“Memorizing” whole operas to a considerable degree of accuracy is a piece of cake. Just keep listening to the music at home (libretto in hand if you mean business), and the thing happens practically by osmosis. But memorizing the ballets of George Balanchine in comparable detail through home study? Dream on. Of the 465 titles in the official George Balanchine: A Catalogue of Works, an estimated 300+ exist merely as references in a database. Video of the surviving canon resides largely in archives for the benefit of working pros. What’s available to the general public is for the most part disappointingly dim, blurry, badly shot, edited worse, and far from complete.
Against this backdrop, a grab bag of clean, clear clips on the New York City Ballet Web site adds up to quite the treasure trove. Under headings like “Anatomy of a Dance” and “Inside the Repertory,” two-to-five-minute excerpts present top-flight artists in key sequences from canonical favorites. No-frills yet Palladian camerawork affords their uncropped figures space to activate, space to breathe.
What the dancers show us and the things they say leave sharp, lasting impressions. Partnered by Adrian Danchig-Waring, Teresa Reichlen illuminates quirks and technical challenges in the Baroque-inflected pas de deux of Chaconne. Daniel Ulbricht demonstrates the white-glove finish required of the leader of the men’s regiment in Stars and Stripes as well as the Rubik’s Cube complexities of the Gigue from Mozartiana. Baily Jones shares her exuberance in her solo from Scotch Symphony, which conjures up—without recourse to bagpipes, swords crossed on the ground, or the traditional footwork—daredevil dances of the Highlands.
Tiler Peck’s serene Terpsichore speaks to the sense of discovery built into her pas de deux with Taylor Stanley as the leader of the muses in Apollo. Joseph Gordon delves deep into the heart of that underappreciated masterpiece Divertimento from “Le Baiser de la Fée”; Erica Pereira joins him in telling rehearsal and performance footage.
The dancer who turns up most often is the mercurial yet magisterial Sara Mearns. You’ll find her in such contrasting fare as the spicy Rondo alla Zingarese of Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet, the high-kicking dance-hall climax of Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, the calm-before-the-storm pas de deux of Walpurgisnacht Ballet, and the lunar legato Adagio of Symphony in C. Her immersion in the music, her sensual response to mood, and the theatrical force of the steps themselves astonishes afresh every time. But never more so than in the Gothic ballroom finale of La Valse, in which Death—a demonic Justin Peck—singles out her ingenue in white from among the ensemble of sirens in charcoal and rose.
“I feel like when I get out onstage, I have no control over what I’m doing, even though we’ve rehearsed it. I really fling myself all over the place and let him dictate everything that happens,” Mearns says in voice-over.
She illustrates abandon in every frame, even owning a wardrobe malfunction that might have thrown another dancer off her game. Peck sets Mearns spinning, and off she whirls, a paper doll in a cyclone. He snatches her out of thin air, and suddenly she’s a marionette, crumpling from the knees as if Fate had cut her strings.
Clips are available for streaming on the New York City Ballet Web site. Fans of Jerome Robbins will find gems, too, including a five-minute featurette on Dances at a Gathering, with commentary by Harrison Ball and Indiana Woodward, video direction by Emilie Silvestri
Matthew Gurewitsch writes about opera and classical music for AIR MAIL. He lives in Hawaii
