Tag: Faycal Karoui

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Last Week at New York City Ballet

 

Last week I went to two performances of NYCB – opening night and Thursday night’s “See the Music” program – and to two of the free all-day Balanchine events on Saturday. First, I’ll talk about the last two since I found them so informative. The free studio talk on Saturday afternoon – Balanchine’s birthday – was moderated by Sean Lavery (former NYCB principal dancer, now ballet master), and included Sterling Hyltin (in Paul Kolnik photo above with Robert Fairchild), Chase Finlay, and Jenifer Ringer. Lavery asked the dancers to talk about their first Balanchine ballets, their favorites, and what drew them to NYCB. Hyltin named as her favorite Duo Concertant (pictured above) which I’d just seen her dance on opening night. She said she liked the syncopated movement, the he goes and I go kind of back and forth movement conversation with her partner, and with the musicians. I really liked it too. The violinist and pianist are onstage (the music is Stravinsky), and I like the interaction between the dancers and the musicians, and between the two dancers, and I like the sharp, angular movement. She seemed particularly animated when I saw it. I love Robert Fairchild and think he’s such a sharp, masculine mover with a presence that commands your attention without meaning to – he kind of reminds me of a less cocky Ethan Stiefel – but she seemed so happy to be dancing this piece that she stood out to me more. It was nice to hear her talk about it.

But what I really loved was the School of American Ballet class taught by Peter Martins. He interacted cutely with the students, particularly “Cyrus,” (at least I think that was his name…) a tall, long-limbed young man who I think will soon be in the company. Cyrus didn’t always do everything perfectly (at least in Martins’s eyes) but he had a charming presence and a great leading-man physique and you can tell he works hard.

Martins had the class demonstrate ballet basics – beginning with the five positions, and they showed us a perfect fifth position (with the toes of the front foot touching the heel of the other and vice versa). More interestingly, he had the class show us the difference between a Balanchine hand and a classical ballet hand. I’d always noticed there was a difference but couldn’t figure it out exactly. God gave us five fingers, Balanchine had said, so we shouldn’t hide two of them. The Balanchine hand shows all five fingers, the classical ballet one only three (with the ring finger and pinky held so that they are hidden from view behind the middle finger).

Martins also had the students show us how Balanchine’s fourth position differed from others’. In Balanchine’s the back leg is straight; in all others’ the back leg is bent. Martins didn’t go into any functional explanation for this – just said “here, we think it looks better.” But I thought about it and thought, wow, it must be hard to take off in a jump for example with the back leg straight. And then I realized that’s partly why Balanchine’s choreography always looks so fluid, like one step leading right into another, without a lot of stopping to build up to a big athletic feat – a big jump or series of turns. Other companies – like the Russians, like the Bolshoi – are all about preparing so that you can do something astounding. So they’re all about the building up.

This was mentioned in the studio talk as well. Lavery also talked about how fluid Balanchine’s movement was, and how, for example, in a lift, a guy would pick up a girl, then take two steps, and put her down rather than walk all over stage with her hoisted above his head. Balanchine wanted her to come up, then down right again, because that was more fluid, rather than have her head bobbing around up there while the guy was running all around with her.

Martins also demonstrated the bows. At City Ballet, he said, we just do them as such, and the girls did a little curtsy with the back leg slightly bent, without going down on one knee. Making fun of the dramatic Swan Lake bows, Martins went all the way down on one knee, exclaiming, “Yes, yes, I know I’m good!!!” while putting his head down, forehead nearly touching the floor, and raising his arms up in back of him like wings, fingers pointed toward the ceiling. It was hilarious.

Anyway, here are a couple more photos of opening night:

 

Above: Ashley Bouder in Valse-Fantaisie, and below, the cast, including Andrew Veyette, in the same (all photos by Paul Kolnik)

 

I liked Balanchine’s Valse-Fantaisie (Veyette replaced Joaquin DeLuz – but don’t know why because DeLuz danced Concerto DSCH two nights later) but I really loved the first of the evening, Walpurgisnacht Ballet. I’d never seen Walpurgisnacht before and it’s funny but I always seem to love the Balanchine ballets that are the least often performed. This was really beautiful. It’s from Gounod’s Faust, and features a group of women (and only one man – here Charles Askegard) in deep red dresses, their hair down in the second half as the music increases in tempo so that there’s almost kind of a hedonistic madness in the mood – and the footwork is so intensely complicated and fast fast fast. Wendy Whelan even made a tiny little flub, which I’ve never seen her do before. Crazy! And breathtaking!

