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New York City Ballet (Costa Mesa)

By Sasha Anawalt
(Originally read on air as a radio review: Dance Notes for Theater Talk on KCRW).

I spent the last two nights at the New York City Ballet in Costa Mesa at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.  The company is here because it is celebrating its 50th anniversary and artistic director, Peter Martins, wanted to go across the land and embrace America.  In the spirit of company founders, George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein, it seemed the right thing to do, because Russian-born Balanchine pursued an American style that came literally out of the ethos, the fabric, the popular culture and the body type of Americans.  American style didn’t exist in ballet before Balanchine.  I quote Kirstein .  He said, “Even before Balanchine left Russia -- this was in 1924 -- he imaginatively identified himself with the world of ragtime, Jack London, Mark Twain and the Wild West.  America’s young girls were not sylphides; they were basketball champions and queens of the tennis court.   They were long-legged, long-necked, slim-hipped and capable of endless acrobatic virtuosity. “The pathos and suavity of the dying swan, Balanchine replaced by a raciness.  A thinking dart symbolized the ideal Balanchine dancer.”

Fifty years later, here we are with an American classicism, no longer new, and which has influenced almost every choreographer of this century, regardless of place of origin.

We rarely get to see Balanchine’s work here.  And , if it weren’t so much fun, so life-affirming and fantastic to see this company, I would say it is our artistic/ moral obligation.  A medicine we must take, a history lesson.  But what you’ll see onstage at the Orange County Performing Arts Center energizes all sorts of feelings about the inexplicable and ancient need for live performance.  The mysterious awakening that occurs when choreography rings true.  Balanchine and Jerome Robbins (whose glorious Brandenburg is also on the program) are masters at that.   Peter Martins, who contributes his Fearful Symmetries, as well as his Barber Violin Concerto, is less masterly.  The audience went stark raving wild over Martins’ work.  Fearful Symmetries with a John Adam’s score, I appreciated for the excitement of so many dancers coded in pink, red and maroon, shuttle-cocking across the stage.  But Samuel Barber’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra -- a magnificent, genius, heart-wrenching score -- was handled by Martins in a most self-conscious, contrived, cliched way.

Balanchine died in 1983.  But the company’s principal focus continues to be the dancers’ style and behavior.  They claim music as the first, the last, the unsentimental and bare-boned incentive to their motion. Look at Miranda Weese in Balanchine’s Raymonda Variations.  She holds Philip Neal’s’ hand and loops his arm over her head and steps through, under the loop into an arabesque.   It is seamless classic motion.  A magnificent disciplined body that moves almost without moving.  Then there’s Alexandra Ansanelli in Balanchine’s Western Symphony.  His ode to America’s pioneer frontier, with music by Hershy Kay.  She’s also in Raymonda Variations and in both Peter Martins’ works.  She is completely daring.   A dancer you can see thinking to herself, mid-air, “Hmm, I’m going to make the space I’m in narrow.  Slip between cracks and burst out, exploding.”  Or, how about Albert Evans in The pas de deux of the Balanchine/Stravinsky masterpiece, Agon, with Wendy Whelan.  He is a big-picture dancer.  The designs connect through him.  A force.

The New York City Ballet performs 26 weeks a year. More than any other in this country.  The dancers exude comfort with the work.  This is where they swim.  There is a kind of egolessness that comes when performing is not a special thing.  It allows you to see the work.

There were some missteps and sloppy spacings in Raymonda, but imperfection -- while untenable on one hand -- is human.  And the dancers’ acceptance of it makes one long for the luxury of how ballet should be seen which is night after night after night after night until you get it and you’re not ticking off the mistakes.

The New York City Ballet is dancing at the Orange County Performing Arts Center through October 18.