jay rogoff

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.

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.

In his new book, "Becoming Poetry" (LSU Press), Jay Rogoff closely inspects the work of two dozen poets, his forebears and his contemporaries, to reveal how their poetry impacts readers. Rogoff will be talking about and signing his book on Wednesday, November 8 at Northshire Bookstore in Saratoga Springs, New York.

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.

For the third summer running, the one-week New York City Ballet residency at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center opened Tuesday night not with a spectacular full-evening ballet, or gems from the permanent repertory, or a mix of classics and exciting new works, but with an anthology of excerpts from most of the week’s offerings. While most dance goers would rather experience the thrilling emotional architecture that a great company like NYCB can provide in complete ballets, the lecture-demo proved entertaining and illuminating, with the guidance of principal dancers Adrian Danchig-Waring and Tiler Peck.

Jay Rogoff continues his reviews of the New York City Ballet at Saratoga Performing Arts Center.

Justin Peck’s In Creases, the first work he made for the New York City Ballet, returned to the Saratoga Performing Arts Center Thursday for the first time since its 2012 world premiere. It proved one of the program’s two highlights, the other a superb performance of George Balanchine’s 1946 masterpiece, The Four Temperaments.

Ballet presents a world of imaginative order, and Wednesday at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, the New York City Ballet illuminated three different approaches to order in dance. The Twentieth Century Masters program featured the two choreographers most entwined with NYCB’s history, George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. The evening’s third genius, modern dance’s Merce Cunningham, created works that challenged ballet’s architecture but inspired Balanchine to have NYCB dance his 1958 Summerspace, which has returned to SPAC after a fifty-five year absence.