toughened by years of showbiz, but who retains an eye and a heart for a person of real quality like Frances. I won’t spoil the ending with a description, but let’s just say Frances is finding her little niche in New York. Frances Ha is not her full name, but it’s partway there.

This is a misleading piece with a badly flawed premise. Early on, Stahl says the job of saving Classical Ballet from becoming a dying art form has fallen on the shoulders of Peter Martins. Martins seems to agree, saying that someone has to devote his life to “preserve and protect” Balanchine’s legacy. Excuse me? Never mind that Balanchine’s work is NOT Classical Ballet, and there are other people taking care of that. How about the other people who are taking care of Balanchine’s work, in many cases doing arguably a more successful job than Martins? Stahl mentions that there are other companies run by NYCB alumni, but never names one. For her, NYCB is the “mother ship,” and the very survival of Ballet depends on Martins’ quest to fill empty chairs at Lincoln Center. This is the Gotham-centric view taken to an extreme. (I’m a New Yorker and I do think we’re the capital of the world, but the world does not rise or fall on what happens here.) Stahl does confront Martins with the horrendous reviews of his choreography, which he brushes off as merely the work of the ignorant. But more pointedly, she raises the question of how a guy who admits saying “all ballerinas are bitches,” can run a company whose founder believed “ballet is woman.” For Martins and Stahl, the ballerina ideal is passé. Their dreamed-of new audience seems to consist mostly of young women swooning over sexy young male performers, a la Justin Bieber or Beatlemania. The most astonishing thing about this piece is that it includes not one word from a woman. In 13 minutes, the only speakers are Martins, Sir Paul McCartney, Robbie Fairchild, and some little boys from SAB. Sara Mearns, Tiler Peck, Wendy Whelan et al are seen but not heard or named. Suzanne Farrell appears only as a fleeting image over Martins’ crack that he doesn’t like ballerinas. I realize that 60 Minutes is not conventional journalism. It likes to focus on one place and one scene rather than a survey. But this claims to be a report on the state of Ballet today, and it is no such thing. Full disclosure: I’m no more objective than Lesley Stahl. In fact I am an audience member On Strike against New York City Ballet. I began my protest nearly a year ago; you can read it at http://occupythearts...0&max-results=3

I'm now "officially" on strike against NYCB and the David H. Koch Theater. Just before one Saturday matinee of Nutcracker, I staged a one-man picket line with a sign that said "Audience Member on Strike against Koch Theater ticket prices." The response from arriving ticket holders was curious and mostly friendly, though one young lady informed me that this type of performance was not for just anyone and if I couldn't afford it I should look for a cheaper Nutcracker. "They're all the same," she assured me. Others, including a mom in a mink coat, gave me a thumbs-up. After about 15 minutes a Lincoln Center security guard asked me (politely) if I would take my protest out to the sidewalk along Columbus Avenue, and I complied. I was still able to meet a stream of audience people as they crossed the street. Security people kept their eye on me and later two of them asked me what this was all about. I told them, they laughed and said they agreed with me. My conclusions from this experience were a. it's possible to protest at Lincoln Center without getting beaten up or arrested. b. It would be a lot more effective with more people. If you'd like to join some kind of a protest during the upcoming winter season, email me flipsy23@gmail.com and we can talk about tactics. You can read more of my adventure at http://occupythearts...ity-ballet.html

Opening night was the first time I'd seen Ratmansky's Nutcracker, and I couldn't resist writing a compare-and-contrast essay about ABT and NYCB. Here's an excerpt: "If I were a judge on the 'Battle of the Nutcrackers' playing this week on cable TV, I would have to give Act Two to Balanchine's version, for its unhurried, distinct delights, its sense of repose in action. But I would give Act One to ABT for pure energy and drama." To read the whole piece go to http://www.danceview...m/tom_phillips/

Blog post: "When New York City Ballet and New York City Opera jointly announced in 2008 that David H. Koch would donate 100 million dollars to renovate the New York State Theater, the opera called it a “transformative gift.” The ballet said it would “ensure the integrity of George Balanchine’s vision for the theater ..for decades to come.” Three years later, the renovation is complete. But the opera company has left the building, now called the David H. Koch Theater, and Balanchine’s vision is in the dumpster." to read the whole story go to http://occupythearts.blogspot.com/2011/12/david-h-koch-nutcracker.html

My theory is that this has less to do with NYCB's financial condition than their spiritual state, which is near death. Popular pricing was an essential part of Kirstein and Balanchine's vision for the NY State Theater. Charging whatever the market will bear is the mark of David H. Koch and the current board. Count me in, I'm on strike.

