Word: ballets
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When the curtain rises on Jerome Robbins' new ballet, Variations on I'm Old Fashioned, the audience sees a movie screen. A four-minute film clip from You Were Never Lovelier (1942) shows Fred Astaire dancing with the breathtakingly lovely Rita Hayworth, then 24. They start off slowly, pick up momentum, then get rambunctious, in an elegant way. Passing through the French doors at the end of the sequence, they even bump shoulders briefly before gliding off into one of the many mansions reserved for the gods of dance...
...this be topped? No. Added to? Taken apart for demonstration? Spoofed? Hardly. But here is Jerome Robbins, an eminent choreographer and veteran theatrical wizard, presenting it all as a 35-minute classical ballet complete with toe shoes. In any serious sense he does not succeed. New York City Ballet, alas, does not have any girls as sexy as Rita, nor any boys who even set one thinking of Fred. The secret formula for the chemistry of Astaire's ballroom duets remains intact. Despite all this, Robbins, shrewd old romantic that he is, has come up with a diverting piece...
This is the third year of his tenure at A.B.T, which is currently playing an ambitious eleven-week season at New York City's Metropolitan Opera House. His initial goal was to create a strong, youthful corps de ballet and to lessen A.B.T.'s chronic reliance on international stars. The corps now is an impeccably disciplined instrument, but the members are so fresh in their almost votive commitment that their precision never suggests a drill team. At the start of his first season, Baryshnikov also picked out a few youthful dancers and virtually pushed them out onstage...
...solo instruments, the brilliant Gregory as the violin, the mellower Van Hamel as the viola and surrounds them with a corps tracing patterns and recombining in gentle, eloquent classical phrases. Designer Theoni V. Aldredge has fashioned what must be the most beautiful tutus in years, and when the ballet fills the stage it becomes a superplum paradise. Symphonie Concertante is the kind of sturdy piece that ballet troupes survive on and that Balanchine provided as effortlessly as a man sowing a garden...
...company also has a fine new staging of Bournonville's La Sylphide by Erik Bruhn, who once danced the role of James eloquently and who is now artistic director of the National Ballet of Canada. As James, Bujones uses his particular aggressive variation on the Bournonville style effectively, and he is nicely complemented by Marianna Tcherkassky's sweet, limpid, almost blurred Sylph. The gorgeous sets by Desmond Heeley are drenchingly romantic, but Bruhn (wisely keeps sentiment in check onstage. A revival of Jerome Robbins' fierce, street-hip New York Export: Op. Jazz has corps kids...