And the evening ended with The Four Temperaments. I’ve said before and I’ll complain again that I still don’t understand why everyone goes on about how brilliant this one is. To me, there are supposed to be four temperaments, and the ballet is divided accordingly into four variations after the theme: melancholic, sanguinic, phlegmatic, and choleric. But they all seem to be the same to me. The dance seems one-note throughout so that after the first variation, I’m waiting for it to end. I’ll keep seeing it though, perhaps performed by a variety of companies if I have the chance, and will keep looking for the nuances…

“See the Music” night opened with Faycal Karoui’s discussion of Mozartiana, Tchaikovsky’s homage to / riff on Mozart, which made me appreciate Tchaikovsky even more. Then that piece was danced – by Maria Kowroski, Daniel Ulbricht, and Tyler Angle. Tyler stood out to me. As always, he dances with so much meaning, so much intention, and so much expansiveness. He’s a really beautiful dancer.

Then came Ratmansky’s Concerto DSCH, danced by Wendy Whelan, Ashley Bouder, Joaquin DeLuz, Andrew Veyette (replacing this time Gonzalo Garcia), and Benjamin Millepied. Oh, Natalie Portman was there, albeit late – she came in with a friend after Karoui’s lecture and right before Mozartiana was performed. Then, she left right after Concerto DSCH, after Millepied was done performing, and before the last piece. I thought it was a shame she missed Sara Mearns in the last dance, but a Twitter friend said she had a movie premiere that night, so I guess she needed to leave early for that.

Anyway, as usual, Millepied did not stand out to me, and I couldn’t stop thinking of seeing Tyler Angle in that role before and the way he lunges romantically toward the main girl, making it clear how much he yearns for her. Millepied’s knees nearly touch the ground in his deep steps toward her and it just looks like a dance step, not like anything evoking a specific emotion. As always I loved Bouder and DeLuz in the fast, playfully firtatious three-some part. I missed Garcia – where is he? I hope not injured! – but thought Veyette did a fine job in his stead.

And the evening ended brilliantly with Sara Mearns and Charles Askegard dancing the ballet leads in Balanchine’s Cortege Hongrois, while Rebecca Krohn and Sean Suozzi just as brilliantly danced the folksy Hungarian leads. I really love that dance and it made me all the more eager to see Mearns in Swan Lake!

On both nights, I went with my friend, author Maria Mutsuki Mockett. She writes an author blog but has been attending the ballet much more frequently and is now blogging a lot about ballet as well. She’s an excellent writer, so please check out her blog!

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Benjamin Millepied’s “Plainspoken”

Last Thursday was NYCB’s Fall gala, during which they presented the New York City premiere of Benjamin Millepied’s Plainspoken (photo at left, of Teresa Reichlen and Sebastien Marcovici, by Paul Kolnik; the ballet originally premiered in Wyoming this August), along with Robbins’ fabulous homage to Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth, I’m Old Fashioned, and Balanchine’s Tarantella and Western Symphony.

The evening began with the orchestra pit rising and the always lively Faycal Karoui leading the orchestra in a rendition of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide Overture. I love that movable orchestra pit – best thing, in my opinion, about the recent renovations to the Koch Theater.

I was hoping there would be introductions and short speeches, including one by Sarah Jessica Parker, who served as honorary chair for the after-performance party. But no such luck – I guess because it wasn’t the beginning of the season, like galas usually are. I didn’t even get to see Parker come down the red carpet, there were so many paparazzi blocking my view. I certainly heard her though – or, rather, the paparazzi, as they screamed her name like she was the Messiah. I didn’t recognize anyone else. Lots of good-looking people perfectly coiffed and dressed in black tie but no one I recognized. I didn’t see Natalie Portman, though I heard she was there. I never recognize famous people, though. I’m really bad that way.

