Joan Acocella on contemporary ballet choreography

I found this interesting bit, about the genesis of ballet choreography in the last few decades, inside Joan Acocella's New Yorker review of Christopher Wheeldon's Morphoses:

... Many of the ballets made in the past fifty years, above all in the United States, can be traced back to [George Balanchine's] Agon. There was one powerful competing influence: that of the Bolshoi Ballet, when it came West for the first time, in 1956, a year before the première of “Agon.” The Bolshoi’s athleticism and emotionalism made a huge impression on certain choreographers working in England at that time, notably Kenneth MacMillan and John Cranko. They moved in the Bolshoi direction, and many others followed them. When, in today’s ballet, you see a man express his feelings for his lady by hurling her into the air, catching her upside down, and wrapping her around his neck like a pashmina, you are seeing the legacy of the Bolshoi. When, on the other hand, you see a woman in a leotard merely hold the man’s hand as she flashes her legs out in eighty-two fabulous, clean ballet steps, and then, in a change of heart, fall into his arms and do something hair-raisingly sexy, like a front-facing split, you are seeing a child of Agon.

Read the whole article here.

I can see a lot of what she is saying in ballet choreography created in the last fifty years. The complicated, athletic lifts of Kenneth MacMillan (in the pas de deux Manon and Romeo & Juliet in particular) are heavily influenced by this Bolshoi-style daredevil partnering, while more recently, Wheeldon's work looks like it has been influenced by both styles.


Balanchine's Agon (right) and Wheeldon's Polyphonia (left). Photos by Angela Sterling, of Pacific Northwest Ballet's Olivier Weavers and Louise Nadeau, and Andrea Flores, of San Francisco Ballet's Yuan Yuan Tan and Yuri Possokhov.

The Bolshoi choreographer Yuri Grigorovich's Spartacus (right), and British choreographer Kenneth MacMillan's Mayerling (left). Photos by Tristam Kenton, of the Bolshoi's Anna Antonicheva with guest artist Carlos Acosta, and Johan Persson, of the Royal Ballet's Alina Cojocaru and Johan Kobborg.
I enjoy reading Acocella's reviews. The descriptions are very vivid, often humorously so, and you get a precise the image of the work that she is describing. It's irreverent, sure, but you see just what she is writing.