Jay Rogoff

Spend enough time watching George Balanchine’s ballets, and you start to believe that he could express anything on the stage. Friday’s all-Balanchine New York City Ballet program at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center progressed from tragic romance to comic celebration, with Swan Lake and Stars and Stripes marking its emotional poles.

The New York City Ballet’s riches include its priceless repertory of ballets, especially those by George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. It might surprise us, then, that the company commissions more new dances than any other ballet troupe. Thursday night at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, four of these contemporary works demonstrated the great variety of ways in which NYCB keeps pirouetting into the future.

In 1967, George Balanchine created Jewels, billed as the world’s first three-act story-less ballet. But watching the New York City Ballet perform it at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center Wednesday night made it clear that even without a plot, Jewels has many stories to tell.

The New York City Ballet returned to the Saratoga Performing Arts Center Tuesday night with tantalizing tastes of the full banquets to come. Principal dancers Adrian Danchig-Waring and Unity Phelan emceed the NYCB On and Off Stage program with intelligence, wit, and a full smorgasbord of ballet commentary on the excerpts the company danced, as well as the full ballets they will stage through Saturday night.

The New York City Ballet brought a program of three classic mid-twentieth-century ballets Friday night to a packed amphitheater crowd of 5000 at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, with hundreds more watching from the lawn.

In 2011, In Creases, Justin Peck’s first dance for the New York City Ballet, enjoyed its world premiere at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. Since then, he has made twenty-two more works for the company, and Thursday’s matinee at SPAC brought his newest. Copland Dance Episodes, billed as his first evening-length work, is a big, bold, winning ballet for thirty dancers, filled with pure feeling and excellent performances.

Much of the New York City Ballet’s worldwide fame depends on its matchless repertory by its two founding choreographers, George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. Surprisingly, though, NYCB also commissions more new works than any other ballet company in the world. Wednesday night’s SPAC Premieres program at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center featured four twenty-first century ballets made for the company, each by a different choreographer. Three of them appeared on the SPAC stage for the first time, while one, Justin Peck’s Scherzo Fantastique, had its world premiere there in 2016.

For the third summer running, the one-week New York City Ballet residency at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center opened Tuesday night not with a spectacular full-evening ballet, or gems from the permanent repertory, or a mix of classics and exciting new works, but with an anthology of excerpts from most of the week’s offerings. While most dance goers would rather experience the thrilling emotional architecture that a great company like NYCB can provide in complete ballets, the lecture-demo proved entertaining and illuminating, with the guidance of principal dancers Adrian Danchig-Waring and Tiler Peck.

Jay Rogoff continues his reviews of the New York City Ballet at Saratoga Performing Arts Center.

Justin Peck’s In Creases, the first work he made for the New York City Ballet, returned to the Saratoga Performing Arts Center Thursday for the first time since its 2012 world premiere. It proved one of the program’s two highlights, the other a superb performance of George Balanchine’s 1946 masterpiece, The Four Temperaments.