New York City Ballet Spring Season Opens!
We can dream, can't we?
by Nancy Dalva
In the summer of 1958, at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut, George Balanchine choreographed dances passages for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and “A Winter’s Tale.” As a child, Balanchine not only saw “Midsummer” but appeared in it, as an elf in a production at the Mikhailovsky Theater, in St. Petersburg, when he was eight. Many of its lines stayed with him, and as an adult he could recite (in Russian) many of the speeches, seeming particularly to like “I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and nodding violet grows.” READ MORE
New York City Ballet’s break for March and April is over and the company is opening its Spring season with a series of performances of George Balanchine’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Nine of the season’s first fourteen performances are of this ballet and the company is taking the occasion to work a large number of its younger dancers into the key roles; three different casts are rotating this week and two more will be added next week. To watch “Midsummer” this week at City Ballet has thus been to observe a process of maturation and a shift in generations. Most of the dancers involved, with the exception of the company’s two beloved senior ballerinas Darci Kistler and Kyra Nichols and of Maria Kowroski — who returned to the stage Thursday night as Titania after an absence of nearly ten months – are very young and it seems that each night’s program involves at least half a dozen debuts. 
The Diamond Project opened with a modest little solo in the middle of a generous (or indulgent) evening of Eliot Feld ballets, most new to the New York City Ballet. The evening opened with the NYCB debut of “Intermezzo”, choreographed in 1969 for Feld’s American Ballet Company. "Intermezzo" has much in common with Jerome Robbins’ “Dances at a Gathering”, also made in 1969, but, unless Feld was a very fast worker, he could not have been influenced by it. The simple piano pieces (Chopin for Robbins and Brahms for Feld) and romantic swoosh of both ballets was probably mutual reaction to the sometimes raucous 1960’s.