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I am frequently amused by the technological gulf between the modern world and my old-school profession. Ballet dancing is about as low-tech as it gets. There are no CGI tweaks to improve our performances; the only aesthetic help we get is from false eyelashes, contour, and hours in the studio or at the gym. I have written in the past about how little the pointe shoe has changed over the course of ballet’s history. Ballet studios are equally rudimentary: a wall of mirrors and a fixed horizontal barre are about all one needs to practice the art form. I was thinking about this because yesterday morning, while at the barre in Nancy Bielski’s class at Steps, I looked out the window at the buildings all around me and spotted one massive modern skyscraper in the distance. I think it lies some twenty blocks away along Central Park South, but its sleek angled glass was jarring next to the filigreed stone and brick pre-war edifices of the Upper West Side. Without that towering beacon of modernity in my view of the skyline, I could have been at Steps 35 years ago (when it opened) and nothing would be different in the studio except the dancers: same space, same progression of ballet combinations, same piano, same leotards and sweatpants.
I have given several backstage tours in the past few weeks as friends and family have come to see the NYCB’s annual spate of Nutcracker performances, and I have noticed that while the children are not that interested in how the show’s visual effects are produced, the adults are incredibly curious about the stagecraft. I wonder if children today are so inured to the special effects in film and video-games that they aren’t that impressed by the physics-defying coups of the production, like the Sugarplum Fairy’s toe slide. "We live in the grip of a technological paradox, in which the proliferation of wonders dilutes the possibility of wonder," NY Times film critic A. O. Scott wrote recently. Or maybe they are just at the age when magic is real and expected—it is the time of year in which Santa circumnavigates the globe in one night with flying deer after all.
Balanchine’s Nutcracker is theatrically impressive, but the magic is decidedly old-school. Many of the innovations are borrowed from the Mariinksy production Balanchine danced in as a young boy (the ballet premiered in 1892). When people come backstage the first thing they want to know is how the bed moves by itself in Act I. Many imagine that it involves a motorized system that adjusts
I have given several backstage tours in the past few weeks as friends and family have come to see the NYCB’s annual spate of Nutcracker performances, and I have noticed that while the children are not that interested in how the show’s visual effects are produced, the adults are incredibly curious about the stagecraft. I wonder if children today are so inured to the special effects in film and video-games that they aren’t that impressed by the physics-defying coups of the production, like the Sugarplum Fairy’s toe slide. "We live in the grip of a technological paradox, in which the proliferation of wonders dilutes the possibility of wonder," NY Times film critic A. O. Scott wrote recently. Or maybe they are just at the age when magic is real and expected—it is the time of year in which Santa circumnavigates the globe in one night with flying deer after all.
Balanchine’s Nutcracker is theatrically impressive, but the magic is decidedly old-school. Many of the innovations are borrowed from the Mariinksy production Balanchine danced in as a young boy (the ballet premiered in 1892). When people come backstage the first thing they want to know is how the bed moves by itself in Act I. Many imagine that it involves a motorized system that adjusts
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