I agree with the several people who said the SAB 4Ts was better than the company's. But I have a question, is the Mae Wein award actually the kiss of death?
I have been catching the award ceremony almost every year since its inception, when I was only eleven years old and the students seemed impossibly old and sophisticated. I was looking at this year’s copy of Allegro and there was a list of all the award recipients by year. It is NOT a list of dancers who have had dazzling careers like you would expect. It seems like most of the recipients leave the company early, don't rise through the ranks the way you'd expect, or hardly appear on stage. I know the typical career at NYCB is to stay in the corps forever and that's a pretty amazing career to have anyway; obviously not everyone can become a principal dancer. But still, most of City Ballet's dancers come from SAB and the Mae Wein award winners are presumably the cream of the crop, so you would expect that they would be the ones to achieve lofty heights.
OK, all of the recipients from 1987 to 1992 have left the company (Emily Coates to dance for White Oak Project, Robert Lyon maybe retired, Samantha Allen and San’gria Bello probably went to other companies as they were quite young when they left) except for Arch Higgins who virtually never dances anymore (is he injured?) and wonderful senior corps member Elizabeth Walker. That’s not so significant, those people are older and it’s not that surprising that they’ve left the company.
Then you have the recipients from 1993 to 1999. Of those, Jennie Somogyi and Benjamin Millepied have had very successful careers. Edward Liang, Aesha Ash, and Darius Crenshaw, all dancers of color, left the company. Also Aubrey Morgan, Kristina Fernandez, and Jessy Hendrickson. Carla Korbes left the company for PNB. The talented soloists Adam Hendrickson, Craig Hall, and Seth Orza all had their moments in the spotlight where they had lots of featured roles, and then they ceased to be favored and now dance rarely. It must be very nerve-wracking to become a soloist because it seems like you either soon become a principal dancer or you are virtually never onstage and your career grinds to a halt. Janie Taylor never dances anymore (is she injured?) Stephen Hanna was recently promoted to principal dancer but has been performing very little this season. I feel like this is the most “statistically significant” crop of Mae Wein awardees because the younger ones are still (perhaps) on the rise.
2000-2004: Jessica Flynn left the company. Ashlee Knapp, Georgina Pazcoguin, Allen Peiffer, Daniel Applebaum, William Yin-Lee, Vincent Paradiso, and Giovanni Villalobos have had completely undistinguished careers in the corps so far. (I don’t mean they don’t dance well, just they don’t do solos.) Our big success stories here are Ashley Bouder and Megan Fairchild!
About the rest of this crop, time will tell. I hope new principal Andrew Veyette will continue to dance a lot. Tyler Angle has been featured lately; I hope he won’t sink back into oblivion. Sara Mearns is soloist du jour. Soloists Ana Sophia Scheller and Tiler Peck may have already had their moments in the sun.
No one can take their eyes off Amar Ramasar when he dances. For a while he had many important roles, now he is another rarely-seen soloist. Glenn Keenan isn’t put forward anymore either. Kaitlyn Gilliland languishes in the corps but we’ve seen her do lovely things recently.
Of the eight recipients for 2005 and 2006, it looks like six of them did not join NYCB.
I know it’s a big company, they can’t all dance all the time, etc etc. But I don’t think it’s really about whether they “get promoted” but about whether they get to fulfill their early promise. I am left with an impression of young talent just bursting forward, being put on display for a while as a “young new sensation,” and then withering on the vine. Sorry to be so negative.
