New York City (NYT)


This year’s New York City Ballet fall gala was an outlier. In recent years, fashion has taken centre stage, with designers and choreographers collaborating to make new work. But on Thursday, this annual event at Lincoln Centre took a different path. As actress Sarah Jessica Parker, a vice chair of the company’s board of directors, put it in remarks before the show: “Tonight, we’re going vintage”.

The ballet is a celebration of New York City after all. But only one part of Gordon’s unflattering dresses oscillated madly: their spinning skirts. What you want to see in a jazzy ballet like “Who Cares?” is simple: the leg. Gordon’s dresses, in shades of pink and blue - like party favours at a gender reveal - were too long and sodden with coloured stones. If they had a backstory, it was “Barbie crashes the prom.” Who cares about costumes? I do. I also care about music. “Who Cares?” is set to George Gershwin songs, adapted and orchestrated by Robert Miller and Hershy Kay. For the gala, Patti LuPone, Vanessa Williams and Joshua Henry sang the Gershwin standards from the stage – occasionally awkwardly so – as dancers performed solos and pas de deux from the ballet.

The addition of the singers, which required further orchestrations by Miller, was a distraction that made the ballet less musical. Balanchine’s choreography was suddenly a one-note affair; this was a terrible way to show off his legacy. Nor was it a good idea to remake the costumes instead of restoring Karinska’s or creatively re-imagining them. As the fall season has continually shown, it’s not only Balanchine who is the star, but Karinska, whose eye for color and cut remains astounding.

Balanchine once said half of the success of his ballets was owed to her costumes. At least the evening (which included two films and two sets of speeches) ended with “Glass Pieces” (1983), a work by Jerome Robbins, the company’s other founding choreographer.

There are three couples in the first movement and a pas de deux in the second. You live for the last couple of minutes when their bodies, having been driven by relentless speed and meticulous spacing, relax into the hypnotic score with their focus giving way to smiles. Sweaty and united, they dance as one, spilling across the stage until they freeze, arms reaching to the sky.

But before the gala night, City Ballet’s fall season has belonged, rightfully, to Balanchine with programmes packed with gems, including the revival of a dazzler: “Bourrée Fantasque” (1949), set to music by Emmanuel Chabrier. It swings from comedy to romance and finally snaps to an exhilarating finale in which dancers converge in a dizzying array of concentric circles. So many steps and gestures reference other Balanchine ballets, yet “Bourrée” is its own world, with each section unfolding like a dream ballet. The first, “Bourrée Fantasque,” is full of humour, starting with its casting: a tall woman and a shorter man. The woman, at one point, swings her leg back in attitude until her foot bonks her partner’s head.