To put it mildly! Here was a killer from the end of the Spell scene. Two young women (at least in this moment I couldn't call them dancers) are having an hilarious chat center stage. Their friend the Princess has just been carted off as good as dead and everyone around them is being frozen in place by a Lilac gone seemingly mad, and they are laughing??? You'd have thought one of them would have pulled out a cell phone. Would that Lilac had gotten to them first.
But Bouder sweats all the details. In the Awakening, after first opening her eyes with instant recognition, she blinked them shut, and opened them again: All was real. On enough for me.
Saw Sleeping Beauty yesterday. I can't believe how technical NYCB is and yet they can't actually dance. If dance is lyricism, poetry, and passion, then what I saw yesterday was not dance. As for the waltz scene in the second act? It was so ridiculously fast it looked like a jig. Bouder is an amazing technician. But it's the precision of a gymnast, not the grace and beauty of a ballerina. Now I know why I don't see city ballet often. A friend had tickets. The scenery and costumes were beautiful, but the choreography? Yikes. Doesn't Martins ever work on the corps lines? Center them? The lines are askew constantly. And there is absolutely no acting. The audiences responses were entirely for Little Red Riding Hood, Puss n Boots, you know, the "characters" that acted a little. Ballet is a medium through which to act and tell a story. Here, the technique has over powered the message and leaves the audience politely applauding when they should be stomping their feet, overcome by beauty, passion, and raw emotion.
Watch an old Russian ballet with Plisetskaya, or Semyonova, or Maximova. Not technicians, as the dancers of today, true. But actresses. People of passion capable of moving one. If I want to see a technician, I can watch the Olympics and see gymnasts. I go to the ballet to see actresses who speak to me through a medium of movement called The Ballet.
