Taylor Stanley is one of the best young dancers we have--with the potential to become a major, iconic dancer. To begin this article with his race and his sexuality rather his accomplishment, denigrates his achievements. Can we please get away from this kind of skewed, tunnel vision reporting? It's excruciatingly predictable--let's hear something about his dancing, perhaps, in an article about a dancer?
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Why identify him as a mixed race gay man? Does that matter to his art? It seemed like a blunt way to frame the article and how we should read it.
Bravo for his accomplishments. I hop he has a chance to set the tone for his next solo article,
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Love, love, love to watch him dance!
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And yet an interview with the dancer, also by Gia Kourlas, linked below, is titled Taylor Stanley, the calmest dancer at Lincoln Center, February 2016. I'd love to see him dance. It has been decades, though, since the NYCB came to Canada.
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I'll be frank. I am not a lover of ballet.
On the other hand--
--I've listened to Stravinsky's "Apollo"--oh! many times. A striking piece of music! without a doubt. Hard to believe that same composer (fifteen years earlier) composed the frenetic, febrile "Rite of Spring."
Those earlier brutal, driving rhythms--
--softened, refined into the "white key" music (as it were) of "Apollo." All this to say--
--I wonder what Mr. Stanley would make of it?
Apollo, "leader of the Muses." How would he interact with the handful of Muses with whom he is SUPPOSED to interact? Or by himself? Or whatever?
How do you do an Olympian god? A being so utterly removed from, apart from the world of men--people like you and me!--with their loves and desires and hatreds?
And then that finale--the only minor key music in the whole piece. Apollo--taking his departure, leaving earth. This angry, passionate earth!
But that very role (you tell me) whose movements are prescribed by such calm, ethereal music--
--is one of the hardest male roles anywhere in ballet.
Wow!
Well, good luck with it, Mr.Stanley. I wish you the best.
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Of course the man is troubled by self-doubt. The Times is framing his artistry within issues of sexuality and race. Is Mr. Stanley a gender-fluid, mixed race, shy and self-effacing gay man, or is he a dancer? Why should he suffer an article that focuses on an array of identity politics, rather than one that celebrates (or critiques) his balletic abilities?
Please don't get me wrong; I understand the value of Mr. Stanley's back-story. But this article groans under the weight of Kanye West name checking, sexual abuse rumors, and gay clichés (airy port de bras!). No one should ever be asked to carry all that baggage, much less on stage.
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Would love to see him perform!! Boston has no Ballet worth going to. Have to make a trip to NYC.
Phillip
Even if you were to come to New York, I fear you would be disappointed. True, we have truly outstanding ballet companies, led, of course, by ABT and Mr. Stanley’s NYCB, and we get amazing companies on tour (including the Royal Ballet, Bolshoi Ballet, Paris Opera Ballet, and San Francisco Ballet to name only a sliver of the companies visiting here last year). Many of these companies will also tour to other American cities, including Boston.
But Boston also has an outstanding company, the Boston Ballet.
If you denigrate them, your tastes may be too jaded for the artistry of any world-class ballet.
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Which composers, choreographers, dancers, costumers, designers, do you consider "staid"?
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@Bruce Cronin And I wonder why this and every other article about this company published in the NYT suggests there is something wrong with the "interim artistic team," that appointment of a permanent head is overdue. I think many would agree the company has been dancing better than ever, doing both old & new works well, giving new opportunities to dancers who didn't have them before, promoting dancers who deserve it. I'm fine with the "interim artistic team."
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@Bruce Cronin
Good co!mment.
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