ABT’s relationship to Antony Tudor is somewhat schizophrenic. He’s too important to its history to be ditched, and of course several of his ballets are dramatic masterpieces that dancers love to dance. But he’s not a big draw, and—worst of all—he didn’t create any of those full-evening star vehicles that the company’s big spring season at the Met apparently requires. What to do?

In recent years, we’ve had a Lilac Garden here, a Pillar of Fire there, an occasional Dark Elegies. Scattered appearances of Orpheus in the Underworld, The Judgment of Paris and a few others. And all too frequent performances of The Leaves Are Fading, a work that Tudor made for Gelsey Kirkland back in 1975 that’s all lyrical nostalgia—looking back at the joys of spring and the careless rapture of young love.  read more »

San Francisco Ballet is not only the oldest American ballet company (it was founded in 1933), but one of the strongest, as its recent 10-day season at City Center demonstrated yet again. Its artistic director is Helgi Tomasson, the Icelandic dancer trained in Denmark who became a treasured member of Balanchine’s New York City Ballet—a model of classicism, a superb partner and a highly adaptable and appealing stage presence. (Among the roles created on him there: the hero, Franz, in the Balanchine-Danilova Coppèlia; the male lead in Balanchine’s haunting Divertimento from Le Baiser de la Fée; and the central figure in Robbins’ Dybbuk.  read more »

With some kind of unlikely synchronicity,  two important and ambitious figures in the dance world have, in successive weeks, shown us “companies” that aren’t really companies. Here in New York, at the City Center, Christopher Wheeldon installed for a second year his group “Morphoses,” named after one of his finest ballets. And at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., Suzanne Farrell presented perhaps the most ambitious of her brave reconstitutions of the Balanchine repertory.

Neither Morphoses nor the Suzanne Farrell Ballet has a body of dancers who train together, rehearse together and perform together over an extended period of time.  read more »

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 »