Production vs. Performance

“The Leaves Are Fading”, “Overgrown Path”
“Theme and Variations”
American Ballet Theatre
City Center
New York, NY
October 23, 2008

by Carol Pardo
copyright 2008 by Carol Pardo

Something is amiss when production rather than choreography grabs one’s attention at the ballet. At first, I thought this was just a reaction to seeing “The Leaves Are Fading”, made for the huge stage of the Metropolitan Opera House, on the smaller stage of City Center. On the larger stage, the dancers in Antony Tudor’s meditation on love, set in a wooded grove, seem almost overwhelmed by the scale of the natural world. Here, the enveloping forest is a protected cocoon, where humans take pride of place and feel safe revealing emotions that make them vulnerable. The change in scale also means that the structural details of the piece are not subsumed by its sweep. According to remarks made at the pre-performance talk, each of the four pas de deux reflects a facet of love seen through the prism of memory, with the finale a mixture of relief and triumph at having stuck it out, forty years on. I wish the dancers had tuned into this, for each pas de deux looked all too similar to the others and the ballet as a whole monotonous.