We took our four-year-old daughter Victoria to the ballet for the first time and I am pleased to say that she behaved beautifully and loved watching the performances (she studies dance at her pre-school and previously had only seen a performance of mine at the 92nd St. Y; she was slightly disappointed that I was not in this one!). I have often mentioned how some parents take their children to The Nutcracker and to no other ballets, giving them an incomplete and distorted idea of ballet. We do have tickets to The Nutcracker in December but decided to start off with a more complex program to give Victoria an idea of how much ballet has to offer, from Richard Tanner to Balanchine and from John Cage to Gottschalk.
The program started with Ash, choreography by Peter Martins and music by Michael Torke. It is one of Martins's better ballets, its music intense and melodic and the choreography non-stop in a style strongly influenced by Balanchine. There was no adagio, fortunately, since Martins has never managed to convey any emotions in his adagios. The dancing was beautifully executed -- as it was in all the dances in this performance -- and led by Ashly Isaacs and Taylor Stanley. There was even some humor -- unusual for Martins -- as Stanley timed precisely his ducking under Isaacs' legs as she turned.
Next came Sonatas and Interludes, with Tiler Peck and Anthony Huxley, to a score by John Cage for prepared piano and choreography by Richard Tanner. This angular pas de deux made extensive and effective use of attitude, the expressive use of a bent leg. This was followed by Tarantella, a speedy allegro pas de deux to Gottschalk music. I have seen this Balanchine ballet performed by, among others, Patricia McBride and Mikhail Baryshnikov but here it was done by soloist Erica Pereira and corps member Spartax Hoxa, who overcame their lack of technical proficiency with their enthusiastic attack. Then we saw Justin Peck's Rode-o, to the same music as Agnes DeMille's ballet (though Peck used Copland's rearranged score for orchestra). Peck's work, strongly influenced by Jerome Robbins, is still work-in-progress, i.e., the inventiveness of the choreography is not helped by the bursts of facetiousness, the ugly costumes, and having only one woman in the cast. It also would have helped if Peck had more to say, since images of the DeMille ballet kept coming through unbidden.
The last piece was Balanchine's Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, from the 1936 production of Rogers and Hart's On Your Toes, one of Balanchine's best "show-biz" pieces (as opposed to his austere ballets and his romantic ballets), with terrific dancing by Tyler Angle and Sara Mearns. Mearns's dancing came close to my favorite dancer in the role of the girl, Suzanne Farrell, who really "let her hair down," both literally and figuratively. We carefully explained to our four-year-old that no one was actually hurt, that it was rather like a cartoon (she loves Chuck Jones) and she enjoyed the ballet's energy and humor, though somewhat to my surprise she found it slightly "silly" compared to the other ballets on the program.
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