danceviewnewyork The
DanceView Times, New York edition |
An online supplement to DanceView magazine
Letter from New York 29
September 2003. Psychologically
probing, physically exacting, unpredictably conjoined with their musical
scores, frequently dependent for full effect on sets and costumes that
are constructed with consummate delicacy—the ballets of Antony Tudor
can be as challenging to revive and produce as the classical dance spectacles
of Asia. Since Tudor’s death, in 1987, one rarely finds them on
the boards, even at American Ballet Theatre, the choreographer’s
home company in the U.S. for nearly a half century. For a while, the principal
curator of Tudor’s work was Sallie Wilson, one of his most trusted
dancers at A.B.T. Wilson is no longer working with that company; instead,
her revivals, along with one or two by Diana Byer, can be found at the
little, impecunious yet high-minded New York Theatre Ballet, which Byer
directs and which, last spring, put on a fascinating all-Tudor program
at the Florence Gould Hall of the Alliance-Française. Its performance
detail—especially in Tudor’s signature work, Jardin aux
Lilas—stopped the breath. No other current American production
I’ve seen of this plangent hommage to the Edwardian era of Tudor’s
parents even remotely approaches the richness and exactitude of the characterizations
by the N.Y.T.B. Still, as Tobi Tobias observed in the Village Voice, a
Tudor ballet requires not only great coaching but also great dancers to
unfold its full wonders; and despite the loveliness of their performances,
the artists of N.Y.T.B. were not freed as theatrical presences by their
accuracy: they simply do not offer the Olympian stamina and virtuosity
of their colleagues at A.B.T. or, historically, at the New York City Ballet.
(Tudor brought several works to N.Y.C.B. in the 1950s and early ‘60s,
including Jardin aux Lilas, restaged there as Lilac Garden.
However, N.Y.C.B. has not revived them in decades and seems unlikely to
try.) We're just getting started! Mindy Aloff's Letter from New York will be an (almost) weekly feature, and this fall we've planned reviews of: Susan Marshall stay tuned..... |
Welcome! The season is just getting underway, and we'll be bringing you reviews of all kinds of dance in New York, keeping a special eye on the Balanchine Centennial Celebration at New York City Ballet (and related events around the city) as well as covering performances from The Kitchen to The Met. Our lead critic is Mindy Aloff, who has written regularly for The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The Nation, among many other publications, and is currently book review editor for DanceView. (A few of her past pieces are also on our main DanceView website, in An Archive of Dance Writing.) Aloff's Letter from New York will be a (nearly) weekly feature. Other writers, familiar to readers of DanceView as well as other publications, will contribute pieces as well. We can't possibly review every performance in New York, and we're not going to try, but we can promise to bring you interesting, thoughtful commentary on dance in Manhattan, and occasionally elsewhere. —A.T. |
|
Copyright ©2003 by
by DanceView |
|