The company will present a mix of new and old works, including a full-length premiere to Aaron Copland by Justin Peck.
The pandemic has been disorienting for New York City Ballet, disrupting the careers of many rising stars and resulting in the loss of millions in ticket revenue.
Next season, the company hopes to restore a sense of normalcy by presenting an ambitious mix of new and old works, it announced on Friday, including many ballets meant to help train a younger generation of dancers.
“This is a vitamin shot of what we’ve been known for,” Wendy Whelan, City Ballet’s associate artistic director, who helped plan the new season, said in an interview.
The 2022-23 season, which will feature 48 ballets from September through May, will include new works by the choreographers Christopher Wheeldon, Keerati Jinakunwiphat and Alysa Pires, among others. The fall fashion gala will feature premieres by the choreographers Kyle Abraham and Gianna Reisen, a recent graduate of the School of American Ballet.
In January, the company will present a full-length exploration of the music of Aaron Copland, by Justin Peck, the resident choreographer and artistic adviser, featuring visual designs by the painter Jeffrey Gibson.
A major focus will be on presenting large-scale, foundational classics — what Whelan called “very big and very team-oriented ballets” — as part of an effort to train City Ballet’s younger dancers after a series of high-profile retirements.
The lineup includes George Balanchine’s “Vienna Waltzes” and “Raymonda Variations” in fall; Jerome Robbins’s “West Side Story Suite” and Peter Martins’s staging of “The Sleeping Beauty” in winter season.
“We have a lot of young talent and a lot of flowers blooming,” Whelan said. “We’ve got a lot of people that we want to keep feeding at a high level.”
The season will also include several works by the choreographer Alexei Ratmansky, the former artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet who is now an artist in residence at American Ballet Theater, including his “Concerto DSCH” and “Pictures at an Exhibition.”
The pandemic forced the cancellation of City Ballet’s entire 2020-21 season. After returning to the stage in the fall, Whelan said that some dancers expressed an interest in getting more exposure to the rigorous training provided by classics.
“Some of them were like: ‘We just want to do ballet. We haven’t done ballet for two years,” she said. “They said, ‘We want to get razor sharp and at this level.’ ”
The coming season is “going to make everybody a better dancer,” she added.
The coronavirus continues to loom over the performing arts. City Ballet estimates that it has lost $55 million in anticipated ticket sales since the start of the pandemic.
While many cultural institutions have pushed forward with full seasons this year, the Omicron variant still poses a challenge. The surge in cases forced City Ballet to cancel 26 shows in December and January, including performances of “The Nutcracker,” typically its most lucrative show of the year.
Audience behavior is also changing. At City Ballet, attendance is about 80 percent of prepandemic levels.
The possibility of another outbreak is “always at the back of our minds,” Whelan said.
Dancers have recently started wearing masks again in studios, she said, amid the uptick in cases in New York.
“We’re doing everything we can to keep everybody safe,” she said.
Source: Music - nytimes.com
