Archives for June 2006

A press release arrives, announcing an exhibition at the International Center of Photography in New York. Titled Unknown Weegee, the show runs from June 9 through August 27, 2006. It’s culled from ICP’s vast collection of images–over 18 thousand–made chiefly in the 1930s and ’40s by the tabloid photographer Arthur Fellig (1899-1968), best known by his moniker, Weegee. The announcement is illustrated with the strange and striking shot you see here. In this early release, the figure is not identified; the photograph is enigmatically captioned Cinderella Ball, 1941.

Weegee
Ballerina Marina Franca in her peacock costume, April 18, 1941
Gelatin silver print
© Weegee / International Center of Photography

When we look at this image today, we see double: The woman is both a symbol of classical dancing, old style–Odette with her ruff of feathers at the hip–and the iconic Vegas showgirl we can conjure up in our mind’s eye, though we’ve never been to Vegas.

Typically, Weegee captures his subject mercilessly in garish light. A crime photojournalist by trade and temperament, he pretends to do no more than document brute surface reality–the bleeding corpse lying in the gutter, with the cops forming an ironic honor guard around it. In this and his other modes, such as his portrayals of working class folks, down and outs, or victims of disaster and their avid oglers, he cannily provokes our imagination to create the story behind the image. He makes us see.

He also makes us think. Contemplating this lady in her outlandish white costume–all shimmer and froth–we wonder: Who is she? How did she arrive at this time and place? This peculiar destiny? What does her “performance” consist of? Is she, perhaps, a reluctant collaborator in her work? He also makes us dream.

[Read more…] about WEEGEE’S BALLERINA

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on July 7, 2006.

July 7 (Bloomberg) — American Ballet Theatre’s three-act pirate ballet “Le Corsaire,” at the Metropolitan Opera House this weekend, simply wants to entertain you. Its local color is lavish: the exotic bazaars of Turkey, the high and dangerous seas. Crammed with adventure, “Corsaire” offers kidnapping and shipwreck, raids and romance.

Blithely immune to political correctness, it makes the most of gorgeous gals being sold into slavery. Its excuse? Opportunities for sensational dancing — and it was made a very long time ago.

Ballets inspired by Byron’s vivid poem “The Corsair” have been around for nearly 175 years. ABT’s production, staged by Anna-Marie Holmes, stems from the Russian Marius Petipa’s 1899 version.

“Corsaire” is notorious for shameless tinkering to make the leaps higher, the pirouettes flashier and the lifts trickier. Like the legendary opera stars who tailored their cadenzas to their own specific gifts, ABT’s celebrated male virtuosos have contributed their share of gasp-producing feats.

Be sure to notice: the bravura “Corsaire” pas de deux for the heroine and an ardent male slave, often done out of context as a party piece. Also the Jardin Anime sequence, with its lovely women deployed like the blossoms in a formal garden — a passage of pure classicism that provides relief from the hokey melodrama. And then there’s a shipwreck, a reminder that live-theater effects predate pirate movies.

Heroes and Ballerinas

Three performances this weekend (Friday evening, Saturday matinee and evening) will feature heroes such as Marcelo Gomes, Angel Corella, Jose Manuel Carreno and Herman Cornejo — with ballerinas to match their daring and charm.

© 2006 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on June 30, 2006.

June 30 (Bloomberg) — Ballerinas in peril headline the final weeks of American Ballet Theatre’s current season at the Metropolitan Opera House. Before the company’s run ends on July 15, they’ll be continually menaced by death itself, and fates worse than death.

This weekend, Michele Wiles, Paloma Herrera and Julie Kent — who will mark her 20th year with ABT on July 14 –alternate in the dual role of the poetic Odette and the dazzling Odile in ABT artistic director Kevin McKenzie’s version of “Swan Lake.”

Odette, foolish enough to talk to a seductive stranger when she’s out picking flowers, soon discovers the handsome fellow’s a demon. He abducts her, transforms her into a swan and adds her to his flock of similarly guileless maidens.

Pure-hearted Prince Siegfried arrives to save her. The next minute, Siegfried’s duped into believing the demon’s daughter, Odile, is his beloved. Soon, hero and heroine are leaping from a cliff to their death.

At the close of the 19th century, Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, abetted by Tchaikovsky’s score, made poetry out of this weird and violent tale.

The pastoral heroine of Frederick Ashton’s 1952 “Sylvia” is a huntress “chaste and fair.” She resists even the respectful overtures of her shepherd suitor, only to be carried off by a robber named Khan, who woos her with his ill-gotten riches, implicitly threatening rape.

Bravura Feet

Cupid arrives in the nick of time to ensure an upbeat ending. The authoritative Gillian Murphy, the athletic Wiles, the sultry Herrera and the romantically delicate Kent take turns in the title role on July 3, July 5 matinee, July 5 evening and July 6, respectively.

Pirates abound in “Le Corsaire,” a 19th-century concoction memorable largely for its bravura feats, which have been ratcheted up by generations of increasingly adept technicians.

The ladies must be almost as daring as the men and sexy to boot, as will be seen July 7 (Herrera and the piquant Xiomara Reyes) and twice on July 8 (Wiles and Maria Riccetto at the matinee, Irina Dvorovenko and Stella Abrera in the evening).

July 10 to 15 is wall-to-wall “Romeo and Juliet,” in Kenneth MacMillan’s emotionally extravagant version. The first two Juliets will be Diana Vishneva and Alessandra Ferri, both acclaimed for their dramatic power.

