This 47-Year-Old Can Still Dance

The season premiere of Jerome Robbins’s “In the Night” on Friday night at New York City Ballet provided a now-rare opportunity to see Kyra Nichols, 47, the company’s senior ballerina. Ms. Nichols, one of two ballerinas still performing who worked directly under Balanchine (the other is Darci Kistler), joined the company as a teenager in 1974. She did not possess overly long lines or stretch, but neither was she foreshortened. Her relative physical containment, coupled with a more restrained and academic style than was customary in NYCB at that time, enabled Ms. Nichols to quickly carve out and retain her own niche within the ballerina pantheon.Throughout her career, Ms. Nichols has danced with pinpoint musicality and meticulous technique. For my taste, however, she has sometimes been too efficient for her own good.When during the 1980s she began dancing roles created by Suzanne Farrell, who had been the reigning NYCB divinity during Ms. Nichols’s early career, I missed Ms. Farrell’s more extravagant kinetic imagination as well as her discretionary approach to the music. Ms. Farrell liked to toy and tease and luxuriate; Ms. Nichols’s approach is more pristine and businesslike. On the other hand, she has demonstrated a sense of humor – most recently in a wicked stepmother role in Susan Strohman’s “Double Feature” – and a heightened understanding of theatrical rhetoric, as when she performed Balanchine’s solo “Pavane,” in which she was asked to broker a partnership with her draped costume.Costume is also essential to “In the Night.” Although the original chiffon shifts have been replaced by elaborate evening gowns, they retain the filmy texture that was designed to clothe movement that rustled as much as the costumes.Probably the greatest choreographic treatment of Chopin is Fokine’s “Les Sylphides,” in part for the ethereal impersonality that governs its interactions. Robbins’s approach, embracing the tempestuous romanticism of the music, is diametrically different but also very effective. The three duets in “In the Night” seem to become increasingly personal until, in the final duet, there is a near-voyeuristic focus on the psychodramas played out within this particular couple.Friday night, Ms. Nichols was joined by Philip Neal in the second duet, which contains its own significant quotient of passionate effusions. She demonstrated her ability to perform the rhetoric of a piece that is not within her natural inclinations. Her professionalism was manifest as she essayed movement that laps wavelike over the lineaments of the clean-cut positions for which she has always shown a special affinity. At 47, Ms. Nichols is still limber, her pirouettes secure.***Last week’s repertory was also notable for debuts by Jonathan Stafford in “Symphony in C” and “Firebird.” Mr. Stafford joined the company in 1999 and over the last year has been dancing a slew of debuts. Understandably, he seems a bit dazed by his emergence into the spotlight from the sidelines, but overall he has performed well, and has proved that he is one of the company’s most promising men.Like Ms. Nichols, Mr. Stafford does not rely on flash or blandishments tossed at the audience. He tries to execute everything he does with utmost correctness, while maintaining an elegant sweep to his movement. Earlier this season, when he danced the ballroom scene’s pas de quatre in Peter Martins’s “Swan Lake,” Mr. Stafford comported himself more like an incipient danseur noble, finishing one double tour in a clean fifth position – an amenity one does not see all that frequently on the ballet stage.Mr. Stafford is very trim and delicately built, well equipped to essay the acerbity of Balanchine’s choreography. Only occasionally are his legs needlessly guilty of the dryness that often settles upon very thin men on the ballet stage.Last Wednesday he made his debut as the lead in the first movement of “Symphony in C,” partnering a wiry and brilliantly incised Jennie Somogyi. Mr. Stafford entered downstage left with a willowy bend to his torso that immediately announced him as a significant presence. Not all the technique was performed equally well, but some of it was extraordinarily good.The next night he made an agreeable impression as a village lad in Mr. Martins’s “Songs of the Auvergne,” revived for the first time since 1995 and notable this time for Ms. Kistler’s unstinting performance. Later that evening, we saw Mr. Stafford’s Prince Ivan in the company’s production of “Firebird,” a melange of several different productions mounted by NCYB since 1949.From the moment he creeps out behind a scrim at the back of this stage, Ivan as conceived here is clearly patterned after the archetypal village “Ivan” of Russian folklore, a doltish and gauche young hero. Mr. Stafford’s bumptious Ivan was a worthy foil to the lush and feral Firebird of Sofiane Sylve, whom he captured and then released, thus eventually making possible his marriage to the glamorous princess of Rachel Rutherford.City Ballet’s winter repertory runs until February 26 at the New York State Theater (Lincoln Center, 212-870-5570).

This 47-Year-Old Can Still Dance

This 47-Year-Old Can Still Dance

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