I've been organizing family excursions to NYCB's Nutcracker since the 1960s. We usually sit in the third ring, and up to now it's been an affordable family treat. Imagine my surprise yesterday when the guy at the box office told me the only available third-ring seats for this Friday 12/2 would be $112! I wound up taking two in the fourth ring, row D, for $91 each. But it looks like the David H. Koch Theater is no place for middle-class family excursions. That's a shame, because Kirstein and Balanchine, Morton Baum and even Nelson Rockefeller had a definite vision for Lincoln Center as a place where fine arts would be available to the masses, at least the middle-class masses. It paid off in the ballet boom of the 20th century, and the countless kids who decided to try ballet after their parents took them to see the Nutcracker. What do you suppose the effect will be of pricing them out of the theater?

"In 37 minutes “Veronique Doisneau” reveals the toll a lifetime of physical and emotional discipline takes on a beautiful young woman. But the film-maker is a dancer himself, and his portrayal does not slight the sublime nature of her toil. The result is a dancer’s story, told with a dancer’s exquisitely refined sense of balance." This is from a review of "Veronique Doisneau" in danceviewtimes.com. You can read it at at http://www.danceviewtimes.com/2009/03/a-da...tory-.html#more

Kathleen's points are well taken. I'm sure I've seen a picture of Merrill Ashley doing the same step, and the angle of the bent leg wasn't as extreme. So actually I've never seen anything like that grand pas de chat at NYCB. But what I meant by "authenticity" was something deeper -- an honesty and commitment, a selflessness and boldness in the dancing that I remember from the days when Balanchine was there, which I'm afraid has given way at NYCB to a sketchy, smudgy reproduction of his style: e.g. "whatever" pas de chats where the toe never even rises to the thigh, gargouillades that give up after one leg, etc. Miami has definitely added a Latin touch (especially in that upper torso) to the traditional neo-classic style, so its authenticity is its own, not a museum-like reproduction of NYCB in the fifties or sixties. But that's how art develops. NYCB certainly has the talent to match anything Miami does. Contrary to their publicity campaign, MCB's dancers are not "Superhuman." They're just winning because they want to dance more.

For those of us ballet lovers who are also sports fanatics, it’s hard to see the City Center debut of Miami City Ballet as anything but another round in the New York – Miami rivalry, as loaded with emotion as any playoff between the Jets and the Dolphins. Especially when the Miami challengers are led by a New York expatriate, a Prodigal Son returning to his original turf. To see Edward Villella strutting through the City Center lobby this week like the welterweight champion he was, is to see a man who feels he has regained his championship, by a knockout. What has he done? After 23 years of labor, he has brought back a company to dance the Balanchine legacy in its original City Center home, and dance it as well or better by nearly every measure, from Authenticity to Zing, than Balanchine’s own New York City Ballet in its bigger, plusher home ten blacks north. Want proof? A picture is worth a thousand words, so just take a look at page C1 of Saturday’s New York Times. Here is Jeanette Delgado executing a grand pas de chat surrounded by three corps dancers in Balanchine’s “Square Dance.” I have not seen a grand pas de chat like this at NYCB in many years. Look at the point of contact of the toe with the extended leg – two-thirds of the way up the inner thigh! Look at the perfect equilibrium in the air, the thrust of the extended leg through the toes, the stretch of the arms, the softly articulated fingers. Finally, look at the face – a smile of exhilaration and delight. Want more? Turn to page C5, where Jeanette’s sister Patricia flashes another calm, ecstatic smile in a fully extended, classic pose from “Symphony in C,” in front of three leaping men – Jeremy Cox in front, with his legs flying like a javelin. The fully stretched jete may be Miami’s signature look – in six ballets over two days, I saw not a single lazy limb. The Delgado sisters are Miami’s own and the superstars of their present and future. Jeanette in particular packs a punch worthy of Villella in his prime. But this first New York season was not an individual triumph. In programming six ballets with full casts, Villella was clearly showing off his ensemble, and forcing a comparison with the often disorganized, dispirited look of the NYCB corps. Opening with “Symphony in Three Movements” was a case in point. The last time I saw NYCB do it, the opening diagonal thrust looked tentative and confused, like a bunch of girls at an audition. Miami’s had the precision and savagery of an infantry attack. As for Twyla Tharp’s “In the Upper Room,” this was as punishing for some of us in the audience as it must have been for the dancers. To me, it looks like Molissa Fenley times fifty – a largely empty, showy test of endurance. I don’t like the slavish look of the costumes, the hellish look of the smoke-belching set, or the stuck-in-a-groove banality of the music. But it made its point – that these dancers are a formidable force, and they are ready to lay themselves on the line and sacrifice, individually and as a group. “La Valse” made the same point in its morbid way -- a dance of death, willingly and totally embraced by a company that’s taken a vow to go wherever its art requires. The final swirl of the ballroom around the lifted corpse was intoxicating, even scary. Program 2 -- “Square Dance,” “Rubies,” and “Symphony in C” -- was not as fierce and aggressive as Program 1 – maybe a reminder that in the end, this is supposed to be fun. And it was. But there was serious drama in the Prodigal Son's return to City Center, that will reverberate in the ballet world for years to come. My card says Round One to the challenger.

