Latest news with #GeorgeBalanchine
Indianapolis Star
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Indianapolis Star
'Sleeping Beauty' and premieres on Indianapolis Ballet's 2025-26 season
Indianapolis Ballet's 2025-26 season will be marked by another major collaboration with the Indianapolis Symphony as well as several premieres. In September, the company will perform George Balanchine's "Concerto Barocco" for the first time, and dancers will present world premieres of more works with original choreography. In the spring, the ballet will program "The Sleeping Beauty" at Clowes Memorial Hall as the third installment of its running collaboration with the orchestra. The new season also will showcase the talents of students who attend the Indianapolis School of Ballet, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Current season subscribers can renew their tickets now, and new subscription sales begin June 11. Individual tickets go on sale Aug. 4. Visit to buy and for more information. Here's Indianapolis Ballet's 2025-26 season. Performances are at the Tobias Theatre at Newfields, 4000 Michigan Road, unless otherwise noted. Aug. 14-23. District Theatre, 627 Massachusetts Ave. The company will return to the IndyFringe festival to perform a concert that folds in classical ballet, jazz and more with choreography by Founding Artistic Director Victoria Lyras, Assistant Artistic Director Kristin Young Toner and dancers. Sept. 19-21 The performance will celebrate legendary choreographer George Balanchine with "The Four Temperaments," "Concerto Barocco" and a world premiere by the ballet's artistic team. Oct. 30-Nov. 2. The District Theatre The program will combine classical form and contemporary expression to show a current portrait of the art form. Dec. 18-23. Clowes Memorial Hall at Butler University, 4602 Sunset Ave. Indy Ballet continues its tradition of performing the classic tale about Clara's Christmas Eve journey that includes the Land of the Sweets, the Sugar Plum Fairy and waltzing flowers. Dec. 27-30 The one-hour version introduces kids and first-time ballet patrons to the iconic work. 100+ free concerts: Where to find the live shows around central Indiana during summer 2025 Jan. 30-Feb. 1, 2026 On this program full of contrasts are the gentle moments of Balanchine's "Serenade" and the intense "Boléro" with music by Maurice Ravel. The Indianapolis School of Ballet's Dance of the Hours will honor the school's 20th anniversary as well. March 6-7, 2026, Clowes Memorial Hall The ballet will team up with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra to perform the masterwork fairytale about Princess Aurora's journey from a curse to a kiss. April 17-19, 2026 The work pairs Felix Mendelssohn's score with the William Shakespeare comedy about a night of mischief, confusion and young love. The IndianapoLIST newsletter has the best shows, art and eats — and the stories behind them
New York Times
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
There Are Problems for Sure. But ‘Étoile' Has Humor and Heart.
Like the art of ballet, 'Étoile,' a television show about ballet, has its ups and downs. Sometimes you want to toss confetti in the air to celebrate how deftly it dives into the intelligence and humor of ballet culture. It lives largely in the world of comedy, which is rare for a ballet story. Yet it also shows a commitment to world-class dance, with snippets from classic works like George Balanchine's 'Rubies.' And it arrives with a narrative miracle — nary an eating disorder in sight. But then comes a scene, or sadly a dance, that makes you want to throw that confetti in the trash. The first time the show seesaws between paradise and purgatory happens in its first five minutes. 'Étoile,' on Amazon Prime Video, begins on a poignant note as a young girl, alone in a dark studio, follows along to a ballet class saved on a smartphone. A cleaning woman appears in the doorway to let her know that she has only one more floor to get through. This is the dancer's mother, who has been secretly recording company class for her. 'I've barely gotten to frappés,' young SuSu (LaMay Zhang) says to her mom. With a heavy heart, SuSu fast forwards to petit allegro, and an overhead shot pulls back, rendering her tinier and tinier as her feet cross back and forth in springy jumps. Blondie's 'Heart of Glass,' its beat echoing her rhythm, takes over, and we're dropped into a pulsating nightclub. There, a tipsy and inane conversation about Tchaikovsky and Aaron Copland ensues: Who would win in a fight? (Who cares?) And that generates a new topic: famous composers who had syphilis. SuSu, come back! (She does eventually. And her part gets better and better especially after Cheyenne, the leading French ballerina, sees in a studio 'this little girl who appears only at night like a fairy' and takes her under her wing.) Scenes like the one in the