4 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Jerome Robbins Festival: Sparkling, Intimate, Imperfect
In the dance doldrums of August, 'Ballet Festival: Jerome Robbins,' at the Joyce Theater this week, is the hot ticket. Curated by and starring Tiler Peck, the New York City Ballet luminary, it offers a chance to see Peck and some of her world-class peers (from Lincoln Center and across the Atlantic) up close in chamber works by a master choreographer. It has some of the glamour of gala, but with thoughtful choices and a little summer-vacation energy. No wonder it's sold out.
Each of the three programs begins with a few duets or solos, largely lesser-known ones, and swells into a small ensemble staple. The music is live, mostly piano. Multiple casts give reasons for repeat visits though also make for an intermittent under-rehearsed quality. The intimacy comes with imperfections.
All the works date from Robbins's final three decades, after he moved back to ballet full time from Broadway. His 1969 comeback piece, 'Dances at a Gathering,' is in the lineup in excerpted form, as well as some of the Chopin piano ballets that overflowed from it: 'In the Night' (1970) and 'Other Dances' (1976).
What these and the other programmed works share, in varying degrees, is an underplayed modesty, everyday yet elevated, classical yet casual. Robbins was after the feeling of dancers in rehearsal, dancing for themselves. The dancers are people, not abstractions or symbols (as they can be in George Balanchine's ballets), but while these works don't have clear stories, all the roles are characters.
Some of the characters are hard to distinguish from the dancers who originated the roles. That's most the case with 'A Suite of Dances,' which Robbins made for Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1994. Set to some of Bach's suites for solo cello, it doesn't just suggest improvised conversation between musician and performer; it suggests a performer thinking.
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