Word: ballets
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Across Lincoln Center at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House, an evening of sheer visceral joy was conjured up by Britain's Royal Ballet. The chief magician was Rudolf Nureyev, the company's conspicuous permanent guest artist. Following Kenneth MacMillan's disappointing Manon, which inaugurated the Royal's five-week New York-Washington, D.C. season, Nureyev scored a double success. He danced an impressive debut in the comic ballet La Fille Mal Gardée. On the other half of the program was a scene from La Bayardère, the "white ballet" he restaged...
...Bayardère is a richly eccentric embodiment of classic Russian ballet...
Such a repetitious maneuver is exquisite torture for the corps de ballet, but it danced with a purity of feeling and tautness of leg muscle that did not falter. Nureyev's staging was a light modern gloss on the original Petipa choreography. It was also an exercise in personal nostalgia: La Bayardère is the crown jewel of the Leningrad Kirov Ballet where Nureyev was trained...
...answer, alas, is quite a lot. Dybbuk, which was given its world premiere at Lincoln Center last week by the New York City Ballet, is a wan and murky evocation of the Hasidic legend that is all but drowned in a sea of pretentious metaphysical subfusc. The dybbuk story, a ghetto version of Romeo and Juliet given classic shape in Shloime Ansky's 1916 Yiddish play, involves the star-crossed lovers named Channon and Leah. Once their fathers had taken a vow that some day their children should wed. By the time boy meets girl, the vow has been...
Their Dybbuk is a sequence of abstract, related dance episodes that imply but do not explicitly contain a narrative structure. All this would be fine had not the collaborators approached their task with such owlish solemnity. Sequences of the ballet are described in the program notes as if they were stages of a sacred liturgy rather than parts of an evening's entertainment. For instance, a rather ordinary set of variations for male dancers is summed up as "The Quest for Secret Powers." In this case, rite does not make might...