Swan Song: Retirement of Ballerina Darci Kistler

Last Sunday I attended a historic event: the retirement of New York City Ballet principal dancer Darci Kistler.

Darci was the last in a long string of larger-than-life ballerinas who were hand-picked and trained by the equally larger-than-life George Balanchine.
With the exception of an ankle injury that sidelined her in the '80s, Darci has enjoyed a remarkable 30 year performance career as a dancer at City Ballet, and remains its fastest rising star (from Apprentice to Principal in just 2 years).

This poster of Darci adorned my dorm room walls throughout college:

She's posing as Odette, the lead character from "Swan Lake," atop the surface of The Pond at Central Park, with The Plaza visible in the background. This image, with its illusory magic, always defined for me the best of everything about City Ballet. I cannot imagine a recent City Ballet principal better suited to pose for this iconic photo, and I will treasure it always as a perfect tribute to the city and the art that I love so dearly.

I have been looking forward to her farewell performance for months, but I confess that Darci has never been one of my favorite performers, though I have always respected her deeply.

I frequently find myself longing for glory days which predate my lifetime, and my sense has always been that Darci was great long before I ever got to see her dance (in fact, before I was even born), and that she may have done well to retire several years ago.

Though I don't always agree with his assessments, statements made in NYTimes dance critic Alastair Macaulay's review of Darci's final performance seem to corroborate my personal feelings on her career:
"The film 'George Balanchine's "The Nutcracker,"' in which she appeared as the Sugar Plum Fairy, suggests that her glory lasted until at least 1993. But my memory is that by 1992, her dancing had become scaled down, polite and musically safe. Since then her career has been a long, slow fade... After Sunday’s performance I had coffee with a balletgoer who had become a devotee of New York City Ballet in 1996. I was hoping that he would tell me how the later Kistler had meant to him something of what Fonteyn once meant to me. But in all those years, Ms. Kistler’s dancing had never been one of his reasons to follow the company. Her pale autumn has lasted far longer than her bright spring and summer combined, and I cannot see that since 1992 she has been a good role model for the young."

He acknowledges, generously, her undeniable loveliness:
"Her long, tapering limbs; remarkable breadth of shoulder; loveliness of facial features (and in particular her lips, whose beautiful outline registered in the theater with great distinction); the beautiful pliancy of her feet,"
and noted how, during her farewell performance,
"the light still falls beautifully on the planes of her face."
And yet, the time has come for her to bid us adieu.

Many balletomanes have maintained that as long as Darci dances, Balanchine lives.
I used to think that was true; after all, there is nothing like a direct link to the origin of genius to legitimize the continuation of a tradition.
And yet, as I watched Darci dance on Sunday, I found myself longing for other dancers to join her on stage...Tess Reichlen, Maria Kowroski, Sara Mearns.
And I realized that the tradition will continue, perhaps stronger, after Darci.
Macaulay came to the same conclusion, ending his review by stating:
"With the retirement of this last Balanchine ballerina, we have all moved one generation on in history."

I'll leave you with some photos I took during the farewell:

Final performance bow after Swan Lake, Act IV:


Accepting her first flower, from conductor Clotilde Otranto:


A final cast bow:


A bear hug and flowers from former principal dancer Albert Evans, who retired one week prior:


Getting a lift from past and present male Principal dancers, with other Principals surrounding her on stage:


Baby bouquets from baby ballerinas of the School of American Ballet (where Darci has long been a teacher):


Darci is the youngest child with four older brothers.
Three of them, along with her mother, came on stage and lifted her up, in one of the most fun and touching moments of the evening:


Hugging daughter Talicia:


Showered with falling glitter:


It really was quite a sight to behold:


The sunlight begins to set on Lincoln Center after the farewell ends:


Hoping the best will always be yet to come,
Cxx.

Central Park Comes to Life: Snowmageddon 2010

As most of you may have heard -- and some of you have experienced -- NYC is currently in the middle of a blizzard. This being the city that never sleeps, not much changed today other than schools being canceled and my haircut getting rescheduled.

Since school children were out for the day, however, this meant a lot of sledding, snowball fighting and snowman building in Central Park. I took a little stroll to check out the scene.

The hill at the 77th Street entrance.

This little girl was half of a pair of adorable twins, both of whom wore ballet pink Moncler jackets and ski pants. So New York.

My Bean Boots put to good use.

Snowmen of all varieties were on display:








In the Spring and Summer months I spend a lot of time in this particular section of the Park, called Cedar Hill. I pack a lunch and read on the benches while I eat. Sometimes I even take a nap in the sunshine on this exact knoll (I hope this news won't worry my mother; I haven't been murdered yet.). In fact, I've experienced some of the most restful sleep of my life in this very spot.