Ah, youth. The Columbia Ballet Collaborative marked its second year of existence this week with an evening of new choreography – most of it by dancer/students too young and inexperienced to be either conventional or obscure. The result was a program of original, distinctive and promising work, and a big step forward for this unique university company formed by former and current professional dancers. Topping the bill as both a choreographer and dancer was Kimi Nikaidoh, formerly of Complexions Contemporary Ballet. Her choreography to a Brahms cello sonata actually added something to the music – vigorous, contrapuntal movement for six women dashing in and out of lines and patterns, with a lovely circling duet for Victoria North and Chantelle Pianetta. Nikaidoh came back later as a lead dancer in Emery LeCrone’s techno-pop “Figurine.” She was scarily convincing as a dancer in some disco hell, trying and at last succeeding in beating a retreat from a crowd of black-clad, mind-blown clones, led by a sinister Ted Seymour. Simple human emotions are all too rare in contemporary dance, but they were plain to see in a piece by Glenna Clifton, in honor of four people, three of them young, who died in the last two years. “What Branches Grow” begins with a shriek and a fall, followed by a rite of mourning, a slow and sporadic knitting-up of the rent fabric of young lives. It was danced by seven young women led by a passionate Sara Paul, and an eighth who defines the time-frame of the piece by methodically folding a pile of crumpled clothes. The stricken sisters eventually pick up her motif of folding, and smoothing, and finally putting away. The most unusual piece on the program was a muscular meditation by Lydia Walker and Phillip Askew, “Variations on Surya Namaskar” or the sun-worship familiar to practitioners of Hatha Yoga. This included the ultimate Downward Dog – woman face-down on the man’s back, his two hands into the floor, feet slowly lifting and the woman wheeling through space to balance in an upside-down split. It was intimate, physical, odd, and real. Some of the other pieces showed signs of nascent sophistication, e.g. a supercool, mirror-like pas de deux by Avichai Scher that looked too much like Christopher Wheeldon in his Morphoses mode. Also, it was probably a mistake to try to get the jump on the “Nutcracker” season with unremarkable new steps to the “snow” and “marzipan” themes. But all that was redeemed by a funny, destructive takeoff on romance to Chopin piano music. Instead of perfumed couples a la “In the Night,” Brian Arias gives us a lonely, leering, stomping, stumbling drunk, danced with nutty verve by Elysia Dawn who looks like she’s groping for an invisible lamp post. Columbia Ballet Collaborative has a lot going for it – dancers with professional training and Ivy-League intelligence, space and a subsidy from the university, and a rich pool of talent in the neighborhood. And best of all, youth. This program played to overflow crowds in a Barnard dance studio. Next April they’ll open across the street, at Columbia’s major-league Miller Theatre.

Thursday Evening, December 27 I couldn't make it to Sara Mearns' debut as the SPF last week, but I managed to get there tonight for Act 2. She did some lovely things, particularly off the ground -- her jetes and pas de chats looked powerful and free. But on the whole her performance made me think of how hard this role is to master, how it takes such a combination of maternal radiance and breakneck risk-taking. On the maternal side, Mearns still seemed a little too self-conscious to be believed as the fairy who is staging this whole spectacle in honor of a couple of kids. And in the breakneck category, she didn't quite go for broke in her dives and falls into the cavalier's arms. Stephen Hanna was there -- and had saved her from a slip during the step-up turns -- but she didn't seem willing to fling herself at the floor and just trust him to catch her. Still, her lines are regal, her arms and hands always exquisitely expressive, and she seems to have added an inch to her soaring extensions. She has everything she needs to grow into a great SPF. Hopefully it will just take time.

