Performance

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,...

Post-Pandemic Dance Fervor and the Dramatic Turn

April 11, 2022 - By Mark Franko

Ever since last September, the return to a normal performance schedule at New York City Ballet has brought with it a fervor visible not only in a renewed energy, resolve, and an evident joy in dancing after a trying pause, but also palpable in the intensity of feelings dancers display on stage.[1] Perhaps for this reason my attention has been drawn primarily to the performers themselves. Principal dancer Russell Janzen wrote a moving piece in The New York Times last year about his return to “in person” rehearsal. He concluded:

These moments of connection are possible only in the context of a dance. This unspoken recognition of each other and of our shared passion is something my colleagues and I find repeatedly in the intimacy and physical proximity of a danced, onstage world. And it...

Excuse

April 6, 2022 - By Jonathan Berger

This Saturday, April 23, at Carnegie Hall, the Kronos Quartet will be again performing composer Jonathan Berger's powerful Vietnam War suite, My Lai (2015). In May, the CD will be released.

Professor Berger wrote this riveting essay about My Lai on the eve of the opera's premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2017.

El Nora Alila, a twelfth-century acrostic piyut by Moshe ibn Ezra, is recited at the start of the powerfully evocative neila service which closes Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. Neila (literally ‘...