LINCOLN CENTER

Koch Theater
New York City Ballet

Ballet has been the "Big Surprise" for us since we've moved here.  It contains music, orchestra, theater, lighting, scenery, dancing, story, and it's over in a reasonable amount of time.  It's a civilized, pleasant way to spend an evening.

A video to watch...

Another video...

Yet another video...

"Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of his happiest and most loved comedies. It is called a "Dream" because of the unrealistic events the characters experience in the play — real, yet unreal: Crossed lovers, meaningless quarrels, forest chases leading to more confusion, and magic spells woven by the infamous Puck.

Balanchine was familiar with Shakespeare’s play from an early age. As a child he had appeared as an elf in a production in St. Petersburg, and he could recite portions of the play by heart in Russian. Balanchine loved Mendelssohn’s overture and incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (composed respectively in 1826 and 1843), and it is this score, Balanchine later said, that inspired his choreography. Mendelssohn had written only about an hour’s worth of music for the play, not enough for an evening-length dance work, so Balanchine studied the composer’s other oeuvre, finally selecting a number of additional overtures, a nocturne, an intermezzo, and a portion of Symphony No. 9, to weave together the ballet’s score.

Midsummer night has long been associated with love and magic. In European folklore it is the one night of the year when supernatural beings such as fairies are about and can interact with the real world. It is also a date that falls near the summer solstice, which was traditionally a time for fertility rites and festivals devoted to love. Shakespeare’s 1595 play has been the source for films, an opera by Benjamin Britten (1960), and a one-act ballet by Frederick Ashton, called The Dream (1964). George Balanchine’s version, which premiered in 1962, was the first wholly original evening-length ballet he choreographed in America. Two years later, on April 24, A Midsummer Night’s Dream opened the New York City Ballet’s first repertory season at the New York State Theater (now the David H. Koch Theater)."


A review...  The Pas de Deux discussed was immediately recognized as exceptional, not flashy, just really pretty.

Review: New York City Ballet, With Heartfelt Pas de Deux, in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’

At the center of Act II of George Balanchine’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is an intricate, hushed, slow, gentle, spellbinding pas de deux that has nothing to do with either the ballet’s story or the Shakespeare play on which it is based. Danced by an anonymous woman and man during the divertissement given by Duke Theseus for the triple wedding, it is an image of perfect chivalrous love and cooperation. On Tuesday night, when “Midsummer” made its annual return to City Ballet repertory at the David H. Koch Theater, it was danced by Tiler Peck and Tyler Angle as beautifully as I have ever known it, the legato of their phrasing spinning threads like gossamer.

This pas de deux is the complete opposite of the Pyramus-Thisbe play that occurs at the equivalent moment in Shakespeare’s play; and it is the largest point of several in which Balanchine does something unlike the playwright. What’s more, its combination of tender male fealty and serene female glory is an ideal far closer to Balanchine’s heart than Shakespeare’s.

Perhaps we can call it a counterpart to Theseus’s great lines about the poet’s imagination:

And as imagination bodies forth.

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

Still, Balanchine was often pushing away from Shakespeare here — and the chief clue to this is his choice of music. The whole ballet is set to items by Mendelssohn, but while Mendelssohn’s miraculous collection of items composed for Shakespeare’s play serves as the ballet’s binding thread, Balanchine’s greatest dance inventions occur to interpolations from five other scores.

The wedding divertissement, set to parts of the String Symphony No. 9, is a dance for seven couples. But its pas de deux, to an abbreviated version of the celestial second andante movement, goes beyond diversion: it becomes the ballet’s Platonic ideal of love, the perfect emblem at the wedding for the three human couples (Hippolyta and Theseus, Hermia and Lysander, Helena and Demetrius). And at some level it is an image of marital union to contrast with the discord we have seen between the fairy monarchs Titania and Oberon.

Titania in Act I (to the “Athalie” overture) has danced a very different pas de deux with an anonymous cavalier. Here — and the pun is implicit in Shakespeare’s choice of name — her scale is titanic, with wild jumps, catches, plunges and reversals. Tuesday’s Titania was Maria Kowroski (dancing at an early stage of pregnancy); her height and long limbs have always equipped her with an epic sweep, and here she showed particular dashes of humor and rapture.

The contrast between Titania’s huge dances and the divertissement pas de deux is a move from unconfined nature to civilized intimacy. When Titania and Oberon return at the end of the ballet, they too have learned concord. As they dance together, briefly, amid the other fairies — Ms. Kowroski, like many Balanchine Titanias, is taller than her Oberon (Joaquin De Luz) — we see that fairies too can be powerfully civilized.

As in 2007, 2010, 2012 and 2014, this June brings the chance to compare Balanchine’s “Midsummer” with Ashton’s one-act “The Dream” (also Shakespeare, also Mendelssohn), this time when the Royal Ballet comes to the Koch in three weeks’ time; no better exercise in ballet compare-and-contrast exists than between these two masterpieces, and only in New York does it recur. “Midsummer” is the more expansive of the two.

Like the Balanchine “Nutcracker,” Act I of “Midsummer” is all story, Act II all dance. Much of Act I’s comedy is very sweet. I laughed happily Tuesday to watch the enthusiasm with which Jared Angle’s lovelorn Lysander went on picking flowers for his Hermia (Sterling Hyltin) from the forest even while she was fending off the advances of Demetrius (Amar Ramasar). Ms. Hyltin is a wonderfully touching Hermia; and Rebecca Krohn catches much of the disconsolate passion of Helena. Savannah Lowery’s force this season has at times been too coarse; but in Hippolyta it’s excitingly unleashed.

Mr. De Luz, though landing more heavily than usual from jumps, brings his characteristic brilliance to Oberon. (This elusive role also needs more force and grace.) Antonio Carmena and Kristen Segin were making debuts as Puck and Butterfly; both were vivid (but Puck can use more mystery and less mugging). Balanchine daringly conjures much of his magic by casting tiny children as most of the fairies. The School of American Ballet’s performers create many kinds of enchantment.