ABT at Avery Fisher Hall.
http://www.thirteen.org/sundayarts/blog/ballet/abt%E2%80%94short-and-sweet/760/
Absence makes the heart grow fonder, so they say. So it is with ABT, which instead of two weeks at City Center this fall, did a handful of performances last week at Avery Fisher Hall. Making it perhaps even worse is seeing just one show, a reminder of how special their fall seasons can be, when they perform contemporary work and the younger company has a chance to be featured. This program included three new commissions by Alex Ratmansky, Aszure Barton, and Benjamin Millepied, all set to live music played onstage.
Ratmansky’s Seven Sonatas (to Scarlatti) led off. Three couples mixed and matched or went solo in this suite performed by Barbara Bilach on piano. It took awhile to adjust to the dancers entering/exiting from two doors on each side wall (I kept expecting one to make for the closed fire door, dead center), but the stage seemed much larger than in my memory, if terrible acoustically for dance, amplifying the dancers’ footfalls. The cast I caught included three women—Hee Seo, with a lush upper body; the sparkling Sarah Lane; and the truly committed Yuriko Kajiya—paired with, respectively, a maturing, complete Jared Matthews, the muscular Joseph Phillips, and Carlos Lopez, who has never looked better in a role. Ratmansky’s playful musicality and wit flowed through the episodes showing different phases of love.
