Dancing When Everyone’s Looking: Two Dance Celebrations

With Nutcrackers, Rockettes and Viennese waltzers, Thanksgiving to New Year's is the solitary time of the year when the general public shows an interest in dance.  Before the holiday rush there were two dance celebrations - one marking an anniversary and the other a look into the beginnings of extraordinary career - with varying success.   Balanchine: The City Center Years Starting on Halloween and ending on November 4, 2018, New York City Center jointly commemorated their 75th Anniversary and the prolific 15 years (1948-1963) George Balanchine and New York City Ballet were there.  In 1943, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia created the New

2018 BAM Next Wave Festival: Jerome Robbins’ ‘Watermill’

Joaquin De Luz. Photo courtesy of BAM

  A man looks back on his life.  As ballet plots go, Watermill is fairly straightforward.  It's in the telling that makes it Jerome Robbins' most theatrical and intimate work.  Predating the first Next Wave Festival by 11 years, the seldom-seen 1972 dance appeared at this year's Festival as part of the Jerome Robbins Centennial Celebration with recent New York City Ballet retiree Joaquin De Luz and students from the Conservatory of Dance at Purchase College SUNY. Robbins applied elements of his early modern dance training, work in Yiddish theatre, and Japanese Noh  to Watermill.  The choreographer said, "The ballet itself is influenced

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