Springing Into Fall

The banners and posters around Lincoln Center are not a mistake—the New York City Ballet really is performing this fall. For decades, the company has been locked into a predictable schedule: winter and spring seasons, the former launched by the perennial holiday marathon of The Nutcracker. For diehard ballet fans who live to experience NYCB’s generous and varied repertory, this meant waiting from late June, when the spring season closed, until early January to experience the real deal.

But this year the company is mixing things up in a big way. The dancers had barely shed the summer tans and had a shorter-than-usual hiatus following the annual Saratoga Springs season in July, before it was time to reconvene to rehearse for the company’s first autumn performances in the city since 1965.

Peter Martins, the company’s Ballet Master in Chief, was eager for NYCB to be part of the city’s post-Labor Day energizing renewal of cultural activity, and this year the company made new arrangements with New York City Opera, which shares the theater and usually begins its fall season at this time. NYCB will perform for four weeks before the opera moves in for a late-autumn stint. NYCB’s entire 2010-11 schedule has a different look, with the company taking a two-week post-Nutcracker break in early January, and cutting its spring season back to six weeks, ending mid-June.

Jenifer Ringer, the versatile and vivid principal dancer, admits that the shortened summer necessitated “a faster getting-in-shape process” when the company returned for rehearsals Aug. 24, but sees the altered schedule as a positive development. “I think in the long run it’s going to be a lot healthier for the dancers. We end up dancing the same amount of weeks we always did, but they’ve spaced them out, and interspersed little breaks, and also little rehearsal periods. So we don’t have an intensive performance period for a long period of time, which is what we usually had—and which was so difficult, physically, for the dancers—to maintain that high level for so long.”

To emphasize and celebrate the company’s new schedule and the more ongoing performing presence it entails, NYCB is launching its new fall season with a flurry of special events and bonus activities for its audience. All opening-night tickets are available at the bargain prices of $25 and $50, and members of that Sept. 14 audience will be invited to take pre-performance tours of the theater. During the opening week, the theater will open an hour before performances, and NYCB’s orchestra will offer 45-minute jazz concerts on the spacious Promenade. Principal dancers will participate in pre-performance “Meet the Artists” talks that are free for ticketholders, and will also provide introductory remarks from the stage. (Henry Leutwyler features the 24 principal dancers in a photo exhibition on display on the theater all season.)

“It’s very exciting to be part of this new fall season, and to see the direction the company is going in right now, because I think it’s really about embracing the community and embracing the audience, and allowing more access to the dancers and to the company,” Ringer says. “We’re giving a more intimate look at what makes the company run, and what makes this choreography so special, and what makes the dancers so interesting. I think this first week, we’re getting a glimpse of how the company is going to be opening its doors and allowing more access.”

The four weeks this fall offer many of the company’s George Balanchine classics—Serenade, Concerto Barocco, Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet, Who Cares?, and Stravinsky Violin Concerto—as well as a revival of Martins’ 1981 The Magic Flute, a charming re-working of an older story ballet. The season also offers a second look at several of the new ballets created for last spring’s Architecture of Dance festival. The first to return is Namouna: A Grand Divertissement, Alexei Ratmansky’s generous, leisurely and thoroughly delightful ballet set to a little-known and revelatory Edouard Lalo score. Ringer has one of her finest roles ever in this work, which she describes as “an hour of great dancing, for the corps de ballet up to the principals. It’s one of the most challenging ballets created for the corps in a long time; they do some hard stuff! It really is a good exhibition of the fact that our corps can really dance. It’s so nice to see a choreographer come in and challenge them, use them to their fullest abilities.”

Although Namouna fits right into the mostly plotless NYCB repertory of works that illuminate their music, its score was composed for a rather fantastical narrative ballet, and hints of characters and situations appear. “Alexei said, ‘there’s no story’—but with his work, there’s always a sense of drama that’s driving the dance, a dramatic impulse behind what the dancers are doing.”

New York City Ballet

Sept. 14 through Oct. 10, David H. Koch Theater, 20 Lincoln Center (W. 63rd St. & Columbus Ave.), 212-721-6500; Tue.-Sun., times vary, $20-$135; Opening night only: $25 & $50.