Haglund's Heel

Pennsylvania Ballet Sleeping Beauty footage

Haglund is working on his review of opening night and hopes to have it published tomorrow.  In the meantime, here's some footage of this delightful production. Below this video is one of our Sterling Baca with his lovely Aurora, Oksana Maslova, blowing in the wind high along the Avenue of the Arts in Philadelphia:

 

 

 

Sterling blowin' in the wind in Philly from Haglund's Heel on Vimeo.

 

UIEXobservations 10-13

Maria let the cat out of the bag. Maria opened the barn door and let the horses out. Thanks, Maria for telling us via Instagram that Zachary Catazaro has been promoted to principal dancer. We wonder if he is the first Buckeye since Suzanne Farrell to be a New York City Ballet principal. Could somebody verify? Sometimes – not very often – but sometimes, we Ohio folks are in the news for good reasons rather than bad.

Catazaro has increased his focus, effort, and stage output exponentially in the past year since coming back from injury. His long-awaited debut as Prince Siegfried proved that he could go to most any company in the world and be a principal. We thank him for choosing NYCB.

 

New info on the October 22nd Hearts for Houston Benefit

Haglund received some clarification and details from Jared regarding the upcoming benefit that he and Yuriko will be producing at the Ailey Citigroup Theater on October 22nd.

First, sob sob-some-more, there will be no Giselle PdD. J&Y wanted to bring something new and fresh to New York; so, we'll be treated to Yuriko and Connor Walsh in a PdD from Stanton Welch's new Madame Butterfly and Jared and Sara Webb will dance the Act I PdD from Stanton Welch's La Bayadere. Also, Yuriko will dance the Prayer variation from Frederick Franklin's Coppelia. That little solo by itself should have people whipping out their wallets from Boston to Washington DC to get here to see this performance. But it will be a wonderful treat to see the new Welch pieces as well. Also, two dancers from PA Ballet will perform the Don Q PdD. We should have more information later on what the other performers will dance.

The NYPhil musicians won't be performing; however, they have donated to the silent auction for the event.

We noted from the press release that Neiman Marcus is one of the supporters for this special benefit performance. As most local-yokels know, we're getting a swanky new Neiman Marcus store in the Hudson Yards development in a year or so. Supporting the ballet and other arts is one of the best possible ways for any retail company to endear itself to Manhattanites.

There are only about 250 seats in the theater; so, don't delay purchasing your tickets.

Update:

The Pennsylvania Ballet dancers bringing their Don Q PdD to this benefit performance are none other than Arian Molina Soca and Mayara Pineiro. Cuba will be in the house, people. Make that, da Cuban Don Q. They don't come any bigger or more authentic. No fakerina here. Haglund saw this first hand last year: 

By the way, Haglund is more than a little excited about riding the rail down to Philly tomorrow for the brand spanking new Sleeping Beauty starring Sterling Baca and Oksana Maslova.

 

 

observations 10-10

"The dancers, the stage hands and the New York Philharmonic musicians are donating their participation." This from an article in the online journal Paper City about the special performance being produced by Jared Matthews and Yuriko Kajiya at the Ailey Citigroup Theater on Sunday October 22nd to benefit United Way of Greater Houston's Relief Fund. Somebody pinch us -- NY Phil musicians will accompany the dancers? Just thinking about what those fine artists might do with the music for the Giselle PdD gives us the tickling shivers -- although no one has yet confirmed in words that it will be danced.

Among the 20 dancers performing will be Connor Walsh, Sara Webb, and Daniil Simkin. And a world premiere by Ben Stevenson O.B.E. to boot!

Info here. Tickets here. There are only about 250 seats in the theater which makes it about the size of the center orchestra section of the Joyce Theater.

Come on, people, let's go let's go let's go.

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Also on that same Sunday, at 12:55pm, Bolshoi in Cinema will livestream (on a delayed basis) Le Corsaire (Ratmansky production). We are a little confused about the casting. The Bolshoi website shows Ekaterina Krysanova as Medora on that date with Daria Khokhlova and Igor Tvsirko as Gulnare and Conrade. However, the Pathe Live/Bolshoi Twitter feed announced on September 22nd that Olga Smirnova would debut with Igor on October 22nd. The last time we saw Olga on the big screen a few months ago in Etudes, she really surprised us with her new strength and lovely calm. So, maybe she can pull off Medora, too.

