Thursday night at New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker, guest conductor Raphael Jiminez loosened the reins a bit on Tchaikovsky’s Waltz of the Flowers, the blooms breathed a sigh of relief, and Sara Mearns and the “girls” took it from there!
Mearns’ arabesque voyages were Whoa!—she didn’t just do them, she DID them. Completely on top of her leg, as she moved backward upstage, she kept some energy going forward as well—nothing like a tombe lean—but she was so aligned, so poised, that her downstage silhouette kept resonating.