Happy 4th of July!!!
There will be no issue this week. The next issue will be up July 10, 2006. In the meantime, there are a lot of reviews in this issue — we hope you read them!
American Ballet Theatre's Spring Season
Julio Bocca's Farewell in "Manon"
by Susan Reiter
It was probably as close to a World Cup soccer atmosphere as a ballet performance can get when Julio Bocca ended his illustrious, 20-year ABT career on Thursday, dancing an intensely heartfelt performance of Kenneth MacMillan’s “Manon” with his longtime partner Alessandra Ferri. Indeed, towards the end of the fervent ovations that lasted for fifteen minutes, someone tossed an Argentine flag to the exhausted but exhilarated Bocca, who draped it over his shoulders and seemed to embrace the admiring throngs with his outstretched arms. This was after he had motioned, midway through the curtain calls, for someone to hand him a beer (presumably the Argentine brand he mentioned, in one of the many interviews he gave in recent weeks, keeping handy in his dressing room). It added to the enthusiastic, festive nature of the extended ovation — as though he was toasting the audience and his fellow dancers, while also making clear he was enjoying the prospects of a life released from the intense discipline of classical ballet. READ MORE
Royal Ballet at the Kennedy Center
Pleasures and Questions
by Alexandra Tomalonis
This year, Britain’s Royal Ballet celebrates its 75th anniversary. During much of those 75 years, the company set the standard for classical ballet in the West, preserving the 19th century Petipa ballets as well as classics from the Diaghilev era and presenting brilliant new ballets by its own choreographers that have since become classics. Ballet companies’ fortunes are as variable as those of corporations or football teams, and the Royal has had a rough go of it for some time now. Changes at the School and an influx of foreign-trained dancers that eroded the company’s style and identity, several seasons without its home stage when Covent Garden was under renovation, an unfortunate change in directorship — all took their toll. If the company isn’t quite back to its full former glory, its brief appearance in Washington this past week showed that the current director, Monica Mason, a former RB ballerina, is steering the ship with a sure hand. READ MORE
Beauty and the Beast of Time
by George Jackson
Irreversible time: in “The Sleeping Beauty” a mere 100 years signals not just a change of fashion but also the leap from arranged betrothal to romantic love. Ideas about staging this ballet have differed too since its premiere in 1890. READ MORE
New York City Ballet's Spring Season
Funerals, Weddings and Westerns
by Leigh Witchel
Miranda Weese holds up more than her share of the repertory at New York City Ballet, but not much of her share was also Suzanne Farrell’s. The roles Weese performs that were created by Farrell are few; they usually go to taller dancers who bear a closer resemblance to Farrell. Her most notable Farrell part was one she had to campaign to get — “Mozartiana”. Weese gained a new role on Wednesday night with her debut in “In Memory Of . . .”, a ballet Jerome Robbins created in 1985 to Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto. The score was dedicated by the composer “to an angel”, Manon Gropius, who had died from infantile paralysis at age 18. With two men, the first a young lover originally danced by Joseph Duell and then Adam Lüders as a Death figure, Farrell brought that angel to life — and death. READ MORE
Letter from San Francisco No. 11
Liss Fain, Fresh Meat 2006, Every Little Movement
by Rita Felciano
For this year’s home season, Liss Fain took a big step away from the small stages where she has shown her work for the last fifteen years or so. Fain designs her choreography with space in mind. Her nine dancers flow in and out of the wings with an ease that suggests that a dance is much larger than what we actually see in front of us. Once on stage, they fill it with long extensions and voluptuous lunges that thrust the energy beyond the body’s physical confines. READ MORE
Neighbourly? No Way
by John Percival
There is a sense of antagonism to come before a single character sets foot on stage in Michael Keegan-Dolan’s “The Flowerbed”. We see two houses, unrealistically depicted in blue flat boards; the one on our right is neat and trim, the other has its missing door and window taped over. The lawn in front of them likewise reveals more care on one side. Yet it’s the smarter house where a boy climbs on the roof and throws paper aeroplanes at the audience, so we ought to guess this is not going to be just goodies versus baddies. READ MORE
"The Sleeping Beauty"
Classical Ballet Finally Wins in Flanders
by Marc Haegeman
When last December the Royal Ballet of Flanders added William Forythe’s “Impressing the Czar” to its repertory one Dutch newspaper critic observed a little rashly that artistic director Kathryn Bennetts had “suddenly revitalized this company, which generally limits itself to the usual 'Sleeping Beauties'”. Even considered within the prevailing climate in these regions to look down on anything which even faintly smells of traditional ballet and to deem the revival of not-so-new Forsythe as beneficial for the future of a classical troupe, such a statement proves as incorrect as it is insulting. In previous seasons the company has always spent a great deal of attention to contemporary work to balance its programming. Furthermore, now that Bennetts has revealed her final trump card of her first season with Flanders — Marcia Haydée’s spectacular staging of “The Sleeping Beauty” — these words have become truly nonsensical. READ MORE
Coming to a Theater Near You
by Lisa Rinehart
If anyone decides to genetically engineer a crop of dancers for a utopian dance company, then the highly lauded CND2 (Nacho Duato and Tony Fabre's Compania Nacional de Danza 2) may be a good place to start. Classically trained, highly versatile, and strong as oxen, these dancers can swallow Duato's demanding choreography and spit it back out with the efficiency of a Swiss watch. And therein lies the problem. Duato creates snazzy architecture built on invention, sleek pizzaz and vaguely pretentious content, and when set on these young, fearless bodies (most dancers are under 21), it can look vacant. Duato's work, along with its tremendous physical demands, needs enrichment by more seasoned performers if it's really to fly. READ MORE
Flamenco in Nueva New York
by Tom Phillips
The great Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca spent a year in New York, studying at Columbia in 1929-30, and he didn’t like it very much. He produced a cycle of poems entitled “Poeta en Nueva York,” in which he portrays the city as an inhospitable, even inhuman place. READ MORE
Remembrance of Things Past
by Leigh Witchel
“At this point in the making of the dance my friend Michael Mitchell died.” The last line projected at the back of the stage in Neil Greenberg’s “Not-About-AIDS-Dance” (1994) encapsulates the urgency of it. Eight friends died while the dancers created the piece, as did his brother Jon. Greenberg himself was HIV+. Fast forward twelve years later. Protease inhibitors made him asymptomatic. Greenberg looks in admirable dancing shape, better than I have seen in a few years. He’s still making dances. READ MORE
The intense concentration and deliberateness of Myung Soo Kim’s program of seven ritual solos made for a mesmerizing two hours. As she offered up these extremely detailed, delicate dances, whose origins are shamanistic, one could appreciate that their meanings were as layered as the elaborate costumes she calmly, methodically put on and removed in a small upstage alcove in between the pieces. So much history and significance lies behind these dances, and Kim’s thorough program notes offered some guidance to those of us bringing a glaring lack of knowledge and perspective about Korean culture. All one could do was absorb the focused, often somber approach she brought to them, while realizing that what lies behind, and motivates, every measured step and fluttered sleeve, adds an import to these performances that is cannot be fully appreciated by many of us. READ MORE