New York City Ballet’s 2024-25 season will feature earlier curtain times, fewer intermissions and a tribute to the great American ballerina Maria Tallchief, the company announced on Monday.
Starting in the fall, in response to audience feedback and what Wendy Whelan, City Ballet’s associate artistic director, called “new ways of life” following the pandemic, curtain times will be pushed up, with all evening performances beginning at 7:30 p.m. (Matinees will remain at 2 p.m. on Saturdays and 3 p.m. on Sundays.) In addition, about 40 percent of the season’s repertory performances will include only one intermission, down from the standard two.
“Slightly shorter performances without an intermission makes everybody happy — dancers, audience members, everybody,” Jonathan Stafford, City Ballet’s artistic director, said. “You’re still getting the same quality of performance but in a slightly shorter time frame.”
The lineup will feature 30 ballets by the company’s co-founder, George Balanchine, including, in the winter, a revival of his final work, “Variations for Orchestra” (1982); seven works by Jerome Robbins; and three world premieres.
The new works will be by Caili Quan (Oct. 9), set to Saint-Saëns’s Cello Concerto No. 1; by City Ballet’s resident choreographer Justin Peck (Jan. 29), to an original score by Dan Deacon; and by Alexei Ratmansky (Feb. 6), the company’s artist in residence. He will stage a suite of dances from Petipa’s full-length “Paquita” that incorporates the “Minkus Pas de Trois,” Balanchine’s restaging of the ballet’s pas de trois.
Whelan said audiences will get “a feel for the spectrum of what we do here and what we’re capable of.”