It seems that the performance will be shown in most of the theaters that usually transmit Bolshoi Ballet in Cinema. But check your local listings to make sure.

 

NYCB 10/7 Violins and valedictory

Saturday evening's NYCB performance which was the Farewell Performance by principal dancer Rebecca Krohn, was danced to three violin concertos. John Corigliano’s The Red Violin was the inspiration for Peter Martins’ 2006 choreography of the same name wherein both music and dance began with inventive concepts but ran out of fresh ideas midway. Alban Berg’s concerto, which Berg wrote in response to his inconsolable grief over the death of a friend’s daughter, was Jerome Robbins’ choice of music for a sorrowful, anguish-filled ballet called In Memory of... which he created two years after Balanchine’s death when the company and much of the ballet world were still paralyzed by grief. Stravinsky Violin Concerto has just about everything that one could want in a violin concerto — pointed neo-classicism, hummable adagios, pounding feisty folk rhythms that make one think of Nijinsky madly hurtling through the air. Balanchine caught the irresistible pulses of this music with his sharp-edged abstract choreography and catapulted the whole shebang into the balletic stratosphere.

Unity Phelan, who doesn’t yet possess the cool control of the original interpreter Jennie Somogy, managed a strong debut as the lead in The Red Violin, if uncertain at times while being manhandled by one or more men. Taylor Stanley maintained his knack for making Martins’ choreography appear brilliant – he has an uncanny sense of how to emphasize certain aspects of a movement to make it look bigger and more dramatic than others before him. Megan LeCrone, Zachary Catazaro, Harrison Coll, Emilie Gerrity, Joseph Gordon, and Lauren King completed the cast. Lauren, despite a slip and fall, had full command of her choreography including the fast, compact chaine turns and striking battements to the front.

It was impossible to watch Maria Kowroski dance her heart out in Robbins’ In Memory of… without realizing that there is no other dancer in the company who has as exquisite an instrument. Her limbs convey a poetry unlike anyone else’s in ballet today. Certainly there are dancers with exceptionally long, thin, wondrously curved legs in many companies around the world, but the geometries that Maria creates with her limbs and torso are so uncommonly beautiful that they make one gasp. We see her late afternoon sun becoming even more beautiful as it lowers toward the horizon. We don’t want to blink and miss even a second of it.

But the sun did finally set on a wonderful career last Saturday. Rebecca Krohn, loved by purists for her the-steps-will-show-me-the-way philosophy in performing, closed out her 18+ year stage career with perhaps her best ever performance in Stravinsky Violin Concerto. In this age of high-pitched high-volume ballerinaism, Rebecca always allowed the choreography to speak for her, not her for it. In the company where the spotlight and stardom are thrust upon talented dancers still in their teens, Rebecca’s spotlight gradually glowed brighter at a slower, steady pace. Her career was almost evenly distributed among the ranks – 7 years as a corps member, 6 as a soloist, 5-1/2 as a principal dancer.

In Saturday evening’s Stravinsky Violin Concerto, Rebecca demonstrated that she was indeed leaving while still in top form. Her limbs stretched easily to lengthen the line of a tendu or battement. Her arabesque seemed as flexible as it was 18 years ago. Her musical punctuation was bold and her rapport with her partner Amar Ramasar was filled with warmth. Modesty and humility marked her personal celebration at the conclusion of the performance. The admiration of her colleagues was honest and heartfelt — which may be a good description of her dancing.

We are so very happy that this beautiful dancer will continue showing her artistry to us through the up and coming dancers who she will coach and mentor as NYCB’s newest ballet master. We look forward to seeing a Dark Angel who holds her arabesque like Rebecca did, an Elegy which we recognize as having Rebecca's graceful sweep and abandon, and the black & white repertory danced with her unpretentious precision. It makes us feel good about NYCB’s future. Our HH Pump Bump Award, a Jimmy Choo diamond stiletto with a myriad of strap paths that come together to form something beautiful, is bestowed upon Rebecca Krohn.