Anyway, I’m Old Fashioned was, as always, enjoyable, albeit too long. No dance-maker needed an editor more than Jerome Robbins in my opinion- and Tyler Angle stood out to me in his solos and duets with Maria Kowroski. But my favorite part of the evening was the second half of the post-intermission, when Ashley Bouder and Daniel Ulbrich just nailed Balanchine’s super fast-paced bravura-heavy duet, Tarantella (Ulbrich smacked the tambourine so hard one of the little metal things came flying off) and then Sara Mearns just astounded me in the last section of Western Symphony. How in the world does she stand on pointe, on her own unsupported by a male dancer, and lift her other leg in the air into a perfect split, into practically a six o’clock penchee? How how how? She and Charles Askegard really put on a show as tart-y saloon dancer and cowboy. She is really just unbelievable.

Okay, so onto Plainspoken. Well, sometimes I like Millepied, and sometimes the work just falls a bit flat to me. I didn’t much care for this one, though I’ve liked his last several ballets for ABT and NYCB. This was very abstract, no story that I could find, and I’m just not a fan of purely abstract ballets that I can’t find any story in whatsoever. It was a ballet for four couples: Sterling Hyltin and Tyler Angle, Teresa Reichlen and Amar Ramasar, Jennie Somogyi and Sebastien Marcovici, and Janie Taylor and Jared Angle (the last were generally my and my friend’s favorite pair – I think because Janie always brings something dark to her roles, there’s always something beneath the surface with her even if you can’t put your finger on what it is). The couples sometimes changed partners though, and there would be different-sized groupings.

The music was by Pulitzer prize-winning composer David Lang – it was a commissioned score – but to me the music here wasn’t nearly as rich as, for example, that used by Morphoses recently. This was mainly strings and piano and each section seemed emotionally the same. There didn’t seem to be a lot of contrast between the movements or a build-up toward the end. The sections were each differently lit – by a different color and a background curtain that would rise and lower to reveal more or less light than the section before. But the set was nothing very dramatic and the different colors didn’t, for me at least, evoke a different mood.

Movement-wise, there seemed to be a swimming theme. At various points the dancers would sit on the floor and make motions evocative of swimming – sweeping arms through the air, paddling legs – backward, then forward, then all dancers lying on their backs with their feet in the air like a synchronized swim team. At other points, the women would be carried somewhat Chaconne-like across the stage. I remember a slide characterizing Janie’s section, and she made it seem as if she was being taken by the men who slid her, against her will, across the floor.

I also have in my notes that the movement toward the beginning, in the first section, was a combination of robotic and more casual walks, kind of like the ensemble walking across the back of the stage in the second part of Robbins’s Glass Pieces. This kind of movement was interspersed with the swimming-like motions. In later sections, dancers seemed to run in place.

Oh, and during Janie’s section, there was a point where the men all picked her up and hoisted her high above them, like in MacMillan’s Manon or the Balanchine ballet where the woman is carried around the whole time by a group of men and the lone man on the floor keeps reaching up for her (sorry, can never remember the name of that ballet). My friend loved this part, and I did as well, but couldn’t really figure out how it played into the rest of that section.

In general, my first impressions of this ballet were: some interesting movement reminiscent of other ballets that didn’t seem to add up to much and didn’t really make me feel anything.

At the end, Millepied, Lang and the costume designer (Karen Young) and lighting designer (Penny Jacobus) took the stage for a bow. The applause seemed more polite than hearty (in contrast to the crazy applause Wheeldon always gets!), but that could just be me projecting my own thoughts onto everyone else.

What about you guys? I saw some mentions on Facebook of people liking it. Who else saw it and what did you think?

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Janie Taylor Debuts in Millepied’s “Why Am I Not Where You Are” Etc.

I’ve been remiss in my New York City Ballet posts! Last week I saw two programs: one featuring three dances to three different violin concertos – Peter Martins’s Barber Violin Concerto, Robbins’ Opus 19 / The Dreamer, and Balanchine’s Stravinsky Violin Concerto. And the other program was another in the “See the Music” series but was also dedicated to Santiago Calatrava, who designed sets for all three of the ballets performed – Benjamin Millepied’s Why Am I Not Where You Are (pictured above, photo by Paul Kolnik), Christopher Wheeldon’s Estancia (pictured below, photo also by Kolnik), and Mauro Bigonzetti’s Luce Nascosta, all of which premiered last season and which I wrote about here, here, and here.

