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Theme Music

"Serenade", "Mozartiana", "Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux", "Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3"
New York City Ballet
David H. Koch Theater
New York, NY
Sept. 24, 2014

by Mary Cargill
copyright © 2014 by Mary Cargill

New York City Ballet is continuing its theme evenings, performing ballets that the marketing department can group together. The official opening night of the season (after the fashion-themed gala) featured all Balanchine/all Tschaikovsky. All of these ballets are glorious, of course, but performing them together does seem to imply that the program wasn't really carefully curated. However, any performance that opens with "Serenade" is halfway home. Sara Mearns danced the Waltz with her usual dramatic intensity. There is something so vibrant about her presence, yet she never seems to be overdoing it--the stage is her world and we are privileged to watch.  For her the Waltz girl did not seem to be the elegiac, almost wistful memory of happiness that some have made her, but a free woman forging her own path. The section where the woman dances ahead of the man, looking back and urging him on, only apparently to fade to mist, for Mearns was not a gloss of the old Romantic ideal of the unattainable but rather a forceful pushing forward.  She was simply breathtaking.

Sara Mearns in "Serenade" Photo © Paul Kolnik.

Dancing Together = Community

"The Muir," "A Wooden Tree," "Jenn and Spencer," "Festival Dance"
Mark Morris Dance Group
Cal Performances, Zellerbach Hall
Berkeley, CA
September 25, 2014

by Rita Felciano
© 2014 by Rita Felciano

Walking out of a Mark Morris concert you can't help but feel that maybe the world is not going to implode after all because we are handling ourselves so badly. There is such heft to the way these gorgeous dancers negotiate space and each other that they make you want to believe in the power of our ability to overcome our own follies and whatever fate throws at us. Morris is a great artist but the fact that his works are so deeply ingrained in an encompassing humanistic spirit is not the least of their hold on us.

Mark Morris dancers in "The Festival." Photo © Amber Star Merkens

New Blood, New Clothes

Fall Gala
New York City Ballet
David H. Koch Theater
New York, NY
September 23, 2014

by Leigh Witchel
copyright © 2014 by Leigh Witchel


Fashion loves a party, and New York City Ballet is only too happy to provide. The main attraction of the company’s fall gala was a trio of new works by younger choreo- graphers, paired with three designers for the costumes. The results were nicely tailored.

But before the new pieces, two older ones were dusted off and taken out of the closet. In the countdown to Wendy Whelan’s retirement from NYCB, she appeared to affectionately riotous applause in Christopher Wheeldon’s “This Bitter Earth.” Discreetly and securely partnered by Tyler Angle in the melancholy and pensive duet, Whelan deployed her best-known qualities: extreme plasticity, lingering balances and intense focus. The work is a solid Whelan vehicle, but Wheeldon built it from the same ingredients as their greatest collaboration, “After the Rain.” “Liturgy” is also cut from similar cloth. In some ways, Whelan is the Katherine Hepburn of ballet – everything she does becomes inimitably stamped with her style, rather than the other way round. That wasn’t a bad thing for either woman. Whelan remains one of the most adventurous of ballerinas, turning her focus now to independent projects. Yet it’s difficult to know if she’ll ever get what she’s said she wants most from new choreography: Transformation.

New York City Ballet in "Belles-Lettres" Photo © Paul Kolnik.

Teaser

“Everything You See”
Vicky Shick (with the Dancers)
American Dance Institute
Rockville, Maryland
September 20, 2014
 
by George Jackson
copyright © 2014 by George Jackson
 
Women choreographing in contemporary mode are on American Dance Institute’s schedule this season. Some of the choreographers are showing in-progress, “incubator” pieces that aren’t supposed to be reviewed. Vicky Shick kicked off the ready series with a work that had its premiere April 2013 in New York. Shick bisected the dance space by hanging a gauze curtain across it. This device, depending on the lighting, sometimes provided an impressionist view of the dancers and the part of the public on the curtain’s other side. The effect, though, was minor. Major were the questions that came to mind about the cast. Who were they, as dancers and as people? What were they doing? The answers provided by Shick during her 55 minute piece made her seem somewhat of a tease.

Photo © Anjola Toro

It Would Be So Nice If Something Made Sense For A Change

“Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"
National Ballet of Canada
David H. Koch Theater
New York, New York
September 9, 2014

by Michael Popkin
copyright © 2014 by Michael Popkin

There’s a saying that “a camel is a horse designed by a committee."  During the first two acts of Christopher Wheeldon’s “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” (a joint 2011 production by Britain’s Royal Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada that was first seen here last week), this saying came to mind. The ballet is a collaboration among Wheeldon, composer Joby Talbot, designer Bob Crowley and lighting designer Natasha Katz, with a scenario by Nicholas Wright. A production design by Jon Driscoll and Gemma Carrington is also credited. The parts contributed by each were brilliant, but the whole was at times barely intelligible, particularly during act one. Dance, character and the story itself became mere afterthoughts in a Cirque de Soleil-style experience, on which level alone did the work succeed. While an unexpectedly brilliant third act restored a sense of structure and proportion to the spectacle, providing even a moment of grandeur, it happened too late.

Greta Hodgkinson and Jillian Vanstone of the National Ballet of Canada in "Alice." Photo © Cylia von Tidemann

The Show Must Go On

"Gnawa,""Herman Schmerman (Pas de Deux,)""D-Man in the Waters (Part I,)" "Bend in the Road: New Orleans"

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Charles “Lil Buck” Riley and Damian Woetzel, New York City Ballet
Fall for Dance Festival

Delacorte Theater,
Central Park
 New York, NY

September 14, 2013

by Martha Sherman
copyright © 2014 by Martha Sherman

If there was a theme for the opening program of the 2014 New York Fall for Dance Festival, it was wit and grit -- from both the performers and the audience. Each of four companies danced a work tinged with humor, some of it saucy, some gently sentimental. An injury, though, forced an unexpected change in the program, and a Saturday night downpour cancelled the open air Delacorte performance, but the audience –- which had waited for free tickets for hours on Saturday morning –- came back in droves for the Sunday rain date.

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago in "Gnawa." Photo © Tammy Shell.

Full Force

"Playing with Angels", "When We Rise", "Tower", "Introducing Mrs. Stephen P. Baxter", "Criminal Commoners"
Mazzini Dance Collective
Ailey Citigroup Theater
Joan Weill Center for Dance
New York, NY
September 6, 2014

by Mary Cargill
copyright © 2014 by Mary Cargill

Annmaria Mazzini, formerly with Paul Taylor, has established a small company showcasing her own choreography; its New York season also featured two works by another Taylor alumnus, Orion Duckstein. Her choreography, like her dancing, is dynamic, incisive, luxuriantly feminine, and full of contradictions--woman as comforter, as seeker, and as avenging angel, danced with a blazing individuality. 

 

 

Annmaria Mazzini © Jaqlin Medlock