Dumbing Down with New York City Ballet’s Season Brochure
I don’t know how many of you have had the honor of receiving New York City Ballet’s season brochure. When I pulled it out of my mailbox, I briefly mistook it for a Barney’s catalogue. Then I thought Robert Mapplethorpe might have come back from the dead to focus his heated lens on City Ballet’s lithe, muscular performers. Riffling through its pages, I started to feel uneasy. Instead of featuring images of the ballets, the brochure delivers sexy, casual shots of the dancers holding each other tightly and wearing abbreviated clothes (somewhere between lingerie and rehearsal gear). Positioned alongside these black, background lit photographs are quotes from the dancers that could have been lifted from their Facebook pages.
“I can’t wait to see what [Lynne Taylor-Corbett] does with The Seven Deadly Sins,” says Jennie Somogyi. In the full-page photograph, this principal dancer wears black, silk hot pants and looks challengingly into the camera like a cover model selling underwear. Of the ten quotes from the dancers, four of them begin very much the same: “I aspire,” “I’m looking forward,” “I love,” and again, “I love.” The dancers’ thoughts about their favorite ballets are strikingly similar to a Calgon ad. “Serenade is classic! The costumes, music, and mood never get old,” says Tiler Peck. Even more dismaying is Peck’s oddly contradictory costume that comes with her promotional message. She wears a black shift, which is open at her crotch and translucent around her waist. If this is the new little black dress, I’m going back to wearing floor lengths and pastels.
So what is this all about?
Clearly City Ballet is trying to sell their season as intimate and hip. They want their dancers to feel as familiar to us as our long lost high school friends. The dancers’ quotes demonstrate how they are just regular folk who get a kick out of dancing Balanchine’s Jewels. But the brochure does something worse. It takes these talented people’s simple words and highly trained bodies and presents them together to form a compellingly stupid contradiction: City Ballet principals look as sexualized and sculptural as Mapplethorpian objets d’art; they talk just like the girls and boys of Sesame Street!
I’m deeply offended.
This brochure dumbs down City Ballet’s greatness. These dancers, no matter how hard they try, will never be average folk. The company’s repertoire isn’t merely a sexy, fun vehicle for them. The experience of watching City Ballet is more than a happy-go-lucky affair. I don’t know why dynamic images of dancers moving (let alone plucky description of dances) isn’t considered marketable.
So now I will make my City Ballet season pitch:
Please go to the tiny text and orange-colored headlines buried in this brochure. There you will find something worth looking at. City Ballet is offering 64 dances, four of which will be world premieres, this season. Among this embarrassment of riches will be ballets by George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Christopher Wheeldon, Peter Martins, Mauro Bigonzetti, Alexei Ratmansky, Wayne McGregor, and Benjamin Millepied. Some of the most interesting dancers working today will perform these choreographers’ ballets. They include Sara Mearns, Wendy Whelan, Theresa Reichlen, Sterling Hyltin, Andrew Veyette, and Sean Suozzi. The season begins September 14. On arrival at Lincoln Center, please feel free to check your Facebook worldview at the door. Feel free to embrace your inner elitist who is dying to experience more than the sweetly familiar or the sexually manufactured.
Tags: New York City Ballet