Performance

Classicism and Romanticism

May 31, 2019 - By Mark Franko

In 1970, George Balanchine added three new sections to his well-known one-act ballet showpiece Theme and Variations (1947). This spring New York City Ballet has been presenting Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3 as part of its Balanchine offerings. In its first iteration, Theme and Variations was an extended pas de deux with the interventions of a full corps de ballet—women first, men joining in toward the end—a sort of compressed nineteenth-century classical ballet presented for its own qualities of relative abstraction but still performed in regalia against a royal background as if it were an historical divertissement. Like other Balanchine works, it was a new classic that nostalgically evoked nineteenth-century ballet while steering clear of plot.

In Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3, however, Balanchine inserted three very different...

What is a Classic?

April 19, 2019 - By Mark Franko

In its continuing celebration of the 100th anniversary of Jerome Robbins this past winter season, New York City Ballet has revived one more Robbins work, a piece dating back to 1958—New York Export: Opus Jazz.[1] An ensemble work for sixteen dancers with a jazz-inspired score by Robert Prince and sets by Ben Shahn, New York Export: Opus Jazz was first shown on a tour of Robbins’s Ballets U.S.A. in Europe and later had its New York City premiere in an all-Robbins Broadway season.[2]

This premiere was in itself an unusual event, on the heels of Robbins’s 1957 smash hit musical West Side Story. Blazoned by its title as...

Whither Vibrancy? How Long Relevance?

February 6, 2019 - By Mark Franko

At the time of this writing the New York City Ballet remains a company without an artistic director and continues to be overseen by an interim artistic team. Five principal male dancers are gone. Robert Fairchild has moved on; Joaquin De Luz retired; and, Chase Finlay, caught up in a sex abuse scandal, resigned. Amar Ramasar and Zachary Catazaro, peripherally associated with Finlay’s problems, were dismissed last fall by the leadership team after having initially been suspended. Given such dramatic attrition in the ranks of leading male dancers one wonders whether the dismissal of Ramasar and Catazaro was possibly avoidable.

The state of the Company is always measured by the state of performance of the Balanchine repertory. The New York City Ballet is currently suffering from a serious deficit in experienced and unique male dancers who excel in it. Yes, there are very...

Robbins at 100

January 6, 2019 - By Mark Franko

(Originally Published June 7, 2018)

Ballet, Gesture, and the Vernacular

Jerome Robbins is a legendary dance artist—not least because he succeeded as a choreographer in two quite antithetical domains: the Broadway musical and classical ballet. One might conclude that he was an innovator of dance theater (as opposed to theater dance), yet this would not do justice to the hybridity of his work. Like Agnes De Mille he revolutionized the American musical by tapping into the savoir-faire of the professional concert dancer and making dance do the work of story. Yet, starting in the 1940s, he also undertook to update ballet by introducing vernacular dance vocabulary into the classical lexicon. While these two are related projects, they are also distinctly different. Robbins’s career was dual in more than one sense. He crossed over genres, but...

Marco Rosano's Stabat Mater

January 5, 2019 - By Len Berkman

(Originally Published February 7, 2017)

I address this capsule memoir especially to those of you who take boisterous, passionate delight in retracing trajectories of your major life discoveries and convergences. Among my most profoundly haunting classical music discoveries of the past decade, Marco Rosano’s contemporary Stabat Mater has come to play a role in my life well beyond the treasured experience of listening to it, and seeing it performed, again and again.

The insistent, unmitigated artistic focus, across centuries, on the mother of crucified Jesus has long fascinated my wife and me: There the mother stands, as witness, as support through her very proximity, choosing not to shut her eyes or flee from the torture and murder of her son. A literally excruciating event, beyond the capacity of nearly all of us to genuinely absorb, whether or not we ever...