The Royal New Zealand Ballet has been impressing audiences in New York at the end of its first trip to the US in 21 years.
The tour is being touted as a homecoming for artistic director Ethan Stiefel, a American who spent much of his career as a principal dancer in New York with the American Ballet Theatre before coming to New Zealand with his partner Gillian Murphy, a world-class ballerina.
"I don't know what these dancers looked like before Mr Stiefel got his hands on them, but they're spruce now, with pleasing manners and crisp classical technique," Brian Seibert wrote in the New York Times.
He said an audience of ballet notables came to see three recent works performed at Joyce Theatre.
A Broadway World review said audiences in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Minneapolis had already had the chance to see the admirable results of Stiefel's vision and hard work with the 61-year-old company since he took the helm in September 2011 at the age of 38.
"The boyish swain who played Cooper Nelson in the 2000 ballet movie Center Stage is all grown up and he has clearly made a successful transition from performer to director. Let's hope another two decades don't go by before we see the New Zealanders on American soil again."
A Huffington Post review by Meghan Feeks said the company's range was impressive but the opening piece by Benjamin Millepied was too compartmentalised.
"A technical showcase with contrived moments of romantic suggestion may work on a group of students, but on a mature company, it looked dated and a bit stifling."
A 2013 work by Kiwi choreographer Andrew Simmons gave the dancers much more freedom to reveal themselves as artists, she wrote.
