AUDIENCE REVIEW: Eclectic Modern Dance Spring 2025 Part 1
Company:
New York City Ballet
Performance Date:
May 16 2025
Freeform Review:
The Essence of it was classical innovation for modern ballets. In four dances with four choreographers, and two intermissions for two transitions, a gradient display on stage for the NYCB dancers coined as, "Eclectic."
"Divertimento," a section from Le Baiser de la Fée flowed and flowered. The organic form of George Balanchine type for the modern dance, yet trenched in a charisma of its exactitude. Regeneration becomes a spring board for the next choreographers of a contemporary dance world to carry on with the prominence of an auteur critic for the dancers.
The big draw for the Spring Performance 2025, “When We Fell” by Kyle Abraham was a World Premiere. It was previously released on the same commission for a virtual program during the COVID-19 epidemic 2021. The adaptation from film to the stage has a life of its own in a growing field of adaptation. That is, how the multimodal media coincide, or morph from its origin and would have the differ, rather than recapture its fidelity. We emerge from this element of humanity in nature depicted in the black and white film directed by Ryan Marie Helfant. Now, like Heaven and Hell by proximity to the joyous dreaming of the kiss of the fairy by Balanchine. This Balanchine- Abraham transformation acts on its contrary mode of creation, by how far we have fallen, and what is left of our own doing, but its self-aware malady in this earthly world.
This spin off of "Divertimento" is like a kiss, a flirty playfulness between duets and full company that brings highlights of a different light for “When We Fell.” The fairy dust magic surrounded the lead male dancer, Roman Mejia, as the full company circle around him. There’s only so much I can say to the classical form, but the funny feeling that punctuated its veneer, in a smirk, a gracefulness shrugged off by principle dancer, Tiler Peck, and a seriousness in their step. A mystical innocence, maybe little seduction grows into golden-trophy winning artifices, the body and the body-builder for example gives the illusion of this universal man-made demigod in transitioning to Abraham’s lost paradise, “When We Fell.”
Author:
Chuck Schultz
Website:
WHYSEEART.com
Photo Credit:
Chuck Schultz