nightclub are deflating, especially for a series created by the imaginative husband-and-wife team of Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino. In previous Sherman-Palladino creations like 'Gilmore Girls' and 'The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,' actors weave gestures and words to give them an eccentric, choreographic flair, employing dialogue so muscularly arranged that when it really takes off, it swings. Characters are sometimes cartoonish, but rhythm gives them life. The best scenes almost always remind me of a dance. (And that doesn't even include the gem 'Bunheads,' the wonderful, short-lived comedy from 2012 about a ballet school.) As for 'Étoile," it is anchored more by a setup than a plot. Two directors of ballet companies, Geneviève (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in Paris and Jack (Luke Kirby) in New York, decide to swap talent, partly as a way to sell tickets. Ballet, as Geneviève says, was dealt a huge blow by 'the mighty reign of king Covid.' That's true. And 'Étoile' often pops with observant, real-world details. Jokes, like fresh musical accents, are slipped in nimbly. When Jack finds out that the theater's expensive etched Champagne flutes are being pocketed by wealthy donors, he demands that all further etching be stopped. 'But they won't match!' one employee says, his voice raised to tinny heights. 'What are we, Cleveland?' 'Étoile' takes on a lot — the impossible business of running a dance company in 2025, smarmy donors, institutional infighting and more — but it can also live in the weeds, where there's space to crack a joke about regional ballet. There are also real-world dance people, including Tiler Peck, the virtuosic, self-assured New York City Ballet principal, who plays the fictional Eva, a dancer who loses her focus during a performance of 'Swan Lake' and now must be shadowed by Dr. Speer, a whispering therapist in charge of getting her back onstage. Peck is a riot. She never drops the act. In Season 2 (the show has already been renewed), she could carry an episode. In the main character department, though, there are problems. Jack and Geneviève are better served in scenes that keep them apart; their banter feels forced. The New York company's aging artistic director, Nicholas (David Haig), with his affected, wistful voice as he gasses on about the old days, is perplexing: No part of him is funny or endearing. And then there's the next generation. Tobias (Gideon Glick) is a young, innovative choreographer who lacks social skills and, as far as I can tell, lasting talent, though he is considered a boy genius. (This, of course, happens in life.) Tobias wears headphones, listens to metal at full blast and has tantrums. His biggest meltdown happens during the premiere of a new ballet: He stops the performance and remakes the dance in real time in front of the audience. Like most of the contemporary ballet on the show, Tobias's creation is anything but inventive. (Much of it is by Marguerite Derricks, but there are also contributions by Christopher Wheeldon.) After the new version is finally performed — complete with portable ballet barres in a derivative William Forsythe touch — Tobias dashes onto the stage for a passionate kiss with his lead dancer. This was unforgivable. 'Étoile' went Hallmark. But the show has something crucial going for it: The guiding star that is Cheyenne (Lou de Laâge), the French étoile traded against her will from the Paris company to the New York one. She's a bulldozer, a climate activist-ballerina who has been sent away, to her horror. 'They're going to make me do 'Stars and Stripes,'' she says, referring to Balanchine's patriotic 1958 ballet. She rejects dance partners without even bothering to swipe left. 'You think I don't know what I need?' she asks Jack. 'You think I am a baby ballerina new to the world, stumbling around, stuffing lamb's wool into my shoes to stop the pain? There is no stopping the pain.' De Laâge, chin lifted like the Degas ballerina, is a tender tornado. The best part of 'Étoile' is how ruthlessly serious Cheyenne is about ballet. Wise and irritable with an inability to lie, Cheyenne possesses the vulnerability that comes from passion. She may be Parisian, but she also seems like a real New Yorker and is reminiscent of another City Ballet principal, Sara Mearns, who isn't in 'Étoile' but whose spirit seems to be part of the moral fiber of the series. Cheyenne, who sometimes appears to be styled like Mearns with her loose hair and baggy clothes, shares with her a raw, absolute dedication to ballet's expressive truth. 