Tribute
Tribute is a short ballet made by Christopher d'Amboise, set to a single movement of Bach's keyboard arrangement of an Adagio by Alessandro Marcello. It began life as a student showcase piece at the School of American Ballet before entering the New York City Ballet repertory nearly two years later, a common route for new work made within the Balanchine-descended NYCB/SAB pipeline.
What is danced
The article does not describe the choreography, steps, partnering or staging of Tribute at all — it gives only the premiere dates, venues, the music, and a list of review citations. No synopsis, cast breakdown, or musical-numbers structure is provided, so nothing about vocabulary, technique, or set pieces can be responsibly drawn from the source. What can be said from the music alone is that the work is built on a single slow movement (an Adagio), which points toward a short, sustained, likely duet-centred piece rather than a multi-scene narrative ballet, but this is an inference about scale, not a claim about what is actually danced.
Context
The premiere took place at a School of American Ballet workshop performance in 2005, the annual showcase in which SAB, the official school of New York City Ballet, presents new and repertory work performed by its students, often as a proving ground before a piece is picked up by the main company. That Tribute moved from the SAB workshop stage to the NYCB main stage at the New York State Theater about twenty months later situates it within that specific pipeline, though the article gives no further detail on how the choreography changed, if at all, between the two stagings.
Staging history
The article records two stagings: the premiere on Saturday, June 4, 2005, at the SAB workshop performance in the Juilliard Theater, Lincoln Center, and the New York City Ballet premiere on Sunday, February 4, 2007, at the New York State Theater, also at Lincoln Center. No further revivals, cast changes, or restagings are mentioned.
How to watch it
With only the music identified, a viewer's main point of reference is the Adagio itself — Marcello's oboe line as reworked for solo piano by Bach — and how the choreography answers its sustained, singing tempo. Because the article supplies no cast or structural detail, there is no documented set piece or convention to watch for beyond that musical relationship.
Credits
- composer: Johann Sebastian Bach