Robert Gottlieb

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 »

Roads paved with good intentions don’t always lead to Hell—often they go straight to BAM.  read more »

Why would the world’s foremost classical ballerina choose to turn up in New York leading a small company performing three works newly choreographed on and for her? Idealism? Vanity? Artistic ambition? Chutzpah? Her program was called “Beauty in Motion,” a real misnomer. How about “Vishneva Goes Contempo”? Or “A Long Night at the City Center”?  read more »

I’ve been seeing Balanchine’s Jewels for more than 40 years, and that’s a lot of jewelry. In the beginning it seemed to many of us unique in its ambitions and its splendor; to others it seemed gaudy—paste. But no one thought it would ever travel. Too expensive, too many styles to absorb and what company other than New York City Ballet could produce a Verdy, a McBride and Villella, a Farrell?  read more »

The story at Alvin Ailey is always the same: the dancers. But having been away during the opening weeks of the company’s annual City Center lovefest, just ended, I have a new take on them. Seeing a number of second- and third-cast performances, I was more exposed than critics usually are to the company’s depth of talent.  read more »

Count your blessings, all ye New Yorkers who every Christmas can rejoice in George Balanchine’s masterpiece The Nutcracker. Never have I appreciated it more than in Paris this year, when the Opéra Ballet gave us Rudolf Nureyev’s 1985 version. (For unfathomable reasons, it’s seen frequently in Paris and for years it held the stage in London as well.)

Not even Nureyev’s greatest admirers acclaim him as a great choreographer.  read more »

Two biographies of Ethel Merman in the same month? The real problem isn’t the duplication; it’s that although she had one of the greatest careers in Broadway history, she was just an uninteresting woman.  read more »

You can usually tell how healthy a ballet company is by the degree of your interest in the middle ranks of the dancers—the not-yet stars, the up-and-comers.  read more »

What have we New Yorkers learned from our first exposure to Christopher Wheeldon’s new ballet company, Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company?  read more »

Six programs, 28 separate works—the annual Fall for Dance blast at the City Center gives you your money’s worth.  read more »

For those of us who care about Martha Graham, it’s been a bumpy ride.  read more »

A provocative new piece, set to Elgar’s famous cello concerto, but in a version with piano rather than orchestra accompaniment, which makes it a very different piece of music—narrower and thornier.  read more »

This has been the best City Ballet season in more years than I care to reckon.  read more »

Choreographer Cristopher Wheeldon’s latest effort is visually arresting but thin; plus, Gelsey Kirkland wakes up Sleeping Beauty.  read more »

The artistic director of the company, Kevin Mc-Kenzie, and Gelsey Kirkland, that one-time superb dancer and tragic self-destructor, have collaborated to give us a perverse and self-defeating reading of the ballet.  read more »

I wasn’t planning to write this week, and then on Sunday, May 27, something happened: a nearly perfect afternoon at City Ballet, certainly the best all-round program I’ve seen there in years. And one with symbolic implications—if you believe in symbols.  read more »

Dense Terrain is ambitious, exciting and moving—but not everyone sees it that way.  read more »

Peter Martins' Romeo + Juliet, which is in the midst of a two-week run at the State Theater, just doesn’t add up.  read more »