Performance

The Balanchine Enigma: Repertory, Variation, and the Plotless Ballet

November 3, 2022 - By Mark Franko

Slowly surfacing from the social and emotional depths of the COVID nightmare to perceive a tenuous normalcy around me, I experience New York City Ballet performances as a welcome afterlife—in which a repertory continuously redefines itself in relation to its own potentials and boundaries. Immediately after the pandemic, the bursts of individual energy of dancers drew attention to themselves, whereas now they are once again working through repertory rather than focusing attention on their individual exhilaration.[1]

The repertory itself takes center stage as a constantly varying puzzle. For example, Divertimiento no. 15 (1956), Vienna Waltzes (1977), and Mozartiana (1981)—all seen this season or last—suggest there is a festive, Central European plotless ballet...

My Student

September 16, 2022 - By Len Berkman

A Beef Stew for Shakespeare: Food for the Journey to Cordelia Lear

July 22, 2022 - By Len Berkman

Cordelia Lear, A Fable

July 7, 2022 - By Len Berkman

I think I’m waking up. One moment I was having a hard time accepting my father’s gifts to my husband and me, and the next my dad was screaming that he wanted never to set eyes on me again. It’s the kind of switchback that happens to you in a dream, when the higher you climb a mountain with the most gradual of winding roads upward, you reach a point where your road forgets what it’s doing, and as you carefully make your next turn you’re in mid-air. You’re ten again.  You’re not married in the least. Your road doesn’t even wave goodbye.

My dear friend Edgar knows what to do with dreams like that. He doesn’t rush away from even the wispiest cloud he sees as his only support. He lies down as though the wisp were his natural pillow. He tells himself he’s out of his mind to lie down on a wisp, but he laughs. “...

Modernist Tradition and the Individual Choreographic Talent

May 25, 2022 - By Mark Franko

The 2022 Stravinsky Festival began with an orchestral performance of Fireworks, one of Stravinsky’s early successes, which according to musicologist Charles M. Joseph in his book Stravinsky’s Ballets first drew Diaghilev’s attention to the composer in 1909. Joseph explains that the actual breakthrough piece for Stravinsky, however, was Scherzo Fantastique.[1] Leaving aside Rite of Spring, which does not feature in New York City Ballet’s narrative of its relation to Stravinsky, Fireworks and Scherzo Fantastique initiated an extended temporal framework for Stravinsky’s engagement with ballet in the US. From 1909, the year of the Paris debut of the Ballets Russes to the New York City Ballet’s first Stravinsky Festival in 1972, and on into the present,...