Calatrava was in the theater, and after encouragement by Peter Martins, he rose and took a bow.

Then, as with the first “See the Music” program, before the performance began, the orchestra pit rose and conductor Faycal Karoui gave a humorous little explanation of various parts of the Thierry Escaich score from Millepied’s Why, the first ballet performed.

These explanations are really interesting to me, I have to say. I only took one classical music class in college and now wish I’d taken more. Karoui talked about how there were four main parts to the score: a waltz, a tango, a disco, and a final climactic part, and he talked about the differences in tempo between them, and between them and a typical waltz, tango, etc.. He also talked about how the ballet has a central male character (danced very well by Sean Suozzi – in top picture, being carried by the group of men), and how you can hear that central character’s theme – or voice – throughout each section of the music. But the voice changes with each section: at first, he’s shy and mysterious (and his voice in the first section is portrayed by a violin solo), then as the orchestra grows sharper and stronger in the second, tango, section, so did the character, etc.

When we got to the “disco” section (it sounded nothing like disco to me but just slightly more mechanical and percussive than the preceding sections), Karoui really began rocking out as he led the orchestra. It was like he was actually dancing in a disco, and I nearly cracked up. I’m not sure if that’s what he normally does down in that pit – if he regularly starts to embody the music literally like that, or if he was just being a goof for the audience. He didn’t seem to be hamming it up at that point, though – oddly – so who knows. Anyway, he is very entertaining and I find his musical explanations very educational as well. What more can you ask than to be both entertained and educated, right?

Anyway, Janie Taylor debuted in the Millepied. She was supposed to have debuted when the ballet did last season but she was out with injury and so Kathryn Morgan had filled in. Character-wise I thought she played it the same as Morgan. Except with Morgan it seemed to have a West Side Story feel to it; with Janie it was darker and more La Valse-like. Both were tragic, but in a different way; Kathryn’s character seemed more innocent. Anyway, this was my second time seeing the ballet and it grew on me. It’s very dramatic, not a dull moment in the whole thing, and you’re really on the edge of your seat, both because of the intensity of the music – maintained throughout each section – and the dramatic story of the poor innocent guy who’s drawn into another world by his enchantment by this ethereal creature, only to get trapped and ultimately destroyed, along with her.

To me, Sara Mearns and Amar Ramasar, with their bravura roles, largely stole the show – I think I remember thinking the same last time. She with those crazy fast chaine turns all around stage that almost make you sickly dizzy, and he with his virtuosic leap sequence – they are kind of the sinister characters, seducing Suozzi but also the audience.

Then came Estancia, and it was my first time seeing Ana Sophia Scheller and Adrian Danchig-Waring (pictured above) in the leads. I’m not a huge fan of this ballet – well, I like the ensemble sections, particularly the dancing and taming of the “horses” – but I nearly fall asleep during the middle, romance part, where city boy wins country girl over. I think it’s just the choreography in that middle section (that I found relatively bland) that slows it down – along with the music – but I liked Scheller and Danchig-Waring just as much as the first pair of leads – Tiler Peck and Tyler Angle. In fact, they seemed to fit the roles a bit more. Scheller reminded me of the main character of Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo and there was something more sweetly, playfully tomboyish about her look than Peck’s. And Danchig-Waring perfectly suited the city boy trying to woo her. He acted his part very well. And his movement is always very sharp. Andrew Veyette and Georgina Pazcoquin as the horses who are eventually tamed, were fabulously entertaining.

And lastly was Bigonzetti’s Luce Nascosta (picture at left by Kolnik), which I’ve seen now three times and which I like but think is too long. I missed seeing Craig Hall in the middle section that seems to be softer and looser than the other sections, where the movement is more marked by those extreme shapes with the flexed hands, splayed fingers, and angular balances and slides on pointe. Hall seems to have the ability to move in a more undulating, kind of serpentine way than most of the others and it seems to me to suit that middle section well.

