Latest news with #NewYorkCityBallet
New York Times
6 hours ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
At City Ballet, Casting, Coaching and Dances Worth Watching
Looks can be deceiving, even in ballet. On paper, the spring season of New York City Ballet looked safe and dutiful, with no premieres, except the stage performance of a pandemic-era dance film and more recent contemporary works, some welcome (by Alexei Ratmansky), others not so much (everything else). But the season had a surprising sense of purpose, which came from casting, coaching and commendable repertoire. Suzanne Farrell, the former City Ballet star, worked with the dancers on four ballets. The 50th anniversary of the Ravel Festival made for a memorable trip back to 1975. And debuts were plentiful; more than that, they were meaningful choices, the kinds of roles that challenge dancers at the right time and give them the space to grow. Ratmansky didn't need to present a premiere. Two sides of his artistry were already on display. There was the buoyant, technical 'Paquita,' his spirited look at classicism in the 21st century; and 'Solitude,' a remarkable ballet illustrating the inner turmoil and outer tragedy of the war in Ukraine, with dancing shaped by and seeped in sorrow. It is even stronger now — quietly devastating with an icy spareness and, from the dancers, deep, grounded conviction. Its placement on a program between Caili Quan's 'Beneath the Tides' and Justin Peck's 'Mystic Familiar' seemed clueless, as if all of contemporary ballet is on an equal playing field. It's not. Other programs were dragged down by ballets that felt like needless filler — Peck's blandly lush 'Belles-Lettres' and Christopher Wheeldon's drippy 'After the Rain' pas de deux. The pas de deux made what should have been a strong program of ballets by Jerome Robbins and Ratmansky interminable. Ballet is an art, but its athletic demands can be cruel: Gilbert Bolden III, a new, much-valued principal dancer, tore his Achilles during a performance of 'Scotch Symphony.' His recovery will take months. But that show went on — Jules Mabie filled in for him — and the season, which included a farewell to the longtime principal Andrew Veyette, ended on a cheerful note with Balanchine's enchanting 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,' made even more so by the debut of Mira Nadon, dancing with Peter Walker, in the second act divertissement. She moves like silk. Here are a few other standout ballets and performances. Kyle Abraham Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Ballet Kids of ‘Midsummer' Bring Magic to the Bugs
There is Oberon, the King of the Fairies, and his beautiful Queen, Titania. Puck, a sprite, works his magic with the occasional unforced error, as mortals and immortals find themselves in a similar predicament: wanting to love. And wanting to be loved. But for all the sparkle of the mythological adults in George Balanchine's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,' it's the kids — 24, plus Titania's page — that rule this fantastical realm. Enter the Bugs. These young dancers from the School of American Ballet are the heart of New York City Ballet's production. Technically, they play Fairies and Butterflies, but at City Ballet and its training ground, S.A.B., they are known informally as Bugs. (Perhaps less dignified as far as outdoor creatures go, but cuter.) These Bugs are small, exuberant bodies that, at times, scurry across the forest stage, gleaming in the moonlit night. They're a coalition, a small but mighty squad of fleet-footed girls, ages roughly 10 to 12 — 'a wholly unsentimental deployment,' wrote Lincoln Kirstein, who founded the school and company with Balanchine. Balanchine based his ballet more on Felix Mendelssohn's overture and incidental music for 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,' to which he added additional pieces, than on the Shakespeare comedy. Mendelssohn's sweeping music also thrills the Bugs no end. It puts the gas in their engines, the quiver in their antennas, the flap in their delicate wings. 'You're not walking down the street anymore,' said Naomi Uetani, 11, with a smile she couldn't suppress. 'I'm in a magical place. I understand 'Nutcracker' — yeah, you're in the candy land, but this is different. The feeling.' There's truth to that. 'George Balanchine's The Nutcracker' (1954) is a marvel of storytelling and dancing, and kids play a huge part in it. But 'Midsummer' (1962), which closes City Ballet's spring season this week, remains both grand and carefree, irresistible for its sweetness. That comes from the children. 