'Étoile' has no connection to the ballet horror of 'Black Swan' or, worse, the backbiting, eating disorders and sexual abuse found in 'Tiny Pretty Things' and 'Flesh and Bone.' While it makes reference to 'Fame,' the Alan Parker film, and 'Ballet,' the Frederick Wiseman documentary about American Ballet Theater — even lifting dialogue from both — 'Étoile' shows, at its base, a kind of fortitude that reminds me of 'Billy Elliot.' For Billy, as for Cheyenne, dancing is breathing. During a performance of 'The Nutcracker,' Cheyenne, who never slips, slips. When the idea is floated that she could become the company's next artistic director, she suddenly has the possibility of a new beginning, a path that she has already embarked on, as SuSu's biggest champion. That doesn't happen, and Cheyenne (her dance double is Constance Devernay) throws herself into a new creation by Wheeldon, playing himself. The solo, 'I Married Myself,' set to music by the pop and rock duo Sparks, shows that Cheyenne is, for better or worse, married to her art. Unfortunately, it is a slight and melodramatic work that begins with the dancer's back to the audience as she stretches her arms behind like tentacles. She darts about the stage — it almost has the feel of a floor exercise in gymnastics — and gets stuck in a burst of stationary speedskating. She hugs herself from behind. And when it's over, Cheyenne races off the stage crying and after a tirade — 'I don't want to be hollow!' — falls into Jack's arms. It's all very Luke and Lorelai in 'Gilmore Girls' (surprisingly not in a terrible way), but that's not the point. Ballet doesn't make Cheyenne feel hollow, it makes her feel too much. 'I Married Myself' is a dance of futile agitation, but Cheyenne's turbulence is real. In an earlier episode, during an onstage interview with Isaac Mizrahi (great choice), she gives a defense of ballet that gets to the heart of 'Étoile'; that defense is part of why Sherman-Palladino, a former dancer, wanted to make the show in the first place. Dancing, Cheyenne says, got into her brain, 'like a song that won't leave.' 'People today want to fight,' she continues. 'They want to be angry. OK. But how do we express that anger? How do we turn it into something better? How do we create hope when no one listens? Maybe they watch, maybe you dance, you feel, you change the story. Dance can do that. Dance lets you float above it all. It lets you play in the clouds.' Throughout his life, Balanchine referred to himself as a cloud in trousers, a line taken from the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. To the critic Arlene Croce, this meant Balanchine was 'a creator of airy ephemera.' That airy ephemera is vital, not just to see on a stage but to have in one's life, and to know the reference is to understand the best parts of the show. 'When I dance,' Cheyenne says, 'I want the audience to play with me, to dance in the clouds, to feel what I feel. To hear my song.'
Boston Globe
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Alla Osipenko, prima ballerina who chafed at Soviet grip, dies at 92
She was tall and willowy and embodied a new and evocative quality in Russian ballet, which reflected ballet's evolution in the West - particularly under George Balanchine and his New York City Ballet. Advertisement The Soviet ballet repertory had been dominated by interpretations of 19th-century ballets based on fairy tales, as well as newly choreographed story ballets that usually conveyed an implicit political message. She was 'the most sensuous of ballerinas,' dance and theater critic Clive Barnes wrote in 1970 in the New York Times. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up The French ballerina Violette Verdy, Ms. Osipenko's contemporary and later a leading dancer for Balanchine, said that Ms. Osipenko employed 'the classical technique in a completely personal way to create shapes and emotions that one didn't expect.' In 1956, Ms. Osipenko became the first of the new Kirov luminaries to receive acclaim in Europe. Dancing in Paris as a guest with Moscow's Stanislavsky-Nemirovich Danchenko troupe, she won the city's Pavlova Prize, named for the internationally idolized ballerina Anna Pavlova who died in 1931. Advertisement When the Kirov (now known, as before the Russian Revolution, as the Mariinsky Ballet) made its European debut in 1961 in Paris and London, she danced hallowed classical roles in 'Swan Lake' and 'La Bayadère' as well as Yuri Grigorovich's 'The Stone Flower,' which she had premiered in Leningrad in 1957. Then, at the height of her career, obstacles emerged. 