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January 15, 2007
Latest Dance Article
Beauty's Debutantes, on Sterling Hyltin's debut as Aurora (among several others) at NYCB.
Even with her lively presence, one could sense that Sterling Hyltin had the jitters in her debut as Aurora in Peter Martins’ “Sleeping Beauty”.
The first paragraph of that review got rejiggered a few times, because of the way I write reviews. I take notes during the performance, then transcribe them at home and craft the review from that. It means I have a clear record of my immediate thoughts as I watched, but the danger is that the notes have little perspective in their immediacy. On the first draft, I felt that I dwelled too much on Hyltin's nerves. It does need to be mentioned, but nerves in a debut as Aurora is more the rule than the exception. By changing the order of the sentences to front-load the paragraph with more about Hyltin, as opposed to Hyltin's nerves, I felt it better reflected what actually happened.
Glamorous and malevolent, Barak looked as if she didn’t only use NYCB’s previous interpreters as models; there seemed to be a bit of Walt Disney’s Maleficent as well as The Wicked Witch of the West thrown in. If there is any justice, she’d be groomed and put on a path to becoming a Principal Character Artist. But of course, NYCB is a company that doesn’t need such things. Or does it? Now that the company is doing more and more narrative ballets for better and for worse, are they going to admit that it takes different abilities, training and coaching to dance and act them, or are they going to keep pretending that changes in repertory have no consequences?
It's nice to have gotten to the point in reviewing where I feel able to open up a can of worms, as in that last sentence, without feeling as if I need to close it again. It's a very interesting issue - and one I hope to discuss in the future here, but I was assigned to cover debuts in Sleeping Beauty.
There are two other Beauty reviews at DVT this week as well, Gay Morris' of the Bouder/Millepied cast and Michael Popkin for Fairchild/deLuz. Check 'em out.
Posted by Leigh Witchel at January 15, 2007 3:54 PM
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