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.… continue reading
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