In the previous program, I loved Megan Fairchild again as the “modern” dancer in Barber Violin Concerto, and, as always, Gonzalo Garcia as “the dreamer” in Robbins’ Opus 19!

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New York City Ballet’s First “See the Music” Program

Friday night, my friends Hsien and Alyssa came with me to see the first program in NYCB’s “See the Music” series. First, we met for drinks on the promenade, which, as I mentioned, they’d opened an hour before showtime for the first week of this fall season. We watched members of the orchestra play some soft jazz music, which some patrons were dancing to. I know Hsien from my ballroom dancing days and we had to laugh because some of that music sounded straight out of Blackpool! (Blackpool’s one of the only – perhaps THE only – ballroom dance competition with live music.) (Above are a couple of my pictures of the promenade, about an hour before the performance, with people beginning to gather. My iPhone seems to take better photos outside…)

The two ballets performed were Ratmansky’s Namouna: A Grand Divertissement, which premiered last season, and Jerome Robbins’ The Four Seasons, which served for the first week of this first fall season as a tribute to fall.

Before the performance, Peter Martins came out and introduced the new series, explaining that it was inspired by Balanchine’s highly musical approach to dance, his belief that dance is music made visual, summarized by his words, “see the music, hear the dance.” Then the newly movable orchestra pit rose (as I knew it would!), and up came conductor Faycal Karoui with his crew, to explain a few things about Eduaord Lalo’s Namouna score. No one could give these talks but Karoui. He is hilarious, such a character!

 

Photo of Karoui by Paul Kolnik, taken from The Faster Times.

Karoui joked, in his thick French accent, that the music is very French, because of its … charm of course. Okay, then he became serious. The Lalo score is too long, of course, to talk about all of it, but Karoui focused on a few sections. One of the sections, he explained is characterized by its transparency of orchestration, meaning the harmonies don’t always  behave the way you expect them to; they are a surprise. He talked about how the beginning of the score had a nautical theme, and it opened with a sound like waves, but more German waves than French, he said, as the opening crescendo sounded more like Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. He talked about the conversation between the harps and the strings, how Lalo plays with flexibility inside the tempos by following a quick tempo with a slower one, and he showed how Ratmansky had the dancers visualize part of that tempo by having the corps women at one point use cymbals onstage. After Karoui did a little dance himself while clapping the cymbals, he and Martins had the audience clap where the cymbals should be played to get us to internalize that rhythm a bit.

Karoui spoke at length about one of my favorite scenes in the ballet, where a group of smokers (led by Jenifer Ringer) really kind of tantalize the poor male lead, blowing smoke right into his yearning little face. It’s called “The Cigarette Waltz” believe it or not, and Karoui showed how the music really teases and tantalizes you into desperately wanting a cigarette, just like Ringer and her friends tantalize the poor sailor into wanting one of them. “Oooh, I really want one now,” Karoui cried after the orchestra demonstrated part of that waltz.

I liked Namouna much much better on seeing it a second time. I wrote about it earlier here (also, read Marina Harss’s fabulously detailed and in-depth description in Faster Times). It seemed less long this time, and each of the the parts seemed entertaining and compelling, each having its own theme and it own little storyline, however abstract the whole was. Maybe it was because of Karoui’s brief humorous explanations of the music, or maybe it’s just Ratmansky, because I always feel this way with his work – that nothing strikes me that much on first viewing, but that the more I see each ballet of his, the more I see in it, and the more entrancing I begin to find it.

That ballet was all the same, except this time Tyler Angle took over for Robert Fairchild as the main sailor guy. I’m told Robert is out for the moment with an injury. I loved Robert, but I really liked Tyler as well. Robert is so boyishly charming like Jose Carreno, and his dancing is more sharp and precise, hitting every count with spectacular flair and pizzaz, whereas Tyler’s more Romantic with his expression, with stretching port de bras and longing lunges, and he really draws out the music. They are such different dancers and it’s always nice to see another’s interpretation.

The next “See the Music” program will be this Sunday’s matinee.