'They bring so much to the whole idea of the forest and all the little creatures,' Dena Abergel, City Ballet's children's repertory director, said. In other words, they bring the magic. With militaristic precision they burst into the action — their movements sharp and swift — while brief, stand-alone moments bubble up, seemingly from nowhere, as when the Bug called the spinner whips around in place while drawing her arms up and down. The seven Bugs in the overture have more difficult steps, including the first two who perform big saut de chats, or catlike jumps. But largely, for the children, the dancing in 'Midsummer' is a group experience. 'They're all part of the finale, they're all part of the Scherzo,' Abergel said. 'Everybody gets to dance a lot in 'Midsummer.'' Arm movements — pushing them out like rippling wings — are important for the Bugs; running and sharp footwork, too. 'There are a lot of sauté arabesques and pas de chats, and those are things that Balanchine uses from beginning to end in the training,' Abergel said. 'They're practicing all of those crucial classical steps,' as they also work on moving in and out of formations. When she's casting, though, Abergel is on the lookout for something other than technique. 'Just like every creature in nature, there are different bugs and different energies,' she said. 'This is more about energy and that ability to move quickly and with excitement.' For Abergel, the sweetest moment in the ballet has nothing to do with nailing a tight fifth: It's when the bugs yawn and fall asleep on one another in a pile. 'You don't really need any technique for that,' she said. 'You just need to be in the moment and understand what it's about. I love that they experience that onstage.' The children, wearing dresses or short pants and whimsical headwear designed by the innovative costumer Karinska — there are a dozen designs with individual details on each, which is rare for an ensemble — frame the ballet. After the classical wedding scene in the second act, they return to a darkened forest stage for the finale. Isla Cooley, 12, loves this moment, when the adult dancers leave and 'then, us Bugs are running onstage and flapping our wings,' she said. 'I think it was a supervisor who told me that she thought it was like us kind of crashing the party. Because it's like, Oh, wait! We're here.' Last year Isla was the spinner. This year, she is a pop-up Bug. 'When Oberon motions to us, we pop up, we spin, and then we jump around,' she said. Naomi was the first Bug in the overture last year. For her big jumping moment, she said: 'You have butterflies in your stomach, but you also want to do it super bad. So I was scared, excited and like nervous at the same time. But yeah, I still couldn't wait to do it.' What was Balanchine looking for when he cast children in his ballets? 'Curiosity,' said Carol Aaron Bryan, 74, who trained at the School of American Ballet and danced in 'The Nutcracker' and 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' 'A kind of wonderment — just wondering what this adventure will be.' Bryan was around Balanchine a lot. In 1961 and '62, she performed Clara (as the young girl in 'The Nutcracker' was then known) opposite his Drosselmeier. 'He always did something different in the transition scene, and I never knew what he was going to do,' she said. 'It was always a surprise.' His Drosselmeier would sit near her legs on the sofa where she was meant to be sleeping. 'The whole couch would shake because he'd be fixing that Nutcracker,' she said. 'And I remember this so vividly: He would take the shawl off me and then he would cover me again. Like he was my Drosselmeier, my godfather.' When rehearsals started for 'Midsummer' — the first entirely original full-length ballet Balanchine choreographed in America — she said she felt she had gotten to know him, which 'made it easier for me to react when he asked us for things.' She recalled him working with the students on their runs by taking them to the back of the studio and running along diagonals with them. 'He would really show us,' she said. 'He was so nimble on his feet. It's like his heels never touched the ground. He became a Bug, and he became one of the Fairies. He taught us how to be so light and so quiet.' For Bryan, he was the man with the magic. His ability to enchant lives on in 'Midsummer' — in its glittering array of kids. As Naomi said, 'Without the bugs, the ballet wouldn't be alive.'
