Word: ballets
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Drop by Lincoln Center whenever a work by Jerome Robbins is on the program at the New York City Ballet, and chances are you'll see a 26-year-old Brit with a long neck and a big, bright smile. N.Y.C.B. soloist Christopher Wheeldon is engaging and reliable, and he knows how to make the most of a Robbins role. But last week he swapped his tights for a business suit to take a bow with 62 children from the School of American Ballet as 2,000 dancegoers yelled their heads off. The occasion was the premiere...
That's evident in Scenes de Ballet, set to the delectable score by Igor Stravinsky. Ian Falconer's set depicts a ballet classroom bisected by a barre and an imaginary mirror; the cast is similarly divided into "real" dancers and their "reflections." At one point, a child gazes into the mirror and her image vanishes, replaced by two teenagers who dance together rapturously as she looks on, spellbound...
Dracula, despite its faults, is worth the trip to the Wang. Its a spectacle with more glitz than substance, but when it comes down to it, Dracula is an American ballet. And after all, Americans practically invented glitz...
Although the ballet is rife with the elaborate costumes, sets and special effects we have come to expect with Disneyesque productions, the inherent integrity of the dancing, Liszt's music and the gothic tale itself do not let the ballet become a sticky-sweet morality tale in the style of Beauty and the Beast. It is an odd mixture, to be sure--appealing more to those accustomed to home-videos of rhythmically-inclined crustaceans than those with box seats already lined up for next year's Firebird. And while Dracula proves to be an exciting show, it is just that...
...ballet opens in Dracula's crypt, where no less than 18 brides begin a hypnotic dance with their arms outstretched in positions of lifeless submission. The brides are attired in gauzy white gowns with pale blond wigs, their bodies an unnatural shade of white. The highlight of the first act is when the brides fly across the stage apparently effortlessly, a stunt which garnered audible gasps from those sitting around me. But I found the cleverest moment of the ballet to be when the brides ran across the stage, holding the top layer of their gowns up like...