In the snow, however, this location that I know so well and frequent so often is wholly transformed. My sudden consciousness of this fact today made me realize that the versatility of NYC's landmarks is one of the things I love best about this city.

Just beyond these Park walls are two of the places where I work. Whereas this part of the Park often serves as my lunch spot or after work stop, today it felt like a playground designed exclusively for winter sporting fun.

This statue of Alice in Wonderland is often crowded by tourists in warmer months but was reclaimed today by native New Yorkers.

And the Boat Basin -- which in the summertime is full of electronic toy sailboats, and a point of convergence for ice cream-eating visitors -- was transformed into a place for quiet reflection today.

Any geographic location that experiences seasons undergoes this kind of transformation from month to month, but because many of those places (I'm thinking of my homestate of Kansas) are car-based societies, one's experience doesn't change from Autumn to Winter to Spring to Summer. In New York, you live outside and every change is felt in wholly-consuming and wonderfully metamorphic ways.

As I left the park I passed a father pulling his children in a sled across a Fifth Avenue crosswalk.
Only in New York.

Cxx.

Visions of Dew Drop Fairies Danced in My Head

(Reichlen as Sugar Plum Fairy in a past season)

Last week the Bunny's mother treated me to a very special NYC experience: a performance of George Balanchine's "Nutcracker" at the City Ballet.
She couldn't have given me a more perfect gift; ballet is one of the true loves of my life.
As soon as we selected our attendance date, I compulsively checked the dancer casting on NYCB's website until it was posted. I am the balletomane described in the first few paragraphs of THIS article. But what a delight! Teresa Reichlen, one of the best dancers I've ever seen, was to dance the role of Dew Drop Fairy!



I first saw Ms. Reichlen this summer when she danced an incredible piece entitled "Bleeding All Over You" with Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company. She made such an impression on me that, looking back on my blog post from that event, I'm shocked that I didn't comment upon her dancing at all.



It's not often that I can remember exactly HOW a dancer moves.
I frequently leave a performance with general feelings and impressions about a dancer's artistry.
But Teresa Reichlen's movements were so singular that every aspect of the specialness of her dancing was burned into my mind. Her great lyrical sense allows her to play with the music's measure, drawing out special characteristics in the score that might otherwise go unnoticed; pairing this with beautiful movement only underscores how imaginative and invaluable dancing is as an art form. As Gia Kourlas of the NYTimes noted in 2008, "To enhance her dancing with a touch of rubato — a kind of teasing or playing with the music — she uses her elegant limbs to slow down moments or stretch them out like taffy." You see her dance and cannot imagine that she should move in any other way. There is nothing false, phony, or forced about her movements or her performance (a problem, in my opinion, with many of City Ballet's dancers); it's a glorious thing to behold.

In 2004, following her debut as Dew Drop, the NYTimes said:

Teresa Reichlen was Sunday's exhilarating new Dewdrop, exciting in her boldly assured dancing and its blend of opposing qualities. Regal, with long, lean body lines and snapping finishes to her arm gestures, Ms. Reichlen was also musical, with serenely held balances, making for a look of skinny voluptuousness.

In a New York Times review from June 2009, Alistair Macauly said:

It is good to have had, at City Ballet, some debut performances that truly cleansed the palate. No more radiant example of this comes to mind than Teresa Reichlen’s performance last weekend in the lead role of George Balanchine’s “Concerto Barocco.” Ms. Reichlen is a tall, pure blonde with small head, long neck, clean line and easy stretch, the kind who looks bred to Balanchine’s specifications, though taller than most. Her dancing is so unmannered and so selfless that at first it’s hard to know what to say about it. Instead you find yourself watching the choreography with new attention...Afterward you realized that the very air onstage had seemed different from the moment of Ms. Reichlen’s entry: her dancing has a quality of springtime bloom.

And, the best of all reviews, came in February of this past year:

I have stated my general impression that the company is on the way up since the doldrums it hit between 1991 and 2002. One day I took a friend to a matinee; he had begun to follow the company before me and had followed it more closely during those dim years than I. Was I right that things had improved, I asked? He said simply, “Ten years ago there was no Teresa Reichlen.”

Happily, City Ballet rewarded her hardwork and EXCEPTIONAL talent with a promotion from Soloist to Principal dancer in October of this year.

I look forward to seeing many more of Ms. Reichlen's performances across what I hope will be a VERY long career. And I am so grateful to MCL (Bunny's Mom!) for the gorgeous, generous gift; it's a Nutcracker I'll always remember!

Cxx.