THE popular image of New York City Ballet is decoratively Spartan – long, perfect ranks of dancers dressed in somber, black and white leotards on a bare, bleak stage – everything stripped down for the athletic aestheticism of dance.
Well, yes, it sometimes is like that – but far from always. At the New York State Theater, for City Ballet’s 50th-anniversary season, we had restored to the repertory a number of ballets that went against the grain of that image – if images have grains!
George Balanchine’s ”Bugaku,” not seen for a season or two, is the choreographer’s idea of a Japanese marriage ritual conceptualized in terms of classic dance.
It involves the most erotic duet (tastefully erotic, mind you) that he ever created, and this season it is being exquisitely danced by Darci Kistler – new to the role – as the not-too-fluttering bride and Jock Soto as her proud and prowling groom.
But what is also fascinating about ”Bugaku” (1963) is the sensuousness of its scenery by that remarkably inventive designer, David Hays.
Hays also provided a wondrous woodland tent for Jacques d’Amboise’s long-overlooked ”Irish Fantasy.”
It makes a fresh, enjoyable dance excursion – here, rhapsodically given by a whole new cast, led by a scintillating Alexandra Ansanelli and Damian Woetzel.
But, then again, nothing much could be more unlike the standard City Ballet image than the Chopinesque peasants of Jerome Robbins’ ecstatically Romantic ”Dances at a Gathering.” Among this season’s casts, the sterling Woetzel and a graciously ditsy Maria Kowroski proved outstanding.
Of course, no image is completely undeserved, and Balanchine’s ”Ballo della Regina,” in which Miranda Weese has made a fierce-driven yet sparkling debut, and Peter Martins’ superb essay in baroque architectonics, ”Concerti Armonici,” which looks better on each successive seeing and is now handsomely danced by ensemble and soloists, both put a firm emphasis on what will always be the specialty of City Ballet’s house: pure classic dancing.