Ballet alert! The Columbia Ballet Collaborative -- featuring current and former professional dancers who are students at Columbia University -- made an impressive debut Friday night, with a program of works in progress. The venue was a small dance studio at Barnard College, packed to the walls with students, faculty and assorted balletomanes. The choreography ranged from a happily kinetic romp by Emily Hayden to music by Moby, to an arresting piece of yogic sculpture by Lydia Walker and Philip Askew, titled "Aristophanes' Dream." This is based on Plato's "Symposium," where Aristophanes opines that originally people were formed in pairs, and love consists of trying to reunite with one's lost other half. Walker and Askew, locked in bilateral symmetry, go through a series of slow-motion somersaults and four-legged strolls, timed to the solemn cadence of a Bach organ chorale. It's a bizarre take on a serious theme, and was a riveting performance. The main piece on the menu consisted of excerpts from "Moon Roses," a classical ballet by Bonnie Scheibman to an astringent, quirky piano piece by Bruce Novack. Of the many attempts I've seen to meld classical steps with modern music, this was one of the more palatable, largely due to the definitive dancing of the two lead women, Walker and Victoria North. North in particular was able to soften the jarring aspect of the music with fluid, classical lines. At the same time, she had the explosive attack needed for the jumpy score. North, who has danced with Complexions Contemporary Ballet, is tall and imposing, warm and inviting, and articulate down to the fingernails. August Pozgay added strength as he partnered both women. This was far more than what you might expect for a first performance from a fledgling, pick-up troupe. Keep your eyes open for more next spring from the Columbia Ballet Collaborative.

Friday, November 30 Besides a sparkling Wendy Whelan as the SPF, ably assisted by Philip Neal -- the stars of tonight's show were Kathryn Morgan as a delicious lead Marzipan, and Megan LeCrone as one of the two demi-soloists in flowers. Morgan dances big but delicate, and even seemed to be enjoying the fussy pointe work. As Marzipan she reminded me of my all-time favorite -- the young Gelsey Kirkland, who had the same kind of bouncy exactitude, kicking off her gargouillades like a frolicky lamb. LeCrone is more regal -- solid through the core and exquisite in the extremities, especially the hands and wrists. She finishes every shape with just the right flourish, right in the music. And her facial features are so sharply etched. You can really see her! I can't make it myself, but I recommend catching her debut as Dew Drop this Sunday afternoon, December 2. Could be a matinee to remember.

I never heard the orchestra play better than tonight. Nobody missed a beat, and Firebird was shimmering with life. I actually took a seat on the side upstairs to watch Gergiev conduct Firebird. He doesn't use the baton, but directs with his hands and fingers and his whole body, hovering over the score and then leaping out over it to bring in one section after another. He conducts like a dancer, and in fact is the only conductor I've ever seen who didn't look clumsy when he joined the dancers for the curtain call. DRB has it right: Gergiev was profound, and Sara Mearns was divine. Her drama always comes straight out of the music, and tonight she had a profound musical "floor" to dance on.

Thanks, Jack and Bart. That quote is really illuminating, and helps me see the ballet both as a response to a response, and as a free-standing work of art. I think Villella may have used the "anti-war" peg as a way to inspire his dancers and involve the audience, and there are some literal references to war in the piece -- i.e. the "radar" circles are hard to see as anything else. But there is also a scarey, almost barbaric coldness to the ballet. In an early review (quoted in Repertory in Review) Paul Gellen wrote "Balanchine has made us feel the chilling, harsh tensions of some future universe where privacy and community have been irrevocably polarized." Of the pas de deux, he writes. "They never appear to give in to each other with total weight and harmony; they've forgotten how to make love." It's this sort of thing that makes me think of Guernica, a prophetic work with its roots in the same ghastly era as Stravinsky's score.

Bart -- I was puzzled too when Villella called this an anti-war work, but now I think I see his point. Looking it up in Nancy Reynolds' Repertory in Review I read that Stravinsky wrote this score as World War Two movie/propaganda music --- a martial piece meant to denounce the Nazis. The choreography -- especially for the corps -- has a fanatical and fascist edge to it, as if these young people had been turned into a destructive force, their movements inspired by some demonic cause. Balanchine was no pacifist, and he clearly loved military choreography, as in Union Jack & Stars & Stripes. But this is the the battleground, the killing field, not the parade ground. War itself, if you look at it, is anti-war. Military people know this. I wish George Bush did!