Spectator
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Christopher Wheeldon's real gifts lie in abstract dance
Christopher Wheeldon must be one of the most steadily productive and widely popular figures in today's dance world, but I'm yet to be persuaded that he has much gift for narrative. His adaptation of the novel Like Water for Chocolate was a hopeless muddle; his response to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is mere vaudeville; and I'm praying to St Jude that nobody is planning to import his dramatisation of Oscar Wilde's downfall, premièred in Australia last year. But as the elegant craftsman, and sometimes the inspired artist, of more abstract dance, he is without doubt a great talent. The Royal Ballet's programme of four of his shorter pieces showcases his strengths. Let's get the misfire out of the way first – The Two of Us is set to four Joni Mitchell standards, prissily sung live on stage by Julia Fordham (to do her justice, she was struggling against a faulty sound system). Lauren Cuthbertson and Calvin Richardson are wasted as they mooch around in shimmering pyjamas without ever establishing any compelling counterpoint to the implications of the lyrics or the mood of the music: they might as well be extemporising, and there's just not enough interest in the movement they come up with to hold one's interest. But everything else on offer gives much pleasure. Fool's Paradise, first seen at Covent Garden in 2012, is richly melancholy – perhaps subliminally a meditation on how relationships between three people inexorably gravitate into two, but more obviously a beautiful example of Wheeldon's neoclassicism. His aesthetic has been influenced by his long sojourn in America and his choreographic style reflects that of New York City Ballet luminaries such as Jerome Robbins and Justin Peck as much as it does that of his Royal Ballet precursors Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan: sleekly athletic, clean in line, devoid of jerks and twerks, milk and honey for dancers with fluent classical technique.
Wall Street Journal
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
New York City Ballet Spring 2025 Review: A Rewarding Romp Through the Past
New York For only the second time in my 5 1/2 decades attending New York City Ballet's spring seasons at Lincoln Center, the troupe presented no world premieres. Of the 26 ballets in rotation through June 1, only one work—'When We Fell,' by Kyle Abraham—qualifies as a premiere, specifically a stage premiere, since it offers choreography initially shown digitally during the Covid-19 lockdown in April 2021.
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Meet the A-List Ballet Dancers at the Heart of ‘Étoile' — and the Choreographer Who Hired Them
Étoile, Prime video's new ballet dramedy is — like the meaning of its French title — full of star power. Sure, the creators have won Emmys. The actors have, too. But the dancers are what's center stage, and for good reason. Étoile's end credits might as well be a list of the ballet world's most elite: an A-list lineup of names from New York City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Boston Ballet, the Paris Opera and more. More from The Hollywood Reporter For Luke Kirby, 'Étoile' Was a History Lesson 'Étoile' Review: Amy Sherman-Palladino's Amazon Ballet Dramedy Pirouettes Gracefully Before Stumbling in the Final Act 'The Amateur' Star Rachel Brosnahan Insists She Still Feels Like an Amateur 'What I really love is the class, the artful choices,' Robbie Fairchild, a former principal dancer with New York City Ballet and now freelance artist, tells The Hollywood Reporter of the series. Fairchild plays Larry in Étoile — you can spot him rehearsing a duet by Tobias Bell (Gideon Glick) in episode one. Étoile, from Amy Sherman-Palladino and husband Dan Palladino of Gilmore Girls and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (and Bunheads!) fame, follows two ballet companies in New York and Paris that swap their most talented stars in an attempt to boost ticket sales. Luke Kirby and Charlotte Gainsbourg lead the main cast. 'It felt like somebody from Lincoln Center was like, 'This is what you should do the show about,'' Fairchild says. 'It was highbrow. It felt like, relatable highbrow.' So how did the Palladinos pull it off? In part, by choosing a good choreographer — Marguerite Derricks. And, by naming Derricks as a producer. 'Choreographers, we do so much without credit,' Derricks says. 'It's something we're used to doing anyway, but Amy is so dialed into everything. She really embraced me into this project, even before pen went to paper. That was really nice. It doesn't happen very often.' Derricks then pulled it off by hiring all those real dancers — more than 100 of them. 'The biggest thing that made me really interested in doing [the show] was that they really stressed they were truly committed to making it as realistic as possible,' says Brooklyn Mack, an international principal guest artist who plays a dancer in the New York company — he dances Don Quixote with Alicia (Wanting Zhao) in the first episode. 'The casting was tricky,' Derricks says. At both New York and Paris open calls, she saw hundreds of dancers in single days, most of whom didn't have enough serious training to make the cut. 'I realized the dancers we wanted were dancing in companies,' she says. 