 

Jared & Yuriko return!

Just for one night. Sunday, October 22nd at the Ailey Citigroup Theater on West 55th Street & 9th Avenue.

Jared Matthews and Yuriko Kajiya are producers of this benefit performance for the victims of Hurricane Harvey in connection with Hearts For Houston. All funds raised will be donated to United Way of Greater Houston's Relief Fund to help with long-term recovery efforts.

Performers include artists from Houston Ballet, Alvin Ailey, ABT, NYCB, Texas Ballet Theater, Pennsylvania Ballet, and Washington Ballet. The promo picture features Jared and Yuriko in Giselle which suggests to Haglund that we might see such a PdD! It would be cruel of them to tease us.

There will be a world premiere by Ben Stevenson O.B.E.

General admission tickets are $150 and will be totally worth it. For more information, see Hearts for Houston and also the Brown Paper Tickets site. This will sell out quickly. Don't delay purchasing!

 

 

NYCB 10/5 All Blissful Balanchine

With 60% of NYCB's fall season gone, we finally got our first Balanchine ballets last night. Yep, we had to wait for the 17th performance out of a 28-performance season before being allowed a glimpse of the Master’s work in the Master’s house. No wonder people are cranky and have given up looking at NYCB’s calendar. 

 

Did the wait for Balanchine’s great works make us appreciate last week's gala drivel any more? No. Did the wait for Balanchine’s great works make us respect the stripped down Swan Lake any more? No. The only thing that the wait for Balanchine’s great works did was to hammer home how deficient the first 60% of the season was.

 

Thursday night’s all-Balanchine program was a salve for sad eyes and a brace to bolster our weakened spirits – an evening of brawny, muscular choreography, all of it solidly built, musically stimulating, and profoundly satisfying. For two hours we were nestled in the Land of Balanchine where it almost seemed like Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon - "the little town that time forgot, and the decades cannot improve” “where all the women are strong, the men are handsome, and the children are above average."

 

Square Dance, that 1957 gem of virtuosic allegro in which corps members toss off gargouillades and entrechat six in blissful unison with the principals, was polished to brilliance. Megan Fairchild and Anthony Huxley were spot-on and perfect everywhere with fast, witty batterie. This was not a ballet to show everyone how hard the steps were; it was a ballet to portray dazzling technique as easy play. 

 

The 1951 La Valse pulled the audience into the macabre beauty of the ballroom with its Chanel fashionistas where a young girl’s fascination led to her death. Sterling Hyltin as the young girl, Jared Angle as her lover, and Justin Peck as the seductive Death character once again proved this ballet brilliant in its depiction of the utter destruction of Ravel’s waltz. The three soloist pairs (a bewitching Lauren King with Devin Alberda, Ashly Isaacs with Sean Suozzi, and Megan LeCrone with Zachary Catazaro) and the three ladies of the Second Waltz (Marika Anderson, Megan Johnson, and Lydia Wellington) epitomized the glamour and elegance of the era. Sean Suozzi, in particular, danced with a sense of urgency that helped drive the drama.

 

Cortège Hongrois, Balanchine’s adaptation to music from Glazounov’s Raymonda, brought the evening to a stunning close. Georgina Pazcoguin as the Hungarian folk dancer with Ask la Cour gave so much energy to their dances that we nearly forgot that Raymonda and Jean were supposed to come out and dazzle us with classicism. Sara Mearns and Tyler Angle as those characters got the job done, but without Hungarian flavor – unless an 8th Avenue style spanking of the hands together in Raymonda’s variation counts as Hungarian. All of their steps were successful steps, though.

 

Brittany Pollack and Emilie Gerrity as soloists managed their challenging choreography well with Brittany in particular command of her variation.

 

Our HH Pump Bump Award, a Casadei gold boot we found in the hayride, is bestowed upon Megan Fairchild for her blisteringly beautiful dancing in Square Dance.

 

 

Happy World Ballet Day!

http://worldballetday.com/

 

Australian Ballet

Bolshoi Ballet

Royal Ballet

National Ballet of Canada

San Francisco Ballet

 

Let's keep this tradition going strong.