'Your tongue is your enemy,' she recounted being told by elders when she was young. At the Kirov, her sometimes intemperate remarks and defiance of Soviet norms left her at odds with the Kremlin and its representatives in Leningrad. She turned down an invitation to join the Communist Party and rankled at being lectured on morality by party representatives after an affair in Paris with the French dancer Attilio Labis while she was married to a Kirov dancer, Anatoly Nisnevich. She was not allowed to accompany the Kirov when it made its US debut in September 1961 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. For most of the next decade, Ms. Osipenko battled the Kirov and the Soviet political establishment to keep the status she had achieved. Visiting Leningrad in 1967, Barnes wrote in the magazine 'Dance and Dancers' that Ms. Osipenko was 'probably the grandest of the Kirov ballerinas,' but noted 'she does not now enjoy great opportunities to show her qualities.' She was largely blackballed from the Kirov's top international tours but - as a replacement for another ballerina who was sidelined by Soviet authorities for an affair with an Australian - she returned triumphantly to London for a long season with the Kirov in the summer of 1970. The following year, Ms. Osipenko resigned from the Kirov. Advertisement Ms. Osipenko danced for years with the small, experimental companies led by Leonid Jacobson and Boris Eifman - and was allowed an aesthetic range that was much less inhibited than the world of classical ballet. In Eifman's 'Two Voices' in 1978, she and Markovsky danced to the rock music of Pink Floyd. Culture writer Gennady Smakov, in his 1984 book 'The Great Russian Dancers,' wrote that 'the more abstract the choreography, the more the various facets of her personality broke through it.' Neither Jacobson's nor Eifman's troupes, however, were permitted to stage foreign tours. Her final appearance on the ballet stage was in Eifman's 'Requiem' in 1981 in the Soviet Union. In 1995, she came to the United States to teach and coach with the Hartford Ballet and its school in Connecticut for five years. She also began acting in avant-garde Russian films, most notably in Alexander Sokurov's 2002 'Russian Ark,' an evocation of the past and present of St. Petersburg's Hermitage palace and museum, in which she played an eccentric gadfly haunting the Rembrandt gallery. In 2007, she joined the coaching staff of St. Petersburg's Mikhailovsky Theatre - an association that continued for the rest of her life. Alla Yevgenyevna Osipenko was born in Leningrad on June 16, 1932. Her mother, the daughter of a family that was prominent before the Russian Revolution toppled czarist rule in 1917, worked as a typist. Her father was a police detective, who in 1937 was arrested for a drunken rant against the Soviet state and was sentenced to five years in prison. Advertisement In June 1941, soon after Ms. Osipenko was accepted into the state ballet academy in Leningrad, Nazi forces invaded the Soviet Union. Ms. Osipenko was evacuated to Perm, on the Russian steppes, with the Kirov and the Rossi Street ballet school. Her collaboration with contemporary choreographers began while she was still a student. After she returned to Leningrad in 1944, famed Russian dancer Vakhtang Chabukiani choreographed a piece for her and two other dancers from the school. Jacobson created a duet, 'Meditation,' in which she danced the female lead. After joining the Kirov's corps de ballet, Ms. Osipenko was the Lilac Fairy in 'The Sleeping Beauty' in March 1952, choreographed by Kirov director Konstantin Sergeyev. One evening after a dress rehearsal, she slipped on the icy sidewalk as she got off a bus, tearing the membrane connecting the tibia and fibula bones in her right leg. She was told by doctors that she would never dance again, but was able to resume her career months later. In April 1957, Ms. Osipenko created a sensation in Grigorovich's three-act ballet 'The Stone Flower' when she wore a figure-revealing unitard rather than a tutu or skirt - something not seen on the Soviet ballet stage since the early days of the Stalinist regime. To Soviet ballet audiences, the future had arrived. Four years later, on the closing night of the Kirov's Paris debut, Ms. Osipenko danced 'Swan Lake' with young Nureyev. The next day at Le Bourget airport, Nureyev defected as the Kirov prepared to fly to London. Nureyev was subsequently convicted in absentia for treason in 1962. Ms. Osipenko testified in his defense, arguing that he had no premeditated plan to defect. She claimed that he was terrified by the KGB's insistence that he cut short the Kirov tour and return home, where he feared his career would now be finished. Ms. Osipenko's support of Nureyev further eroded her standing with the Soviet political establishment. Advertisement Ms. Osipenko was married four times: to art student Georgi Paysist, then to Nisnevich, film star Gennady Voropayev and Kirov dancer John Markovsky. All four marriages ended in divorce; the love of her life, she said, was film director Vladimir Naumov. She leaves a grandson and great-granddaughter. Her son, Ivan Voropayev, died in 1997. Ms. Osipenko often flashed a dry and whimsical wit. During a recreational therapy session in Hartford, in which she and others tossed a rubber ball back and forth, the physical therapist exclaimed: 'How beautiful your movements are! How graceful you are!' 'It's practically my profession,' Ms. Osipenko replied.
