What better day to have a false fire alarm require the evacuation of the building than on the coldest day of the year so far? Luckily, it was around lunchtime so I just went to get something to eat. This is the second consecutive Monday we've had a false alarm -- and while it wasn't nearly as cold last week, it was sleeting, so it was just as unpleasant to have to stand outside for no reason. It doesn't seem to be an NYU occupied floor that's setting the alarm off, so the temp and I are wondering if it will happen again next Monday (when NYU is closed for President's Day) or if it will happen on Tuesday instead to maximize the inconvenience for everyone.

I got my broadband internet hooked up at the house, so now I can do all kinds of fun stuff like upload more than two pictures at a time, listen to Radio Brother call Dakota State's games live, and watch all the TV I miss while at ballet class on Thursdays. Which is good timing, since the writer's strike is almost over: not only will there be new stuff to watch, but the writers will actually get paid when I watch it.

Friday night I went to see NYCB on the last half of my annual mini-subscription. (Note: I'm putting this at the end, so those of you who don't care about ballet can skip the mini review that's about to start.) I was a little ambivalent about the program -- I didn't know much about the Divertimento or The Chairman Dances, I've had my issues with Wheeldon as a choreographer, and I was leery of Stars and Stripes, given that it belongs to the same "Americana" period of Balanchine's as Western Symphony, which I find hokey and hopelessly outdated. However, I really enjoyed the performance. Though each was created in a different decade (from the 1950s through the Wheeldon piece, which premiered the night before I went), all of the pieces were strongly rooted in a traditional ballet vocabulary, which provided a nice link between them, even when the themes were quite different. The choreography was quite strong as well -- the Divertimento is definitely a minor Balancine work, but provided a good part for Megan Fairchild, my favorite NYCB ballerina, to show off her technique and charisma, and Chairman Dances was deceptively simple (and is now my favorite Martins work after Hallelujah Junction) despite some ragged formations in the final section. And since my main issues with Wheeldon are his tendency to overwhelm the stage with movement and to resort to cheesy props or staging, his new piece, for only four dancers on a bare stage, gave me the opportunity to appreciate how seamless his choreography is -- there's never an awkward pause when dancers need to enter or leave the stage for the next section, or any runs around the stage to get into position for the next sequence of steps.

But the most illuminating part of the program was Stars and Stripes. Perhaps because classical ballet lends itself to a certain military precision, perhaps because the marching bands and parades evoked by the literally star-spangled and military inspired costumes still make an appearance every 4th of July, the piece doesn't feel that outdated even more than 50 years after its premiere (though I'd admit you probably couldn't choreograph this piece for a professional company today without getting laughed at or accused of political pandering). It doesn't hurt that it's an incredibly challenging bit of choreography which, when executed as well as it was on Friday, is a guaranteed crowd pleaser. But what really made this piece stick in my mind was the performance of Ashley Bouder as Liberty Bell (OK, so it's a little cheesy), whose brilliant technique ran her poor partner off the stage (he wasn't bad, but was not nearly a match for her in either personality or technique). It was probably the single greatest individual performance I've seen in a lifetime of live dance performances; even when you consider I didn't really know the difference between good and bad dancing until I was about 20, that's still a lot of ballet dancers to surpass. That performance alone was worth my splurging for third ring seats.