Maria Calegari once said in an interview with Dance Magazine that she wanted to be “a dancer who means what she dances.” That quote is decades old, but it has stayed with me, largely because I think of it every time I see the Miami City Ballet perform. It came back again and again this past weekend, as the company presented its Program III at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach. Edward Villella has infused his entire company with this aspect of Balanchine style. Every member of this eclectic international group has to learn to dance this way, not play-acting or showing off their technique, but speaking in movement, directly to the audience, whether in a role or pure dance. Program III is a mixed bag: Balanchine’s lush and delightful “Raymonda Variations,” Tudor’s murky melodrama “Lilac Garden,” and then Balanchine at his most aggressive and martial, in “Symphony in Three Movements.” They call for three different styles of expression, but in every case the dancers meant what they were dancing, and the effect was pure and powerful. As Jack Reed wrote earlier this month, “Raymonda” is a showcase for the polished charm and technical mastery of Mary Carmen Catoya, and underneath that charm is a breathtaking ardor. When she spins and dives forward, with nothing but her partner’s hands between her and the void, she is reaching, and risking, every time. It was also a showcase for debuts by younger, promising dancers. Alex Wong was there as a partner for Catoya, and took off with joyful elevation in the jumping-bean solos once patented by Villella. The female mini-variations were exquisitely light, displaying the hummingbird quickness of Charlene Cohen, Zoe Zien, and Kyra Homeres, and the soaring poise on pointe of Allynne Noelle and Kristen D’Addario. I’ve never been a fan of “Lilac Garden.” This soap opera makes the point that a forced marriage is no fun, but that’s a point that hardly needs to be made in 2007, or maybe even in 1936 when Tudor made it. It survives because of its admirable economy of gesture – a few motifs of arms and hands and face employed to signify the depressing strictures of the garden plot. The Miami dancers did it more than justice, especially Jennifer Kronenberg, Patricia Delgado and Haiyan Wu as the ill-starred Caroline. Each in her own way, they meant what they danced. Kronenberg used her mobile torso, Delgado her striking face, and Wu her delicate arms and hands to etch the heroine’s hopeless state. Fortunately this is all just a warm-up for a blowaway production of “Symphony in Three Movements,” a Balanchine masterpiece channeled by Villella from his place at the center of the 1972 creation. Stravinsky wrote the music in part as a response to newsreel film of Nazi soldiers, and Villella sees it as an anti-war ballet, but not of the conventional kind. The protest is in the abstraction of military menace and the chaos of the battlefield. Quoting Balanchine, Villella tells us (in his pre-performance chat) that the vocabulary of movement refers directly to war materiel: the twin-rotor arm circles of the pas de deux are a helicopter, the two-way running circles of corps girls, with a ballerina spinning madly through them, is “radar.” From the ground it looks like chaos, but from the fourth ring you can see it clearly; just like war, which is a terrifying jumble from a foxhole but choreographic art from above. That of course is just part of the picture, in a ballet that resembles Picasso’s sprawling masterpiece “Guernica,” not fully describable in words. Let’s just say that the finale is like an amphibious assault, with Navy Seals crouching on the shore, air cover buzzing overhead, ranks of infantry advancing and a signal corps darting in and out of the wings. This dance can look ridiculous if the dancers don’t mean what they are dancing. But here they did, most especially Jeremy Cox and Katia Carranza in the sinuous helicopter duet, and the black and white infantry corps, where depending on when and where you looked, you could see Marc Spielberger, Stephen Satterfield, or Andrea Spiridonakis leading the charge. Not only did they mean what they were dancing, but they danced as if their lives depended on it.

As the topic starter, I’d like to weigh in on the question of taste and propriety. I decided to open the discussion because it had already been started in the media, with Woetzel’s rather impolitic confession to wanting the job, and Wheeldon’s thinly veiled jabs at Martins. (He’s leaving to start his own company because he doesn’t like the way things are run in big companies, the casting isn’t always sensitive, etc.) I also have had several frissons of profound terror, at what I perceived to be hints that Nilas Martins was also angling for the job, or being angled by someone. In a company that has been rightly accused of nepotism and insensitive casting, it could happen. My fears were specifically set off by the appearance of the Nilas Martins Ballet Company, a pickup troupe of NYCB dancers performing at Central Park’s Summerstage the last two Augusts. And then, the recent cover shot on the NYCB website of N. Martins as Apollo, being anointed by three lovely muses. I think it’s legitimate to bring these questions out into the open, rather than have them raised darkly or subliminally. And I do feel strongly that this very important decision, whenever it comes, should not just come from the powers-that-be at NYCB in a closed room. The public has an interest in this, no?