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Join ABT for a week of enchanting one-act ballets including Alexei Ratmansky’s The Seasons, a New York Times Critic’s Pick “born from joy and bursting at the seams;” Frederick Ashton’s The Dream, a humorous production inspired by Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Children’s Songs Dance, a new work by Jessica Lang set to the music of jazz legend Chick Corea; Sinfonietta, Jiří Kylián’s exuberant ballet, a milestone in contemporary choreography; and Lifted, a ground-breaking World Premiere by Christopher Rudd celebrating Blackness and created on an all-Black cast of ABT dancers.
There is, perhaps, no happier ode to the illusory nature of love than Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Frederick Ashton’s beguiling retelling of this comedy of errors is set in the magical woods of Victorian England to a spellbinding score by Felix Mendelssohn.
A plotless divertissement, the ballet features archetypal characters such as Snow, Frost, the Faun and the Rose. Alexander Glazunov composed the music for The Seasons for Marius Petipa to use in his original 1900 ballet—one of the last productions Petipa choreographed prior to his retirement. This new version features original choreography by Alexei Ratmansky, who has chosen to retain almost all of the original character names, though the monikers are designed to serve more as abstract ideas than literal representations.