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New York City Ballet’s First Fall Season Opening Night

 

 

Tuesday night, New York City Ballet opened its very first fall season with performances of Balanchine’s Serenade, Peter Martins’s Grazioso, and Jerome Robbins’s The Four Seasons. First, before the performance began, Peter Martins came out and introduced each of the principal dancers, who came out onstage one by one, and said this season would be a celebration of them. Tiler Peck in particular was wearing this really gorgeous silky fuchsia dress. Martins said all principals were there except for Benjamin Millepied, who was doing something movie-related “en France,” he said with a funny faux Euro accent. Everyone laughed and gave the dancers a huge round of applause. The house was packed and it was clear how thrilled the company’s many fans are with there being a fall season this year. Martins made fun of himself for being so into toasts and said that during intermission, we’d all be given be given free champagne to toast the principals. Which we were – very fun!

The part of the performance I was mainly looking forward to was Janie Taylor’s debut in Serenade (above headshot and Serenade photo by Paul Kolnik) as the main ballerina. As usual with her, she completely made the ballet her own. I thought the ballet had a somewhat dark element with her, that I’ve never seen before. When she first ran out onstage, late for class, instead of looking like she was all frantic about being late because she’d been held up by a boy, it looked like she was running from something – from him. That man was Charles Askegard and when he danced the middle waltz part with her, the huge size difference between them added to the sense of foreboding, that she was fragile, he was pushing her around, and she’d eventually be hurt by him. At certain parts, it was literally like he was pulling her along. When he lifted her and she raised her legs in a split, it looked almost like she was trying to get away from him. Sara Mearns was the angel and Ask La Cour was the man who I call “blind justice” who take care of Taylor when she falls, and it was interesting how much the two male leads and two female leads looked alike. I almost got Taylor and Mearns mixed up at parts, thinking they were taking on the other’s role. And the end when the men raise Taylor up like pallbearers and she is carried off by them, arching her back, arms outstretched  – so hauntingly beautiful. It reminded me a bit of Balanchine’s La Valse.

I was also looking forward to Martins’s Grazioso, in which three handsome men – Gonzalo Garcia, Andrew Veyette and Daniel Ulbrich – vie for Ashley Bouder’s attention with their bravura moves. I don’t think this ballet has been performed since it premiered a few seasons ago. And I loved it all over again. I love how each guy has his own personality – Garcia is the romantic, Veyette is the manly man one, and Ulbrich is the one with all the high jumping tricks. And Bouder really played the tart, looking at each of them up and down at points kind of lasciviously, really trying to choose. The guy next to me was really giggly over it.

And the evening ended with Robbins’ The Four Seasons, which itself ends with a lovely tribute to fall.

This whole season the Koch theater will open an hour early. The promenade overlooking Lincoln Center Plaza will be open for cocktails, the gift shop will be open, and, for the rest of this opening week, there will also be live jazz performed by the NYCB Orchestra one hour before performance time. They have the promenade and mezzanine area done up nicely, with big plush chairs. Also taking place the rest of this week will be a “meet the artists” session whereby, beginning at 6:45 p.m. in the first ring of the auditorium, the principals dancers will be available to chat with ticket holders. There’s also a photo exhibition of the dancers by photographer HenryLeutwyler on display in the theater throughout the season.

Tomorrow night will be the first of seven “See the Music” performances which will provide a look inside NYCB’s 62-piece orchestra. At the beginning of each performance, Peter Martins and musical director Faycal Karoui will briefly discuss the program’s music, followed by the orchestra performing an excerpt of one of the ballet scores. The subject of tomorrow night’s discussion will be Eduoard Lalo’s score for Ratmansky’s Namouna: A Grand Divertissement, which premiered last season. Additional “See the Music” programs are Sept. 26 matinee, January 20, Feb. 1, Feb. 19 matinee, May 25 and June 11.

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SARA MEARNS’ MOVING ODETTE, A TRIBUTE TO DARCI KISTLER, AND NEW ADAM HENDRICKSON BALLET

 

Photo of Sara Mearns in Swan Lake, by Paul Kolnik, taken from NY Times.

