It’s been 16 years since New York City Ballet last performed in London, and its brief visit to Sadler’s Wells provided a pleasant opportunity to view a hitherto unseen spectrum of repertory and people. Perhaps the company will never be what it was when I first saw it as a child, with creator George Balanchine still in command and stars like Suzanne Farrell and Edward Villella in their prime, but one cannot live on nostalgia, and what has emerged now has a living, changing force.
The evening’s highlight, however, had to be its ‘legacy’ element: Megan Fairchild and Anthony Huxley’s superb performance of Balanchine’s hauntingly gorgeous little Duo Concertant from 1972. Two dancers stand behind a pianist and violinist playing Stravinsky’s suite. They don’t move much at first; they’re just listening, waiting for the spirit to descend. When it does, they appear to be buddies jokingly improvising rather than lovers engrossed in a romantic pas de deux. Then, in the last section, Balanchine performs a complete emotional volte-face, with the stage plunged into darkness and the dancers left in severe spotlit solitude, their disembodied hands reaching across the emptiness in an attempt to find something irretrievably lost or sought for. The result is exhilarating
Be the first to comment