gramilano

New York City Bal­let is releas­ing a series of behind-the-scenes videos. Here the company’s Bal­let Mas­ter in Chief, Peter Mar­tins, talks proudly of his dan­cers and all the col­lab­or­at­ors who make a per­form­ance hap­pen, with back­stage glimpses filmed by Nick Bentgen.

We are the largest bal­let com­pany in Amer­ica; we dance more per­form­ances in the course of a year than any other bal­let com­pany earth; we have close to 200 bal­lets in our entire rep­er­toire! That requires a tre­mend­ous amount of con­cen­tra­tion from every­body… Some­how it is a fant­ast­ic­ally smooth run­ning machine.

A num­ber of things sep­ar­ates the New York City Bal­let, one of the most import­ant things is that the music is always the pre­dom­in­ant factor. So with everything we do, music is our guide. The New York City Bal­let orches­tra is tuned in to play­ing a rep­er­tory that most other sym­phony orches­tras don’t play: they do Strav­in­sky, they do Schoen­berg, they do Webern, so we don’t try and alter the music to accom­mod­ate ourselves, and con­sequently our dan­cers can dance prob­ably faster than any other dan­cers in the world. The artic­u­la­tion of move­ments is so much more pre­cise here than it is elsewhere.

Mar­tins knows that his dan­cers work hard: morn­ing, class; after­noon, rehears­als; even­ing, performances.

It’s a very rig­or­ous sched­ule, but what it does is that the dan­cers are so ver­sat­ile they can do any­thing: they can do the great clas­sics, and they can do all the con­tem­por­ary works. They are like clay,  they love to be cho­reo­graphed ‘on’ as we say.

We have twelve bal­let mas­ters and they pre­pare the bal­lets; many of them worked under Bal­anchine and Jerome Rob­bins. One of the greatest things about New York City Bal­let is that the dan­cers were all trained at our affil­i­ate school so every­one has the same approach to music, the same approach to move­ment, they all address energy in a cer­tain way that I don’t see else­where. Yes, I’m biased,  how­ever I think that it’s con­ven­tional wis­dom that this is what makes us different.

You know it’s begin­ning to seem a cliché: ‘the New York City Bal­let fam­ily’, but we all per­form one func­tion which is to fur­ther the art-form… we’re all in ser­vice to some­thing lar­ger. But it is alive, it is vital, it is not com­pla­cent, it’s what you can wish for, only we have it.

See other mini-documentaries by the NYCB here.

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