Word: ballets
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...manipulating one another into poses as two women in red-striped T-shirts and white pants prance through ignoring the men. The women dance in the funny upright way Armour often choreographs movement. It's as if she wants to keep her dancers from noticing whether they're doing ballet or jazz...
...image of the firebird is one of the best known in ballet: a ballerina in a fantastical costume of glitter and feathers soaring through space in split leaps. The firebird most people have in mind, unconsciously or not, is Maria Tallchief, for whom George Balanchine created a dazzling version of the Stravinsky score in 1949. But Balanchine was not Stravinsky's first collaborator. In 1910 the composer and Choreographer Michel Fokine had worked out their conception at the piano...
...American Ballet Theater has gone back to the first Firebird for its latest, opulent new production. The impulse can scarcely be questioned: few companies have the resources to provide the public with a chance to step back in the history of movement. The sets are handsome mock-ups of those designed by Nathalie Gontcharova for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. In Natalia Makarova the A.B.T. has a ballerina who understands an older tradition and makes it breathe...
...magic. The firebird has a taste for the golden apples that grow in an enchanted grove. She is caught in the act of munching one (Makarova actually does a few steps with a gilded ball in her teeth) by the prince, who, like any right-minded nobleman in Russian ballet, is out hunting. In exchange for her freedom, she gives him a feather that will bring her and her supernatural powers to his side in time of trouble. She knows there will be an emergency soon because the forest is controlled by a demon who imprisons young girls...
...provided some immediate comment on The Firebird. It was Grand Pas Classique, a showpiece that mocks technical virtuosity while flaunting it. Cynthia Gregory and Fernando Bujones were in dazzling form, and the crowd cheered them on as if it too had been let out of a haunted forest. In ballet, at least, there are apparently limits to museumship...