THE WEEK IN REVIEW
Capsule reviews, a new Tchaikovsky, Western Symphony debuts and a question for you:)
IN THIS EDITION:
THE WEEK IN REVIEW
This week’s capsule reviews: Dance Is A Mother, Resurrection, Afternoon of a Faun, Tchaikovsky: A Love Letter, Western Symphony
The fall dance season this year is explosive from coast to coast: from New York City Center’s Fall For Dance Festival, American Ballet Theaters expanded programming, New York City Ballet’s dancer debuts and a brand new ballet on Tchaikovsky’s inner world—this season is one of the most exciting we’ve seen in years.
Let’s take a look at a few notables from this past week and then see what’s next on the bill.
Hugo Marchand and Hannah O’Neill bow, ‘Afternoon of a Faun’. Photo: Britt Stigler
New York City Center Fall for Dance festival is one of the most international and eclectic on record. The artists and companies are—as one would expect—of world-class caliber, but what makes this particular festival remarkable is its curation.
Each of the five programs is an exercise in dance education, in seeing dance—the viewer is delighted by the easy beauty of one piece and then confronted with the rhythmic violence of another. We may buy a ticket for something familiar, but we leave with an expanded understanding of what dance is, who dance artists are, and where the art form can go. And the relative affordability of the tickets ($30) makes the festival a true offering to the city and to the dance industry at large.
Jamar Roberts’ Dance Is A Mother is experienced as a meditation. The piece is somehow intimate even on a large stage. From the first cello note (the musicians are live onstage), we are invited into a private poem between the dancers and their work. Created for five dancers, it allows each of them to offer their own movement styles—to us, to the company, to dance itself. It ends with the inimitable Sara Mearns walking off toward the light, a dancer led by her own inner flame.
Resurrection with Lil Buck and Davóne Tines was a genre-blending jewel, a heart-opener—a Baptist revival meets dance-off where the sacred and the playful collide in joyous harmony onstage. Tines, a singer whose multidimensional work blends opera, spirituals, contemporary classical music, and protest songs, joined Lil Buck, choreographer and master of Memphis Jookin. Tines’ voice resounded through the theater while Lil Buck played with sound and space in his unique blend of phenomenal grace and streetwise cool.
Paris Opera Etoiles in Afternoon of a Faun. Jerome Robbins’ Afternoon of a Faun is— as are many of his works—an invitation into dance’s inner world. To see his elegant choreography and simple costuming, on dancers like Hugo Marchand and Hannah O’Neill is to be reminded why we wanted to see dance, or become dancers in the first place.
Vitor Luiz and Tara Ghassemieh. Photo: Sam Zauscher
From The West Coast
A new ballet from the artists behind The Whitefeather offers a poetic lens on Tchaikovsky’s life. Premiering earlier this month, Tchaikovsky: A Love Letter sketches a luminous, sometimes haunting portrait of the composer’s final days. Framed by six letters, the work drifts between memory, longing, and creative fire, with Tchaikovsky’s own music as its pulse.
The design is pared back yet atmospheric, giving space for the choreography to both honor the score and carve out fresh emotional terrain. While biographical, the ballet is less a biography than a series of unfolding vignettes. Each one contemplating repression, artistry, and love. Watching we feel as if we could be gazing into Tchaikovsky’s own memories.
Among a larger company, Vitor Luiz inhabits the older Tchaikovsky with a fragile authority, while Tara Ghassemieh, as the Muse-ic, moves between tenderness and provocation in duets that feel both urgent and timeless. Luiz and Ghassemieh are artists to watch. Here’s an interview we did leading up to the show.
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Left to right: Ryan Tomash, Olivia MacKinnon, Alexa Maxwell, Victor Abreu, Isabella LaFreniere, Alec Knight in costume for ‘Western Symphony’
New York City Ballet: All Balanchine and So Many Debuts!
The special tension in yesterday’s performance of Square Dance, Episodes, and Western Symphony came from the tension created between veteran primas (colloquially speaking—NYC Ballet doesn’t officially have “primas”) like Sara Mearns and Taylor Stanley—treasures of our generation—who were deepening and refining familiar roles, and the sparkling potential of dancers stepping into parts for the first time. The result was a performance that might have been merely excellent but instead became one for the books.
Western Symphony in particular kept us on the edge of our seats, as each lead couple was composed of debuting dancers. Alec Knight—containing elegance with command—burst onto the stage with the exacting and charismatic Alexa Maxwell in a river of joy. Olivia MacKinnon, Victor Abreu, Isabella LaFreniere, and Ryan Tomash alternated between the raucous, the hilarious, and the dazzling. More on the history and poignantly layered staging of this ballet in Wednesday’s upcoming drop.
***Alec Knight has a long and somewhat mystical connection to Western Symphony which you can hear about in this interview podcast.
Now I’d love to hear from you:
American Ballet Theater’s fall season is filled with many favorites that aren’t always in the rotation: Theme and Variations, Twyla Tharps Bach Partita, Sextet, Push Comes To Shove and SO MUCH more. We’ll be doing behind the scenes and deep dives on many of these works. Have a look at the season HERE and let me know if anything in particular is of interest and I’ll try to add it to the list for our deep dives (you can just hit reply to this email).