World-class review of ballet and dance.
How many ways to think about “Sleeping Beauty”? In the first written Italian and French versions, the plots outline the fate of a young girl as the object of family jealousy, trickery and, after being drugged asleep, ravishment. By the mid-19th century, the Brothers Grimm toned down the storyline, romanticized and adapted it as a story fit for children. Ivan Vsevolozhsky, Tchaikovsky, and Marius Petipa’s 1890 landmark ballet further refashioned it. But another few generations of scholarly research recognized the darker undertones and representations of girls in the fairy tale tradition. Apart from handsome swains or huntsmen who save damsels like Beauty or Red Riding Hood from stepmothers or disfigured crones, the producers of even the most treasured classics should take some measure of the plight of characters, even if fantasy.
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For a Jewish man, Jerome Robbins sure had a clear idea of heaven—in the ballet realm, anyway. In two elegiac dances made less than a year apart, “In Memory Of…” and “Quiet City,” he had dancers in white doing low arabesque flies in a shaft of light emanating from the back left corner of the stage.
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To travel around, like the Earth in its recurrent, elliptical revolution around the sun, is no mean feat. Touring is a complicated, lengthy and costly affair.
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“Specky Clark” opens with a bang, then a whimper. The bang is the titular Specky’s mother, dropping dead onto the kitchen floor.
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The sought-after choreographer Aszure Barton and award-winning composer Ambrose Akinmusire bend their individual arcs toward one another in their collaborative, multi-disciplinary work titled “A a | a B : Bend,” presented as part of Lincoln Center’s Pasculano Collaborative for Contemporary Dance.
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