Review: The National Ballet’s mesmerizing Apollo raises questions about Balanchine GlobeArts
currently getting a beautiful production as part of the National Ballet of Canada’s mixed program. The ballet is the sort of artistic achievement that can seem to exist outside of history – you might find yourself checking your program to confirm that it wasn’t choreographed in the last 10 years. Balanchine’s understanding of ballet was so intuitive and unimpeachable that it had the effect of gesturing in two temporal directions.
It’s in this exposure of truths that Balanchine’s ballets become more than abstract works of beauty; they are moral vehicles, too.is an almost too-perfect example of this moral perspective on art since it’s the ballet’s subject as well as its form. Apollo’s birth and visitation by the three muses is the quasi-origin story of Western art. The young god was one of the most complex deities, reigning over truth, knowledge and civilization in addition to his better-known jurisdiction over music.
But where do morals sit in ballet in 2019? If you’ve followed the scandal at the New York City Ballet – a company inextricable from Balanchine’s legacy – you might wonder if they have any place at all. In a recent New Yorker article on the retirement of artistic director Peter Martins and dismissal of three male company members, all concerning the sexual harassment and humiliation of female dancers, dance critic Joan Acocella went to great lengths to separate Martins’s tenure from Balanchine’s.
This is the thing about Balanchine: His focus on feminine beauty doesn’t make that beauty seem any less powerful or self-determined. And if you’re like me, and refuse to see femininity as a construct of patriarchy, his reverence can feel like an act of respectful witness, despite what was going on behind the scenes.Paquita,
a sort of ballet-Olympics for its female soloists and corps, who are challenged with difficult successive jumps and endless turns. Less satisfying was Julie Adam’s, created in 2000 for the San Francisco Ballet, which consists of ungainly configurations of dancers that split one’s attention and doesn’t fulfill the stakes of its dramatic score., has an understated naturalism that intrigued me from beginning to end.
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