Dance Performance | 5 Iconic NYC Dance Companies

Five of NYC's most iconic dance companies--Ballet Hispanico, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, and Dance Theatre of Harlem--share the spotlight and an outdoor stage with dancers and pieces from across the companies.

Schedule:

One for All, World Premiere Lincoln Center Commission by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, featuring dancers from each of the five companies, is set to Manteca by Funky Lowlives/Dizzy Gillespie.

Ballet Hispanico - Club Havana by Pedro Ruiz
Latin dancing at its best. The intoxicating rhythms of the conga, rumba, mambo, and cha cha are brought to life by choreographer Pedro Ruiz, himself a native of Cuba, as he imagined his very own "Club Havana."

New York City Ballet - Allegro Brillante by George Balanchine
George Balanchine called the exuberant Allegro Brillante "everything I know about classical ballet in thirteen minutes." One of George Balanchine's most joyous, pure dance pieces, Allegro Brillante is characterized by what Maria Tallchief -- the ballerina on whom the bravura leading role was created -- called "an expansive Russian romanticism." The ballet is set to Tschaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 3, a work that the composer created from sketches for a composition that was intended to be his Sixth Symphony, but which instead served as a single movement work which was published posthumously in 1894. Balanchine described this ballet as a concentrated essay in the extended classical vocabulary, in which a maximum amount of choreographic development is contained within a rather restricted area of time and space.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and American Ballet Theatre - Pas de Duke by Alvin Ailey (Jacquelin Harris, Ailey, and Herman Cornejo, ABT)
Choreography: Alvin Ailey
Music: Duke Ellington
Pas de Duke is Alvin Ailey's modern dance translation of a classical pas de deux celebrating the musical genius of Duke Ellington. It was originally choreographed on two of the most renowned dancers in the world, Judith Jamison and Mikhail Baryshnikov, and presented as part of the festival "Ailey Celebrates Ellington" at Lincoln Center's New York State Theater in 1976. Ailey choreographed five sections that capture the sassy sophistication of "The Duke's" jazz music as the two soloists challenge each other toe-to-toe and line-for-line in a playful, good-natured competition.

Dance Theatre of Harlem - Return by Robert Garland
Dance Theatre of Harlem's Resident Choreographer Robert Garland deploys his signature "post-modern urban neoclassicism" to magnify the soulful exuberance of the music of James Brown and Aretha Franklin thereby creating a ballet that is pure joy to behold.