Jon took me to my first NYC Ballet performance on this rainy cold June night and I enjoyed it immensely. The first piece was “Glass Pieces” set to the music of Philip Glass with choreography by Jerome Robbins (all the pieces tonight featured his choreography). I’m not really sure how to write about dance, but I liked how the repetition in the choreography mirrored the repetition in the music with slight variations every time a section repeated. I was actually so moved by the first Glass Piece, “Rubric,” that I got a bit overwhelmed. After the first intermission they performed “The Cage” set to Igor Stravinsky’s music, and “Other Dances” set to Chopin and featuring pianist Cameron Grant. And after the second intermission they ended with “The Concert (Or, the Perils of Everybody) A Charade in One Act” also set to Chopin and featuring pianist Nancy McDill. It was a nice comic piece to end the evening and keep the audience’s energy up.
Jon and I speculated about the life of a dancer, the immersion, and tried to pick out dancers in the audience based on their posture, poise, and at the end of the evening, their feet and how they walked/stood. There were quite a few dancers hiding in the audience.
The evening was also a reminder of why I live in New York, to have access to such performances, to feel present in a moment.