 

observations 10-3

El Observador reports that Maria Riccetto met with Ballet Nacional Sodre's Board of Directors and the Uruguayan government's Minister of Education and Culture today but rejected their offer for her to take over the directorship of the ballet company from which Julio Bocca resigned as director.

El Observador's sources said that the Minister and the Directors plan to try to persuade Maria to review her position.

Look at this woman -- confident, glamorous, a superb artist, and one of the most influential women in all of Uruguay. Hopefully, she'll hold everyone's feet to the fire until they agree to give her what she needs to do the job. Maria is going to make a great director for Sodre – whenever.

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We can't stop scratching our heads over this fourth dance that ABT is letting Benjamin Millepied make for the kids to perform at intermission on the David H. Koch Theater's promenade during the fall season later this month. Julia must really want Natalie to come to her ABT gala party. "Why am I not where you are?" muses Julia each morning over her soft, spoonable eggs while studying French vocabulary. 

Quasi Una Fantasia, baby. Never here nor where. But perhaps they would consider something along the lines of a Troika if Ben were given a fifth dance for ABT's season.

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We're pretty excited about seeing Sterling Baca as Prince Desire in Angel Corella's new production of Sleeping Beauty at Pennsylvania Ballet. We'll be at the premiere with bells on and expect to be bowled over by Oksana Maslova's Rose Adagio. It's an hour and twenty minutes by train to Philly, which is the time it took Haglund to ride the M66 across town today. Lots of dates and great casts to choose from right here.

Photo: Alexander Iziliaev

 

 

NYCB Gala 9/28There's just no way to un-see it

Oh dear. No one knows how it hurts Haglund to be the bearer of bad news. It’s no fun being the party pooper. The stick in the mud. The sour puss. The wet blanket. The contrarian. He wishes he could stop, but something keeps pushing him. Honesty and love of ballet - not dance - ballet.

 

The NYCB Gala evening performance on Thursday night was a depressing, self-indulgent collection of formulaic dances that relied little on ballet as an art form. But even as bad as it was, we’re not objecting to loading up any gala with stuff on the level of a high school oral book report for a one-off performance where a shoe-string budget was used. What is reckless, however, is the months-in-advance commitment to loading up the rest of the season with it. When one considers the obscene amount of money that was likely spent to bring these works to the stage, it brings to mind the rich daddy who spent $40K on his 7-year-old’s birthday party just to show everyone that he could do it. 

 

Even though NYCB invited several different designers to contribute their imaginative thinking to the costumes, the end result was like a runway fashion show where all the designers’ artistic voices were distinct but all of the choreography looked like it came out of the same high school text book. True, all of the choreographers came out of SAB. But the evening suggested that none of the choreographers had developed beyond being able to deliver sophomoric drivel — even though we know that’s not necessarily true. Each dance had one or two good ideas, but that was it. Anybody can come up with one or two good ideas for a dance. What ran through each piece was the choreographer’s voice assuring us that what he had to say was terribly important and very deep, but he had no idea how to say it with a ballet vocabulary. 

 

At times in each piece, Haglund wanted to stand up and scream “Just stop already!” Each of these choreographers should continue practicing his/her craft – out of sight under the tutelage of someone who can help them. This country has hundreds of regional, municipal, and civic ballet companies who would just love to have these choreographers come in and hone their craft using local dancers. But it is a travesty when America’s greatest ballet company fills its New York stage with this stuff and proclaims it as the new direction of ballet. 

 

The Wind Still Brings by Troy Schumacher to music by William Walton featured 14 of NYCB’s handsome corps de ballet dancers who freely threw themselves in the air in joyous celebration, ran around the stage, posed, ran around some more, lay down on the floor, did cool So You Think You Can Dance moves, ran around some more. These young dancers were having so much fun. We don’t begrudge them, but we don’t want to pay hefty prices to sit in our seats and watch them, either. In the end, we were asking, “The Wind Still Brings what?” Rain, clouds, snow, or the colloquial IT? Did it even matter?