'I was like, 'We have to go after these dancers that are willing to break their contracts and come and do a TV show.'' For months, Derricks sat in her New York office watching thousands of audition videos, sorting clips, sending requests and fielding emails. Her hard work shines in nearly every frame of Étoile, which sparkles with footage of dancers in company studios and hallways, stretching and chatting and, well, dancing. 'It became like that Madonna documentary where she had the cameras following all the dancers around,' Derricks says. 'The cameras were always there and after a while, we forgot.' 'One of my favorite things in the first episode is when one of the dancers comes in with a bag with a dog in it,' Tiler Peck, a principal dancer at New York City Ballet who plays Eva Cullman, says — Eva is also part Tobias Bell's rehearsal piece in episode one, and she performs Black Swan later in the season. 'That's so us,' Peck says. 'We all bring our dogs to class, then there's somebody that's practicing a lift. People stretch, people talk, people try things. I don't think any of that was choreographed. That's just how dancers hang out.' The credits at the end of each episode play over more b-roll of these scenes. 'I love that Amy and Dan decided to use that footage in the credits,' Derricks says. 'We really wanted to keep it real.' With real dancers also comes the ability to perform real repertoire, and when the time came to decide how to introduce Paris company star Cheyenne Toussaint (Lou de Laâge, with Constance Devernay as dance double), Derricks says Sherman-Palladino requested the balcony pas de deux from Sir Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo & Juliet. MacMillan's 1965 adaptation of Shakespeare's tragedy, set to Sergei Prokofiev's score, is widely revered as one of the most famous works of the 20th century. 'Who wants to touch MacMillan?' Derricks says, laughing. 'It's just so beautiful.' In the final cut of episode one, the dancers perform MacMillan's original choreography, and the show is complete with real costumes and sets from the MacMillan estate. Balletomanes can also look out for choreography from George Balanchine and Christopher Wheeldon, in addition to pieces from Swan Lake, Don Quixote, Giselle and Sylvia. 'I wanted to honor all the ballet greats,' Derricks says. 'I just really wanted to be respectful to this community, I wanted them to see that we were doing a ballet show that was real, it was really going to honor their world.' But gaining access to real-world stuff can be a challenge, as most pieces from the 20th and 21st centuries are protected by choreographers' estates or trusts, many of which have high standards regarding who is allowed to perform the work. 'It wasn't always easy,' Derricks says, and part of the puzzle involved making these esteemed stage ballets fit for the camera. 'I really got to know and become friends with the camera guy, Jim, the steadicam operator,' Peck says. 'It really was a duet. It didn't matter if I hit it perfectly, if he didn't, or vice versa, [it didn't work].' 'It was fun watching the estates watch me protect their work,' Derricks says. 'They were realizing what a film choreographer can bring to a piece.' Dancers also sing the praises of Étoile's on-set experience. 'There were a bunch of camera rehearsals, which were great,' says Unity Phelan, a principal dancer at New York City Ballet who plays Julie — you can spot her dancing with Fairchild in episode one, during the Tobias Bell rehearsal. 'Amy and Dan were super specific with their camera crew about the fact that we are dancers, and we can't repeat things a million times to get the shot.' Phelan has worked on other sets with less understanding crews, where she was asked to repeat complicated dance steps over and over again. 'I was doing fouettes at 4 in the morning,' she says. 'That was a much harder situation. This, they really thought about the dancers and our wellbeing.' Étoile shines, for this reason, with a clear respect for the art form. 'A lot of the company life and conversations that happen [on the show], it's really fun to watch because it feels very real,' Phelan says. 'At one point when I had scenes with Gideon and Luke I was like, 'You guys are doing such a good job that it almost feels like I'm at like my normal job right now.'' Mack compares it to the way he watches procedural shows for a glimpse of worlds different from his own. 'I love The Resident because it has so much realism,' he says. 'My mom's a nurse, and she was like, 'Oh my god, this is the best show I've ever seen because it's really what goes on [at a hospital].' I love that [Étoile] went this route and really committed to bring [ballet] to the forefront.' Of course, all this happens without losing quintessential Palladino humor — dancers and non-dancers alike offer big personalities that bounce off one another with irreverent jokes and fast-delivered dialogue. But the dancers say this is the opposite of being unrealistic. 'The ballet world is quirky,' Fairchild says. 'It's really quirky. There's a bunch of weirdos in a building wearing tutus and standing on their tippy toes. They captured that and they respected it at the same time.' *** All eight episodes of Etoile season one are now available on Prime Video. Read THR's interview with Luke Kirby. *** Best of The Hollywood Reporter 22 of the Most Shocking Character Deaths in Television History A 'Star Wars' Timeline: All the Movies and TV Shows in the Franchise 'Yellowstone' and the Sprawling Dutton Family Tree, Explained
