In Vento is a 2006 ballet by Mauro Bigonzetti, artistic director of Aterballetto, made to a score of the same name by Bruno Moretti. It was commissioned by New York City Ballet as part of its Diamond Project, the recurring initiative through which the company invited outside choreographers to create new work for its dancers, and it premiered on 4 May 2006. It is the middle piece of a three-work sequence Bigonzetti made with Moretti for City Ballet, bracketed by Vespro and Oltremare.
What is danced
The article does not describe the choreography itself — no synopsis, scene breakdown, or account of steps or vocabulary survives in the source, so nothing about the actual movement can be stated as fact from it. What can be established is structural: the listed original cast is a single trio, one woman (Maria Kowroski) and two men (Benjamin Millepied and Jason Fowler), which points to the piece being built around, or at least led by, a principal pas de trois rather than an ensemble showpiece; City Ballet's Diamond Project commissions were typically danced by the company's own dancers in pointe-based technique regardless of the outside choreographer's home idiom, since Bigonzetti was working with a Balanchine-trained corps rather than his own Aterballetto company.
Context
The Diamond Project was City Ballet's mechanism, running intermittently from 1992 under Peter Martins, for bringing choreographers from outside the Balanchine-Robbins lineage into the company's repertory; inviting an Italian contemporary-ballet maker whose home company (Aterballetto) worked in a very different, more European-contemporary idiom was part of that project's stated aim of testing the dancers against unfamiliar makers. In Vento sits inside a small, deliberate experiment within that experiment: three consecutive Bigonzetti/Moretti commissions, suggesting City Ballet was treating this pairing as a sustained collaboration rather than a one-off.
Staging history
The article documents only the 4 May 2006 premiere at what it names the David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center (the hall's later name), with the cited cast. A New York Times review from January 19, 2007 is listed among the sources for this work, which suggests City Ballet brought it back into a subsequent season's repertory, though the article gives no explicit confirmation that this later review concerns a repeat staging rather than another program.
How to watch it
There is not enough in the source to direct attention to specific steps or passages; a viewer should instead watch for how the trio structure is used (soloist against two men, or shifting partnering among three), since that is the one concrete structural fact the record supports. Contextually, it is worth watching for how a Balanchine-trained corps handles a choreographer working outside that lineage, which was the explicit premise of the Diamond Project commission.
Credits
- composer: Bruno Moretti