New York Times
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
George Lee, Trailblazing Chinese Ballet Dancer, Dies at 90
George Lee, a Chinese-born ballet dancer who was likely the first Asian to perform at New York City Ballet when he danced in George Balanchine's original production of Tchaikovsky's 'The Nutcracker' in 1954, died on April 19 in Las Vegas. He was 90. Jennifer Lin, who directed a short documentary about Mr. Lee called 'Ten Times Better' (2024), confirmed his death, in a group home while under hospice care. He had no immediate survivors. Mr. Lee, who immigrated to the United States in 1951, was studying at the School of American Ballet, City Ballet's affiliated school, when Mr. Balanchine asked him to demonstrate his talent. Mr. Lee, then known as George Li — he changed the spelling of his surname in 1959, when he was naturalized — had been trained by Russian teachers in Shanghai. He responded to Mr. Balanchine, who was raised in Russia, in the choreographer's native language. 'He said, 'What can you do good? Show me what you can do good,' so I show him something,' Mr. Lee told The New York Times in 2024. 'I did things like splits and double turns, down and up, turn again like a ball, and that's it. He picked up some things and put them together.' During a dress rehearsal, when a makeup artist covered him in yellowface, Mr. Balanchine intervened. 'He is Asian enough!' Mr. Lee recalled Mr. Balanchine saying. 'Why do you make him more?' The elements of Mr. Lee's costume as the character Tea — the Fu Manchu mustache, queue ponytail and rice paddy hat that have routinely been used in the role — are now widely considered racist stereotypes, but Mr. Lee said he didn't mind. 'Dancing is dancing,' he told The Times. Mr. Lee appeared in Act II, when Marie and her prince visit the Land of Sweets. After being wheeled out in a box by two women, he performed and then returned to the box. John Martin, in his review for The New York Times, wrote that Mr. Lee 'jumps wonderfully and exhibits some equally wonderful extensions in the Chinese dance.' In The Brooklyn Eagle, Paul Affelder praised his 'almost unbelievable elevations in the dance of tea.' Mr. Lee was not asked to join City Ballet; at 5-foot-5, he was told that he was too short. He graduated from the Manhattan School of Aviation Trades (now Aviation High School), in Queens, and then attended Indiana Technical College (now Indiana Tech), in Fort Wayne. He toured occasionally with a ballet troupe run by the great Russian dancer Andre Eglevsky. But it wasn't steady work, so he looked to Broadway. In 1958, he auditioned for the original Rodgers and Hammerstein musical 'Flower Drum Song,' a story about Chinese assimilation in San Francisco. He danced the Bluebird pas de deux from 'Sleeping Beauty,' performing it for Gene Kelly, the musical's director. After, Mr. Kelly told him: 'George, I know you like to do ballet. Why don't you learn something new?' Mr. Lee said he went home to discuss the offer with his mother, Stanislawa Lee, a Polish-born former ballerina, who responded: 'Maybe you should go ahead and try it. We've got to make a living.' He stayed with the show through its run of 600 performances, and continued with it on tour. He would appear twice more on Broadway (in the musicals 'Baker Street' and 'Darling of the Day,' in the 1960s), but the rest of his career featured little ballet. He found regular work in summer stock theater and danced in a cabaret show, 'Carol Channing With Her 10 Stout-Hearted Men'; in a touring arena show, 'Disney on Parade'; and in a Las Vegas revue, 'Alcazar de Paris,' at the Desert Inn, his final act in show business. 'Whether he was in ballet or not, he used his ballet training,' Phil Chan, a choreographer and a founder of Final Bow for Yellowface, an initiative dedicated to ending offensive depictions of Asians in ballet, said in an interview. 'If you look at clips of 'Flower Drum Song,' he's doing great ballet technique.' In his mid-40s, Mr. Lee pivoted to a new career — dealing blackjack in Las Vegas — and receded into dance history. George Li was born on Feb. 18, 1935, in Hong Kong. His father, Alexander Li, was a circus acrobat who taught him how to do handstands; his mother was his first dance teacher. When Japan occupied Hong Kong in 1941, the family fled to Shanghai, and then his father went to western China to find work. In Shanghai, a city with a vibrant population of émigrés, George took dance lessons from Russian teachers; at 7, he began performing polkas and Russian dances in nightclubs to help his mother get by. Sometimes he was paid in rice. In 1945, George's father died in a truck accident while trying to return to Shanghai. Four years later, George and his mother, fearing the Communist takeover of Shanghai, evacuated to the Philippines, where they spent two years in a refugee camp. Before they left the Philippines, George's mother warned him about what would be required if he wanted a future in dance. In an oral history interview for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in 2024, he recalled her saying, 'Look here, George, you are Asian, part of you, and we're going to America, and there will be all white people, so you better be 10 times better.' Their immigration to the United States was sponsored by a friend of the family who also introduced George to the School of American Ballet. When he later stopped dancing, his career was largely forgotten by the public. In 2022, Ms. Lin, the filmmaker, was looking at old photos at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, when she spotted a publicity shot of Mr. Lee from 'The Nutcracker.' Knowing how rare it was to see dancers of color perform at City Ballet, she wondered who this pioneering Asian was. 