Jay Rogoff

In April, the Greene County Legislature decided to celebrate National Poetry Month in an unusual way. They fired the county’s poet laureate, Esther Cohen. What was the cause? She practiced her First Amendment rights as guaranteed by the United States Constitution.

If a ballet doesn’t have an enchanted swan, or a sleeping princess, or a mechanical woman, what is it about?

In our technological age, when we increasingly depend on robots and other machines, and become seduced and bewildered by artificial intelligence, the ballet Coppélia tells us what it means to be human.

Spend enough time watching George Balanchine’s ballets, and you start to believe that he could express anything on the stage. Friday’s all-Balanchine New York City Ballet program at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center progressed from tragic romance to comic celebration, with Swan Lake and Stars and Stripes marking its emotional poles.

The New York City Ballet’s riches include its priceless repertory of ballets, especially those by George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. It might surprise us, then, that the company commissions more new dances than any other ballet troupe. Thursday night at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, four of these contemporary works demonstrated the great variety of ways in which NYCB keeps pirouetting into the future.

In 1967, George Balanchine created Jewels, billed as the world’s first three-act story-less ballet. But watching the New York City Ballet perform it at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center Wednesday night made it clear that even without a plot, Jewels has many stories to tell.

The New York City Ballet returned to the Saratoga Performing Arts Center Tuesday night with tantalizing tastes of the full banquets to come. Principal dancers Adrian Danchig-Waring and Unity Phelan emceed the NYCB On and Off Stage program with intelligence, wit, and a full smorgasbord of ballet commentary on the excerpts the company danced, as well as the full ballets they will stage through Saturday night.

The New York City Ballet brought a program of three classic mid-twentieth-century ballets Friday night to a packed amphitheater crowd of 5000 at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, with hundreds more watching from the lawn.

In 2011, In Creases, Justin Peck’s first dance for the New York City Ballet, enjoyed its world premiere at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. Since then, he has made twenty-two more works for the company, and Thursday’s matinee at SPAC brought his newest. Copland Dance Episodes, billed as his first evening-length work, is a big, bold, winning ballet for thirty dancers, filled with pure feeling and excellent performances.

Much of the New York City Ballet’s worldwide fame depends on its matchless repertory by its two founding choreographers, George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. Surprisingly, though, NYCB also commissions more new works than any other ballet company in the world. Wednesday night’s SPAC Premieres program at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center featured four twenty-first century ballets made for the company, each by a different choreographer. Three of them appeared on the SPAC stage for the first time, while one, Justin Peck’s Scherzo Fantastique, had its world premiere there in 2016.