Out & About
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia, loves the New York City Ballet. “I lived in New York for 20 years, and for 20 years I had a subscription to the New York City Ballet,” he told the audience at the New York City Ballet’s spring gala Wednesday night.
The praise continued. “I don’t have to tell you that as I sat in row M, I had the conviction I was watching the greatest dance company in the world,” he said.
Mr. Gioia was proud to note that the National Endowment for the Arts has given 100 grants to the New York City Ballet. “We can’t wait to give the next 100 grants,” he said.
The program featured five works new to the company, including the quiet, romantic “Distant Cries,” choreographed by principal dancer
Edwaard Liang, and the jumping, joyful “An American in Paris,” choreographed by the ballet’s choreographer in residence, Christopher Wheeldon. The ballet’s devoted group of patrons starred in the evening’s sixth piece, “Dinner and Dancing,” staged on the New York State Theater’s promenade. That work began with the highest-profile patrons clustered center stage, on the dance floor scattered with hydrangea petals to soften their landings. The middle act consisted of sitting and eating, with waiters from Glorious Food performing the most dramatic, complicated movements: serving grilled tournedos and matchstick potatoes from heavy, oversize silver trays. The gala’s chairwomen, Mellody Hobson and Maria Bartiromo,announced that the event had raised more than $2 million. The news brought everyone to their feet. The disco dancing went past midnight.
David Monn, who designed a French garden for Monday’s Costume Institute Ball, showed a more modest but equally elegant flair here, hanging orbs of hydrangea petals and fluttering strips of white fabric from the ceiling. It’s too bad Mr. Monn wasn’t around to hear the assessment by Chanel’s vice chairman, Arie Kopelman, of the Costume Institute Ball, which celebrated the institute’s new exhibit on Chanel.
“I’m speaking objectively. It was by far the most exciting, the most beautiful and star-studded of all the Costume Institute Balls I’ve been to, and I’ve been to many,” he said. “There was a certain magic that night.”
For Mr. Monn and the chic New Yorkers who’ve had the privilege of seeing his work, it’s been a magical week, and there’s plenty more in store.
