Let’s face it: The annual Fall for Dance phenomenon—six separate programs at the City Center over 10 days—isn’t aimed at critics. Just about everything about it is geared to be popular, and why not? That’s what City Center was intended for when the city took it over in lieu of unpaid taxes in 1943. Affordable art for everyone—that was the mandate for both New York City Ballet and New York City Opera in their early, City Center days. In 1948, when people like me started going to see Balanchine, tickets in the top balcony cost $1.20 (at intermission we sneaked down to the almost empty orchestra).  read more »

What do we expect from something called Romeo and Juliet—or, as in the case of Mark Morris’ new version, Romeo & Juliet, On Motifs of Shakespeare? We’ve all read it, seen it, heard the operas, watched the movies, enjoyed (or not) West Side Story. And then, of course, there are all the dance versions: Lavrovsky, MacMillan, Cranko and, if we’re lucky enough to have seen them, Ashton and Tudor. It’s embedded in our minds—and in ballet. The two roles almost all young ballerinas most eagerly hope to dance are Giselle and … Juliet.

Why? The scintillating verse of the young Shakespeare doesn’t explain this story’s grip on the world’s—or the dancer’s—imagination.  read more »

The climactic moment—the defining moment—of City Ballet’s exhausting spring season came two nights before it official- ly ended. The occasion was a gala performance staged for the benefit of the Dancers’ Emergency Fund, a worthy project dreamed up years ago by Jerome Robbins and now revived by Peter Martins. The program was the usual gala effort—a little of this, a touch of that, here a solo, there a pas de deux, now something for the whole gang.

But there were two big deviations from the norm. The first, highly publicized, was that the evening, called “Dancers’ Choice,” was programmed and cast by a young principal, Jonathan Stafford, with the help of colleagues.  read more »

This season’s version of ABT’s The Sleeping Beauty is 14 minutes shorter than last year’s version, when it was new. Which means that it’s 14 minutes better, since most of what’s been cut was both gratuitous and disfiguring. No more imposed story line about the Queen weeping a river of tears, or Prince Désiré flinging himself down beside it so that we can have a pointless (and endless) dream sequence. No extended combat scene, up on a rickety platform in the trees, between the Prince and the Lilac Fairy on the one hand and that wicked spider Carabosse on the other. (We still have a web, but it’s down below and barely has time to register.  read more »

A bomb went off in the middle of ABT’s sleepy season of same old, same old classics—the Swans and Giselles and Corsairs; the Beautys and the Bayadères. The bomb was detonated by Twyla Tharp—what a surprise!—and it woke the Met up. Yes, it goes on too long and, yes, it has unconvincing moments, but for most of its 45 minutes, it’s a wild ride of kinetic energy. Tharp is often at her best when she’s kicking ass, and that’s what’s she’s doing here: in one or two places, literally.  read more »

You may have noticed that Jerome Robbins is being celebrated all over the place. And why not? He’s worth celebrating. But why now? Because it’s about to be his 90th birthday? We usually organize these things (as we did for Balanchine) for the centenary. Why this case of premature celebration?  read more »

The Kirov is a great ballet company because it has so many terrific dancers, but it doesn’t always know what to do with them. The dancers—here for a three-week season, just ended, at the City Center—were under a handicap: The stage is so much smaller than their own, in St. Petersburg, that the company’s classical works in particular looked cramped and unhappy.  read more »

The first time the Kirov ballet was seen in America was on Sept. 11, 1961. The ballet was Swan Lake. The ballerina was Inna Zubkovskaya. The place was the old Met, on what must have been one of the hottest nights of the year, and there was no air-conditioning. As I remember it, our secretary of state and the Russian ambassador were sitting in the center box with their dinner jackets off, trying to look dignified as they melted, and the curtain was extremely late—Zubkovskaya, we later heard, was fainting from the heat backstage.  read more »

Every year at this time Paul Taylor arrives at the City Center to make us happy. There are the new pieces (two this season, as usual). There are the recent works being given a second or third exposure. There are the classics: Aureole, Arden Court and of course Esplanade. There aren’t the great dances that are on temporary leave of absence: Sunset, Big Bertha, Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rehearsal), Last Look, Company B, Syzygy.  read more »

One of the givens about Mark Morris is that he’s especially musical. And certainly he’s shown an unusually broad and knowledgeable appreciation of music in his choice of scores. Just as important, he’s trained his dancers to inhabit the music fully and sensitively. (He himself was deeply musical as a dancer.) So what to make of his version of Henry Purcell’s semi-opera, semi-masque King Arthur, now at the New York City Opera?  read more »