Eschewing Stories, Ballet Often Struggles for Purpose

Reading the New York Times today (March 12, 2020), I glanced through a review of a performance by Scottish Ballet at the Joyce theater in Manhattan, a mecca of dance.

The program, entitled "This Is My Body …" and consisting of two contemporary pieces, was labeled "unispiring" by Siobhan Burke, an NYT dance critic. The first of the two pieces, she said, showed off the dancers' "stunning technique and muscular physiques, but little else."

The Role of the Dead in the Lives of the Living

The other night, I attended a performance of "Cinderella" by the Pacific Northwest Ballet.  This was not a conventional "Cinderella," such as that choreographed by Fredrick Ashton and performed by the American Ballet Theater, but rather a reinterpretation of the story by Jean-Christophe Maillot, of Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo.

The main difference: Cinderella's father is obsessed with his deceased former wife (Cinderella's mother), and dance connected with that relationship both opens and closes Maillot's ballet, leaving viewers as thinking as much about that as about Cinderella's successful conquest of the famous prince, which is of course pre-ordained and thus perhaps not as interesting.