Advanced Innovation

In late June, New York City Ballet returned to Los Angeles for the first time in twenty years and presented two dance programs at the Music Center’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. One of the programs included George Balanchine’s Allegro Brillante and Concerto Barocco, two wonderfully digestible exercises in neoclassical ballet. The other program, the subject of this review, appealed to more advanced balletomanes—works by Gianna Reisen, Ulysses Dove, Jerome Robbins, and Justin Peck revealed what contemporary ballet can achieve when free from pseudo-intellectualism.