Plainspoken

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Plainspoken is a ballet made by principal dancer Benjamin Millepied on the Chamber Ensemble of New York City Ballet to eponymous music [1] commissioned from Pulitzer Prize winner David Lang. The premiere took place on Friday, August 6, 2010, at the Center for the Arts, [2] Jackson Hole, Wyoming; the NYCB premiere took place at the Fall gala on Thursday, October 7, at the David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center. Costumes were designed by Karen Young.

Benjamin Millepied dancer, choreographer

Benjamin Millepied is a French dancer and choreographer, who has lived and worked in the United States after joining the New York City Ballet in 1995, where he became a soloist in 1998 and a principal in 2002. He also quickly started creating choreography for the company, and choreographed pieces for other major companies. He retired from NYCB in 2011.

New York City Ballet American ballet company

New York City Ballet (NYCB) is a ballet company founded in 1948 by choreographer George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein. Balanchine and Jerome Robbins are considered the founding choreographers of the company. Léon Barzin was the company's first music director. City Ballet grew out of earlier troupes: the Producing Company of the School of American Ballet, 1934; the American Ballet, 1935, and Ballet Caravan, 1936, which merged into American Ballet Caravan, 1941; and directly from the Ballet Society, 1946.

David Lang (composer) American composer

David Lang is an American composer living in New York City. Co-founder of the musical collective Bang on a Can, he was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Music for The Little Match Girl Passion, which went on to win a 2010 Grammy Award for Best Small Ensemble Performance. He was nominated for an Academy Award for "Simple Song #3" from the film Youth.

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Jennie Somogyi is an American ballet dancer, who dances as a principal for the New York City Ballet.

Amar Ramasar is a ballet dancer and principal dancer of the New York City Ballet. In 2010, Dance Magazine reported that Ramasar was one of the few Asian American professional ballet dancers.

Footnotes

  1. ↑ G. Schirmer and Co.
  2. ↑ Center for the Arts, in Jackson Hole

Reviews

Alastair Macaulay is a writer and dance critic. He was the chief dance critic for the New York Times from 2007 until he retired in 2018. He was previously chief dance critic at The Times and Literary Supplement and chief theater critic of the Financial Times, both of London. He founded the British quarterly Dance Theater Journal in 1983. He writes that his first morning in New York City was before September 1981. In addition to his roles as critic, Macaulay has written for The New Yorker and also published a biography on Margot Fonteyn. In 2000, he wrote Matthew Bourne and His Adventures in Dance: Conversations with Alastair Macaulay with Matthew Bourne. Macaulay was named one of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts' Jerome Robbins Dance Division Fellows in 2017. As of 2019, Macaulay was an instructor at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.

Roslyn Sulcas is a dance critic and culture writer for The New York Times. She grew up in Cape Town, South Africa, and studied English literature at university, receiving post-graduate degrees from the University of Cape Town and Paris VII (Jussieu). While finishing her thesis she lived in Paris, where she began writing for the British Dance Theater Journal and became the Paris correspondent for Dance & Dancers, Dance Magazine and Dance International as well as writing frequently for other publications. In 1996 she moved to New York and worked as an editor at Saveur, Top Model, House & Garden and House Beautiful while continuing to write about dance. She began to review dance for The New York Times in 2005. In 2011 she moved to London. She writes about film, theatre and culture news as well as about dance for The New York Times.

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