Posts Tagged ‘Mark Morris’

Mark Morris’s Pleasant Ballet for ABT

Monday, November 9th, 2015

Mark Morris’s After You, a new commission from American Ballet Theatre, is textbook pleasant and thus a convenient opener for a company wishing to present a thirty-minute ensemble work. Performed by 12 dancers and set to a composition by Johann Hummel (Septet in C-major, Op.114 “The Military”), the ballet’s title, After You, refers to what is said when two people nearly collide. One person gives permission for the other to take the lead. Thus the ballet, seen October 27 at the former New York State Theater, evokes an abnormally civilized world of dance—especially for Morris, who has been celebrated for making ballets to classical music that dabble in physicalized human faux pas

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Red Detachment Redux and the Cowboy Spirit

Friday, August 5th, 2011

by Cathy Barbash For those of you who did not get enough of the Red Detachment of Women during this winter’s run of Nixon in China at the Met, the National Ballet of China will be performing excerpts of the ballet (possibly the same excerpt reinterpreted and interpolated into the opera by Mark Morris) in […]

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Valentine Dances

Monday, February 14th, 2011

By Rachel Straus When the pressure is on to be romantic, delivering the goods is a challenge. The week before Valentine’s Day, four dance events intentionally (and unintentionally) dabbled in matters of the heart.  Merce Cunningham’s 1998 Pond Way—as filmed by Charles Atlas—was surprisingly the most romantic. (It was screened at the Baryshnikov Arts Center […]

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Nixon in Amber

Friday, February 4th, 2011

By James Jorden It’s not hard to guess why Peter Gelb would choose to import a recreation of the original production of Nixon in China instead of devising a new staging from scratch. It would hardly be prudent to blow a million dollars on a six-performance run of a work unlikely to be revived any […]

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Christmas with Mark Morris and Alvin Ailey

Tuesday, December 21st, 2010

By Rachel Straus Nostalgia is the main event in most Nutcrackers.  But in the original 1892 “Nutcracker” by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, the subject—nostalgia for one’s lost childhood—did little for the pre-Freudian audience. The libretto came from the 1816 novella by E. T. A. Hoffman. In it a girl’s favorite Christmas toy (the Nutcracker) comes […]

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