New York City stages return to action - Vancouver Ballet Society
By Robert Greskovic
American Ballet Theatre’s bus-and-truck travels over the summer, ABT Across America, was promoted as building on the troupe’s cross-country tours in the 1940s and 1950s. It culminated in late July when ABT returned home to New York City for two back-to-back performances at Rockefeller Center. The outdoor set-up, like those the company played across 14 states, happily framed (thanks to clear summer skies) a quadruple bill of short ballets and excerpts.
New American Romance by ABT principal James Whiteside, to Claude Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque, was a sometimes witty, sometimes frothy four-movement display for five women and three men. The showcase breezed along, brimming with energy that ultimately amounted to a more decorative than substantive creation. A pas de deux from Alexei Ratmansky’s Seven Sonatas (to Scarlatti) proved short but intriguing as ably performed by Christine Shevchenko and Thomas Forster. Let Me Sing Forevermore, a duet by Jessica Lang with hard-working Catherine Hurlin and Aran Bell to recorded Tony Bennett songs, and Indestructible Light, Darrell Grand Moultrie’s strung-out suite for eight dancers with often forced jazz clichés to Duke Ellington and other jazz composers, closed the bill. Neither gave audiences more than a minimal chance to admire the eager dancers in what were unmemorable choreographic challenges.
In late September, New York City Ballet returned to its home stage in Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater for its first live appearances in 18 months. The ambitious repertoire was dominated by works of the troupe’s founding choreographers George Balanchine (1904-1983) and Jerome Robbins (1918-1998), and intermixed with recent creations by Justin Peck and Christopher Wheeldon, the company’s current and previous resident choreographer respectively. Ratmansky filled out the roster of choreographers in rotation for the four-week run.
Appropriately, Balanchine’s 1935 Serenade opened the season, with a moving and fleet performance of the choreographer’s at once simple and emotionally tinged showcase for its primarily female cast. The audience reacted enthusiastically all through, something Balanchine, who railed against applause that overrode the music, might have excused on this occasion. A less than spotless performance of his Symphony in C (1947, to Bizet) still proved moving from its energetic cast, in which Sara Mearns made the ballet’s shimmering Adagio movement luminous and powerful.
As the season unfolded (I am filing this report in early October), there were highlights, with notable performances of more recent works created for NYCB. I could single out Ratmansky’s vivid and often dramatic Russian Seasons (2006, to Leonid Desyatnikov) and Peck’s Pulcinella Variations (2017), a playful, often tricky suite of solos and duets pouring forth from the ballet’s cast of five women and four men. One especially impressive debut was that of Joseph Gordon as the melancholy and contemplative male lead in Robbins’ Opus 19, The Dreamer (1979, to Prokofiev).
The season prominently featured three world premieres, none adding up to more than a passing novelty. Mauro Bigonzetti’s Amaria (to Scarlatti) was intended to celebrate Maria Kowroski (who’s retiring this season with a special performance on the closing day), but it amounted to little more than a knotty exercise for the ballerina. Kowroski was supported by Amar Ramasar as her long and limber legs stuck out variously along the duet’s way, revealing athletic flash but little more.
The most publicized of the premieres were those showcased in the ninth of NYCB’s Fall Fashion Gala, in which fashion designers collaborate with choreographers. Christopher John Rogers’ costume designs for Sidra Bell’s Suspended Animation featured her cast of six women and six men in dense layers of tulle and ruffles that were gender-bending to less than dramatic effect. Overall, Bell’s dry suite of postures and poses suggested a gathering of runway models coming and going, at points having stripped away layers of costuming. Their activities seemed little more than wanderings in the darkness of Mark Stanley’s shadowy lighting.
Andrea Miller’s sky to hold was dressed winningly by Esteban Cortázar in fluid fabrics of watercolour hues. The commissioned score was by Lido Pimienta, a Canadian-Colombian singer-songwriter, who had an off-to-the-side presence onstage to vocalize words and tones that felt incantational. Pimienta spoke of her score to the New York Times as relating a story about a seed falling in love with a storm. Amid Miller’s full cast of 16, Taylor Stanley’s “seed” proved animated and acrobatic, while Mearns’ “storm” made a free-flown impression. In the end, however, sky to hold didn’t memorably hold the stage with its disparate activities.
New York City continues opening up after its 18-month COVID-driven hiatus, with audiences required to prove vaccination and wear masks. Still to go this month, American Ballet Theatre has a Lincoln Center run offering Giselle and mixed bills that include a revival of Antony Tudor’s Pillar of Fire, and Martha Graham Dance Company will be at the Joyce with a new work by Andrea Miller and some Graham classics. In November, Twyla Now will celebrate Twyla Tharp’s 80th birthday at City Center and NYCB’s The Nutcracker opens there November 26.