Last week was the first time I’d seen Peter Martins’ version of Swan Lake. Overall, I wasn’t in love with the production, but I was in love with the dancing, particularly Sara Mearns’ interpretation of Odette, which nearly moved me to tears, which just hardly ever happens with Swan Lake. She is the Veronika Part of New York City Ballet to me and I just love her. She inhabits whatever character she’s dancing with her entire being and she takes you to that place with her; she really creates another universe and she puts you right there and won’t let you leave it! I think here what I loved was that she humanized her Odette. So many ballerinas will focus on getting the fluttering foot just right, waving their arms about with just the proper fluidity that they look like actual wings, and of course totally nailing the chaines and fouettes in the second act. They make the White Swan all about the styling and the Black Swan all about the athletics. And they forget about the story.

But with Mearns — just the way she would wrap Prince Siegfried’s arms around her body, the way she’d nearly dive into an arabesque letting him catch her before turning her, or fall nearly to the floor and arch her back, wrapping herself around his kneeling knee — everything was about the tragic story, about Odette’s loving the prince and longing for him and her need for him, and then his inability to fulfill that need. I’ve honestly never been so moved before, and when she bourreed away from him at the end (there are no suicide swan dives into the lake here), leaving him, it just left me with such a emptiness. I couldn’t stop thinking about that — about her wrapping his arms around her in the pas de deux and then her sorrowful bourrees away from him at the end — for days; I still can’t get over it. I think those images will always be in my mind when I think of this ballet.

And she just had so much stage presence. Sometimes when all the swans are onstage together, I’ll lose Odette, but not with Mearns. I think that may partly be because she has a broad face, allowing her expressions to be more noticeable to the entire house. But of course she makes those expressions that not everyone does — her face, her body, she is always fully immersed in the role.

And Jared Angle was the absolute perfect partner. You can tell he’s a very strong guy and a very solid partner who’s easy to get along with. Because she’d really really throw herself into those arabesques and he’d catch her and she was so off her center of balance — she had to be in order to show the passion and emotion, and the full, expressive line – and he’d promenade her like that, and it was so incredible because you could tell he spent the better part of the ballet supporting a lot of her body weight.

And he acted it well too, and did perfectly on his solos. Very impressive performance by him!

The other cast I saw was on opening night with Maria Kowroski in the lead and Stephen Hanna making his debut as Siegfried. Hanna was very good — he’s a strong guy too, and that night, he performed a major save! Toward the beginning Kowroski went to jump into his arms, on her way into a shoulder-high lift, and she slipped before she ever got to him. He somehow reached out and caught her anyway, and took her up into that lift beautifully. The whole audience went “ahhhhhh”! I think it threw Kowroski a bit though because she seemed nervous and a bit shaky throughout the rest of the ballet. She might also have been a bit anxious because Hanna was debuting in the role, so they obviously hadn’t performed it together yet. At intermission, someone mentioned she might have been less nervous dancing with her usual Charles Askegard. Maybe that’s true. I thought Hanna did a very good job overall.

But I’m not in love with the production. Like Martins’ Romeo + Juliet, the sets are very modern, and the costumes for Siegfried and Benno and his friends are bright, color-coded, and basic with minimal embellishments. But the sets are the worst. In the beginning, you can’t even tell they’re in a palace. In the second act, the sets are not only minimal, but what’s there is so incredibly modern, just a few brown and beige slashes on some backboards. And yet, the people are dressed in Elizabethan costumes. Either set it in modern times completely or go with the historical thing, but don’t do half and half?…

And the production just moves way too fast, in my opinion. This worked for Sleeping Beauty (the paring down of all the miming and the boring court dances, in favor of getting right to the point and to those gorgeous variations), but it didn’t work here because there’s too much story up front missing. We see all these people dancing — we don’t know they’re in a palace, so we just see them all dance, and next thing we know, Siegfried’s all bouncing around with a bow and arrow. Then he runs offstage and a moment later, on comes Odette. Then Siegfried runs back out and they do a pas de deux, and after that’s over, Odette runs one way, Siegfried runs the other, and on come the swan ensemble. And — and maybe this is conductor Karoui’s doing — but you don’t even realize Odette’s run away from Siegfried because she’s afraid of Von Rothbart, and that now Siegfried is running around madly trying to find her. Instead, it just looks like a bunch of running. There should be pauses so that you know exactly what’s happening and why– the pacing is way way too fast. I never really did see Siegfried fall for her. I first realized there was something between them when Mearns’ Odette wrapped Siegfried’s arms around her in the White Swan pdd.