'I just became obsessed with finding George,' she said in an interview. 'I started tracking him and found an obituary for his mother, which said that she was survived by a son, George, living in Las Vegas.' Ms. Lin, a former reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, called five George Lees in Las Vegas. When she finally located the former dancer, she said, Mr. Lee asked her, 'Why are you looking for me? I'm nobody.' It took about a year for her to complete 'Ten Times Better,' which showed Mr. Lee at the Four Queens Hotel and Casino, where he dealt blackjack for 40 years, and at a reunion in Los Angeles of 'Flower Drum Song' performers, including Patrick Adiarte, who died last month. (The half-hour documentary is available on PBS's American Masters Shorts website.) Graham Lustig, the artistic director of Oakland Ballet, said in an interview that he had been unaware of Mr. Lee's dance career until he saw the documentary: 'It's like he was the ultimate undercover ballet dancer.' On May 4, Oakland Ballet performed the world premiere of its 'Angel Island Project,' seven dances by Asian American and Pacific Islander choreographers, set to music by Huang Ruo, about the harrowing experiences of Chinese detainees at the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay in the early 20th century. The company dedicated the performance to Mr. Lee. As Mr. Lustig said, 'It seemed like the most fitting way to recognize George — an immigrant who pursued a dancing dream.'
New York Post
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
NYC ballet lovers yell ‘f–k you' at climate change protester who disrupted Lincoln Center performance
Climate activists disrupted a ballet performance at Lincoln Center on Earth Day — prompting well-heeled attendees to shout at them to 'Shut the f—k up' and get out of the theater, video shows. One of the eco-protesters made her way inside the David H. Koch Theater Tuesday evening, during the the launch of the acclaimed ballet's spring season. 'It is Earth Day and we are in climate emergency!' she bellowed, just as the third of four George Balanchine ballets on the program, Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux, was beginning. 'Our country has become a Fascist regime and we are enjoying this beauty.' 4 'How will you dance when you're dying of dehydration?' one of the protesters yelled as a security guard tried to grab his sign. FNTV Some attendees didn't take well to the disruption, snapping back, 'Shut the f–k up,' 'f–k you' and 'stop being morons,' according to the video. The curtain then came down and an announcement aired: 'Due to an issue in the house, we need to pause the performance. We are attempting to resolve this issue.' Front of house staff escorted the protester out of the theater, as cheers and jeers erupted in the audience. About five more minutes passed before the ballet restarted from the beginning and the performance continued without further interruption, the New York City Ballet said. Earlier, as attendees filed into the theater, two demonstrators with the Extinction Rebellion activist group stood outside, holding signs with the messages, 'No Billionaire Ballet on Earth Day' and '4°C 1 Billion Dead.' 'How will you dance when you're dying of dehydration?' one of the demonstrators yelled as security workers tried to pry the sign from his hands, according to video posted on X. 'How will you dance when you can't even afford decent groceries? How will you dance when they're scheming people out of their homes?' The NYPD said two men, one in his 30s and the other in his 50s, were taken into custody during the demonstration outside Lincoln Center just before 8 p.m. They were released with summonses. 4 The protesters gathered as the first night of the New York City Ballet's spring season fell on Earth Day. FNTV 4 A woman stood on the balcony level of the theater as she yelled, 'It is Earth Day and we are in climate emergency!' FNTV 'Our action today is not about drawing attention; it's about demanding accountability and leadership from all sectors of society,' one of the Extinction Rebellion demonstrators said in a statement. 'Cultural institutions hold significant influence, and their silence is deafening in the face of this crisis.' The demonstration marked the third brazen act of the day for the group. 4 The woman was escorted out of theater to cheers and jeers. FNTV Members of the group spray-painted the Wall Street Charging Bull — before wiping away their graffiti as cops looked on Tuesday morning. They later sprayed graffiti on the windows of Tesla's Meatpacking District showroom — which landed two of them in cuffs, authorities said. And on Wednesday, a climate protester was busted after he spray painted the word 'USA' over a presidential insignia inside Trump Tower, according to law enforcement sources and video from the scene. The man sprayed the bright green paint over the plaque inside the Midtown landmark before kneeling on the ground in front of it and closing his eyes, according to footage posted on X. Moments after a small crowd gathered — some snapping photos of the demonstrator — a security officer approached, and the man unfurled a small banner bearing the words, 'GAME OVER' with the symbol for the climate activist group Extinction Rebellion.
