New York City Ballet’s Opening Night High on Substance and Style
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The opening night of the New York City Ballet’s 59th season on Tuesday was a record-breaking fund-raising event, bringing in $1.6 million. The evening was also much richer in substance than in years past.
From the stage of the New York State Theater came tributes in the forms of dance, words, and film to the co-founder of the New York City Ballet, Lincoln Kirstein. His legacy, which includes bringing his co-founder — choreographer George Balanchine — to America, is being celebrated in the year that marks the centennial of his birth.
Grainy black-and-white footage showed Kirstein being interviewed, in 1964, at the ballet’s first opening night in the theater; he had worked closely on it with architect and friend Philip Johnson.
“I love the outside, the inside, the stage, the backstage, I love the cellars,” Kirstein says in the film. Nearly 25 years later, the theater is slated for renovation as part of the redevelopment effort at Lincoln Center.
A later film shows Mayor Koch joking with Kirstein about his influence on the arts in New York. “You’d think we’d name a major performing arts center after you — but we already did,” Mayor Koch says. (In fact, the “Lincoln” in the name really originates from the name of the neighborhood where the center stands.)
The dance program featured near-perfect performances. There were flower garlands, exotically costumed princes, and a princess in excerpts from “The Sleeping Beauty.” There were cowboys and cowgirls in “Western Symphony,” with principal Damian Woetzel’s leaps and bounds eliciting jaw-dropping awe.
The final dance on the program, “A Life for the Tsar,” featured 64 children enrolled in the School of American Ballet — also a product of Kirstein’s vision. Some of these dancers were so excited they bowed and ran off stage a few moments early. All of them, however, added tenderness, good form, and amazing smiles to the work.
“To see these students is to know the brilliance of the original vision,” the ballet’s master in chief, and chairman of the faculty at the school, Peter Martins, said. There are many chances to see them in “The Nutcracker,” which runs exclusively through December 22.
The program also included a screening of the first completed scene from the film “N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz,” a project initiated by two New York City Ballet dancers, Ellen Bar and Sean Suozzi, and being executed by filmmakers Henry Joost, Jody Lee Lipes, and Ariel Schulman. The scene, which has already won international acclaim, was filmed for $45,000; the project budget is $1 million.
“This was a great opportunity for them to get donors interested in helping them complete the project,” the president of the Alliance for the Arts, Randall Bourscheidt, an early champion of the project, said at the post-performance dinner.
Before making decisions on arts donations, however, the guests, including Michael J. Fox, Christy Turlington, and Catherine Malandrino, were focused on their Thanksgiving holidays. Jamee and Peter Gregory flew to Chicago to be with Jamee’s mother. Barbara and Donald Tober went to their home in Millbrook, N.Y. The president of the New York City Ballet, Frederick Beinecke, and his wife Candace, celebrated the holiday in the city.
Meanwhile, the company is London-bound: In March, it will have a two-week engagement at the London Coliseum. The company has not performed in London for more than 25 years; it was the first foreign city in which it performed, in 1950.
agordon@nysun.com