The other thing is the ending, which I both like and don’t like. In this ending, there is no suicide with the two lovers  ending up together in eternity. Instead, since Siegfried has betrayed Odette with Odile, they can’t be together. The problem is that Martins still has Von Rothbart die — he melts into a puddle and dies once he realizes their love is undying and real. But then, if he dies, the spell should be broken and Odette can resume human form. So, the ending then loses its mysticism and becomes a human ending — Odette leaves him because he’s betrayed her, and even though he’s horribly sorry, the damage is done and can’t be undone. So, basically she just can’t forgive him. But why not? It doesn’t really have the resonance to me that it should. I think Martins should just not have Von Rothbart die. That way the lovers can’t be together because of Siegfried’s betrayal. But she still loves him, so that when she bourrees away from him, letting go of him little by little, her arms still reaching out toward him as she disappears into the wings, it just makes you want to bawl your eyes out the same way as the Giselle ending.

One other thing: Martins has some children dance in the beginning courtly scene, which I love. It’s very Balanchine to put the children in, and they were very sweet. And I could tell the people around me thought the same.

Oh and one final other thing: there’s no real dancing for Von Rothbart — it’s really just a character part. But I missed the seductive Marcelo making all the women swoon with his sexy jumps, and then tossing his Odile all about!

 

Anyway — sorry, I’m behind on blogging and have to blog about these things all together — but earlier in the week, I attended a daytime tribute to retiring Balanchine ballerina Darci Kistler (above photo from the front of the program). She danced the Preghiera passage from Mozartiana beautifully, with some children from School of American Ballet, then the White Swan pas de deux with Jared Angle. And then Kathryn Morgan danced the Sleeping Beauty wedding pas de deux with Tyler Angle, which was sheer perfection. They also showed some excerpts of interviews with Kistler from a 1989 documentary, Dancing For Mr. B, and there was a short panel discussion where Bob Craft from the NYCB Board interviewed her. Later, the two were joined by Peter Martins, Philip Neal (who seems very polite and well-mannered), and the hilarious Albert Evans, who you can tell is the type of guy who puts everyone at ease. He got up there and immediately started reminiscing about a blue sweater Darci’d wear to rehearsals all the time and how much he wanted it (she ended up saying he could have it!) and some rather amusing (in retrospect) goof-ups they had together, and she just really burst into genuine laughter.

Oh and at the beginning, Kathryn Morgan presented Kaitlyn Gilliland with the 2010 Janice Levin Award (Morgan was the 2009 recipient). Both gave little speeches, and Gilliland (who seems like a natural speaker) prefaced hers by pronouncing Kathryn’s recent Sleeping Beauty debut “historical,” which nearly brought tears to my eyes. Can’t think of a more apt description!

And finally, earlier last week, I saw the debut of a new ballet by corps member Adam Hendrickson. It was presented in a small downstairs auditorium at Carnegie Hall and was part of a program featuring newly discovered Prokofiev music performed by students and faculty of Yale’s School of Music. Hendrickson’s ballet was set to his Music For Athletic Exercises, and it was fast, flirty, and fun. It was performed by three dancers — Matthew Renko (who is really a stand-out dancer — I kept wondering why he wasn’t with a major ballet company, and then realized later in the week he’s a corps member at NYCB), Elysia Dawn, and Colby Damon and one pianist — Boris Berman — and Hendrickson’s original, clever choreography had elements of Ratmansky’s Concerto DSCH as well as Jerome Robbins. At one point, Dawn’s feet are moving so fast and furiously, and the pianist just keeps at it and won’t let up, and she kind of stops and shoots him a look. It reminded me of Robbins’ Suite of Dances — it was cute and the crowd loved the joke. This is the second work I’ve seen of Hendrickson’s and I found both to be engaging and memorable. I think he may have a real future as a choreographer. Anyway, here is Philip’s account of the evening, and here is an article on the music.