Ballet Digital Program News Today

Ashton’s “Birthday Offering” and Tharp’s “Nine Sinatra Songs” bring an end to a season of digital video programs viewed through home streaming.

They also have revived ballets no longer performed anywhere else. One of those is “Valses Nobles et Sentimentales,” from 1947, which had not been seen in decades when Barbieri and Webb brought it back in 2011. It is the opening ballet in the company’s sixth digital program, an hour-long triple bill devoted to Ashton. (The program is available through Wednesday, one day longer than planned, because of a technical glitch that delayed the digital release.)  “Valses Nobles” is set to ...

It is one of three Ashton works that fill the revised lineup for the company’s sixth digital program. Artistic Director Iain Webb had originally planned to feature George Balanchine’s “Serenade” along with “Valses” and Ashton’s “The Walk to the Paradise Garden.” Because of health and safety protocols, he replaced the Balanchine work with a third Ashton piece, “Facade,” which the company has performed many times. Rhodes and Hulland last danced “Valses Nobles” together a...

The sheer joy of Balanchine’s “Donizetti Variations,” set to melodic, buoyant ballet music from Gaetano Donizetti’s opera “Dom Sébastien,” hooks you from the moment it begins. So does the wit of the choreography, which has the intensely satisfying quality of seeming to reveal the score in all its detail, while not taking it terribly seriously. Much of the ballet features different permutations of the ensemble of nine dancers, usually arranged in threes. In one section, three women...

Everybody else was expecting more from Graziano. “People were writing to me and saying, ‘I can’t wait to hear about all this stuff you’re creating at home.’ But I wasn’t creating anything at home,” he said. “When I decided to give myself time for body healing and mental healing, I didn’t force myself to create anything. I didn’t feel I had to do anything and then things started flowing.” That’s the way he prefers to let new choreography develop. “I always have so many ...