 

Gianna Reisen, a recent graduate of SAB and now a dancer with Ballet Semperoper Dresden, used music by Lukas Foss to make her Composer’s Holiday – her first work ever for a professional stage. Foss graduated from The Curtis Institute of Music and then trained in composition under Paul Hindemith during the 1930s. What great choreographer is training Ms. Reisen in composition? Like the others, she’s simply been given expensive, high profile opportunities to figure it all out on her own. Perhaps she was drawn to the Foss composition that featured violin and piano because she is an an admirer of the Stravinsky/Balanchine Duo Concertant. Her intricate pas de deux suggested that might be the case. Gianna used another dozen of NYCB’s handsome corps dancers to create a pensive mood of something or other. She created great photo-op groupings with dancers in arabesque held high in the air. All of it would have looked impressive on Juilliard’s modern dance students.

 

Lauren Lovette’s Not Our Fate was perhaps the most disappointing of the evening. We were expecting her to pick up where she left off with her first commission For Clara which gave us so much hope about the future of new choreography at NYCB. The Michael Nyman score and this evening's choreography combined to repeatedly echo Christopher Wheeldon’s DGV — and others’ work. How many times have we seen in a NYCB dance a line of dancers run from one side of the stage to another? Too many. It must be really fun to do if so many choreographers want to create new work by using it as a gimmick.

 

Justin Peck presented an overdose of pas de deux and solos in his Pulcinella Variations. He just kept trotting out couples and soloists to create the most boring academic and cliched responses to Stravinsky’s music. But hey, thank the Lord for Stravinsky’s music this time. 

 

At this gala, the choreography was such a disappointment that we could barely care about the costumes. None of the costumes furthered whatever concepts the choreographies were trying to reveal. As stand-alone designs they ran the gamut from predictable to pretty darned interesting. The predictable included Jonathan Saunders’ bright blue trunks, tunics, and skirts with various stripes for Schumacher’s The Wind Still Brings. There were long strings of fabric hanging off of them like those that hung from the costumes for Schumacher’s Common Ground. There were similarities in the choreography as well.

 

Virgil Abolh’s dresses for the women in Reisen’s Composer’s Holiday were attractive short dresses with full skirts that moved nicely. The men, in dark pants and mesh long-sleeved tops, were not always easy to see on the dim-lit stage.

 

Fernando Garcia's and Laura Kims' costume designs for Lauren Lovette’s premiere included black tights and white tee-shirts for the men (innovative, yes?) and yards and yards of flowing fabric - also black and white - draped around the women. Honestly, it didn’t matter. 

 

Tsumori Chisato won the costume contest for for her arty tutu designs worn by Justin Peck’s women dancers. What a missed opportunity it was not to put a stage-full of corps women in the white petaled black-eyed Susan half-tutu that Indiana Woodward wore. It was a truly stunning creation of enormous invention that worked fabulously as she darted around in her fast solo. An eye with red petals around it appeared on other tutus which were full-circle tutus rather than just half. The men’s unitards were colorfully painted and seemed to have climbing vines pictured on them. Like we said, these were the best costumes, but the truth is – the hard, hard truth is that it’s been all downhill for the designers since the Valentino gala several years ago. The Valentino costumes worn by Maria Kowroski and Tiler Peck at that gala are encased in glass by the right side staircase leading up to the promenade. Take moment to look at them. Sheer imaginative beauty.

 

We were so disappointed in the offerings of the evening that we’re not going to waste a Pump Bump Award. We're tempted to ask ourselves what could be worse than what we saw at the gala; then we remember that ABT is arriving soon. For the first time in over thirty years, Haglund will most likely be skipping an entire ABT season. It seems others will be skipping it to, judging from the pitiful ticket sales; let them give away the house like they do at the Met. There is still plenty of fabulous dancing to take in: Pennsylvania Ballet’s new Sleeping Beauty, the Mariinsky’s La Bayadere at the Kennedy Center, The Red Shoes, Brigadoon. 

 

Just a final word to remind people that an expensive show generally doesn't get to Broadway without first workshopping the nuts and bolts of the production, and massive editing by many people. Turning over thousands upon thousands of dollars to inexperienced or low-experienced or should-know-better-but-don't experienced choreographers to create something stage-worthy in a few weeks is not responsible.