Today is George Balanchine’s birthday. Thank you to Toni Bentley for reminding me with her sweet email and link to the beautiful video below:
New York City Ballet’s Tribute To Nureyev and New Lee Ballet
Last Thursday (Balanchine’s birthday), New York City Ballet celebrated with a tribute to Nureyev and the premiere of a ballet, Lifecasting by young choreographer Douglass Lee.
The evening began with two films of Nureyev, the first of him dancing on PBS’s The Bell Telephone Hour (do wish they still had that show!) with Maria Tallchief in the pas de deux of August Bournonville’s Flower Festival in Genzano. After the little film tribute, out came Kathryn Morgan and Allen Peiffer who danced just that. I really get so much out of seeing the same thing danced twice back to back — I love it when Christopher Wheeldon will do that at Morphoses or when City Ballet does it with a tribute to Robbins, or, like here, Nureyev — and will show a clip of someone rehearsing a dance, and then the dancers come out and do it for real. You get different artistic versions of the same movement patterns, maybe a less polished then more polished version, you kind of remember the movement and see it through the dancers’ eyes as s/he struggles to perfect the same set of steps.
Anyway, interestingly, when I first saw these dancers doing the same steps, I thought, how much would I NOT want to be poor Allen Peiffer right now! To be compared to Nureyev like that!
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