Familiar Plot

Everyone knows the plight of this heroine: put on the marriage market before she’s done playing with dolls, promised to a guy her parents pick, fated to fall in love at first sight with the scion of their mortal enemies, and so on. After increasingly trying and bloody events, suicide seems a relief.

The bouquets presented to ABT’s much-beleaguered ballerinas will have been well-earned.

© 2006 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on June 23, 2006.

June 23 (Bloomberg) — Flamenco is intimate, essentially tragic. Practitioners have been trying forever to theatricalize the form for the commercial stage. But Rafael Amargo, a celebrated performer-director in his native Spain, may be the first to use flamenco as the backbone of an entertainment that falls between vaudeville and musical comedy.

His 2002 “Poeta en Nueva York,” given the first of two performances at New York City Center last night, advertises itself as a multimedia production. It felt like an Andalusian “Riverdance.”

The work is based on vivid, hallucinatory poems written by Federico Garcia Lorca during a fraught year he spent in the city. They’re recited on tape, in Spanish, no translation provided. Hyperactive, arty film projections constitute the scenery.

Live and loud (the miking terrorizes the eardrums), three red-hot-mama vocalists, incidental musicians and a gang of dancers whose zapateado — that stamping and tapping of heels — means business deliver a stream of vignettes. Not surprisingly, these run the gamut of the gaudier emotions.

The choreography, equally punched up, could be called fusion-flamenco. It borrows from ballet, jazz, folk dance and show-biz tactics like the chorus line.

Amargo, of course, is the show’s dancing star. He has a face straight out of Goya and a maverick stage persona. Like an outrageous youth who mixes daring with charm, he doesn’t hesitate to milk the audience for its affection.

Superficial Star

He’s reputed to be a flamenco adept, and his footwork is indeed pyrotechnical. But his belly (which he bares) is slack, and his thighs lack animation. The deeper aspects of flamenco elude him.

A guest artist, Rasta Thomas, appeared in a brief solo, offsetting his bravura ballet feats with a few moves from his martial-arts training. American Ballet Theatre’s Angel Corella, though slated for a guest slot, wasn’t able to participate.

Nevertheless, the show went on for over two hours without intermission.

Far closer to the real thing is Noche Flamenca, where Soledad Barrio’s dancing offers a crash course in life’s passions and pain.

On the small, naked stage of a low-end theater in Manhattan’s East Village, beneath a grid of exposed lights, Barrio holds the midsection of her chunky body quiet while her feet attack the floor like a fusillade of bullets.

Her arms lash the air around her head, angled wrists and spiky fingers making a moving crown of thorns. Whirling in place, she becomes a vortex.

Face of Feelings

Soon she’s moving as if in a trance, mining a mother lode of human experience and emotions. Her discoveries play across her face, which has the square shape and blunt power of a Mayan mask, at once ravaging it and making it beautiful.

Barrio is ably accompanied by a pair of guitarists, three vocalists and two male dancers. Alejandro Granados, with whom she performs a duet combining seduction and challenge, shares her understanding of flamenco as a means of revealing the soul.

Granados’s long solo on the program is daring in its subtlety. Despite some emphatic passages, it’s unusually laconic, as if the dancer were conducting a probing conversation with himself. Moments of complete stillness register as pauses for contemplation.

Performed by Granados, commonplace flamenco devices take on startling associations. This is an artist who removes his suit jacket and makes you see a snake shedding its skin.

Juan Ogalla, by contrast, is a show-offy dancer out to impress with bravura technique.

Haughty Pose

He tramples the floor so ferociously with his booted feet that his legs seem to vibrate. And when he faces the musicians and slowly raises his arms as if they were an eagle’s wings, his version of the flamenco posture speaks more of arrogance than pride.

Turning on a dime, he snaps his head around military style. Even the sweat that sprays out of his long curly hair seems to be part of his act.

He misses the point that Barrio seems born to convey: Flamenco is not merely about what you can do. At heart, it’s about what you are.

© 2006 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on June 15, 2006.

June 15 (Bloomberg) — American Ballet Theatre is concluding a week of “Giselles,” fielding no fewer than five ballerinas in the title role.

Diana Vishneva, from the Kirov Ballet, plays the tragic heroine Saturday evening. The ballet has been going strong since 1841 and the part has been called “the ballerina’s `Hamlet.”’

Giselle, an innocent peasant girl whose aristocratic suitor betrays her, goes mad — lengthily and vividly — dying when her weak heart finally cracks. She returns as an unwilling initiate into a tribe of vengeful female ghosts and rescues her fickle lover from their clutches.

Among the dancer’s tasks is looking impalpable while executing jumps and leaps that present a major cardiovascular challenge. Another is making the Romantic-era melodrama believable.

Vishneva, one of the most versatile and effective ballerinas of her generation, is unquestionably equal to the assignment. Already a dazzling technician and a forceful actress, she’s now reaching for the poetic dimension of the role.

Bye-Bye, Bocca

Ardent fans of ABT’s Julio Bocca will assemble June 22 at the Metropolitan Opera House, when the beloved Argentinean star gives his farewell performance with the company.

Part 1 of the event will be Bocca’s dancing the male lead in Kenneth MacMillan’s “Manon” opposite Alessandra Ferri, a longtime partner who complements his own fervor.

Part 2 will be the curtain calls. Onstage, ABT’s artistic director, Kevin McKenzie, will present the traditional laurel wreath and a parade of dance luminaries will pay homage. The audience will contribute the standing ovation and flower throw.

Bocca’s many enthusiasts will miss his dynamic energy and meticulous form, as well as his convincing acting and personal charisma. But he knows it’s time to quit.

He looks forward to a life without constant training, surgery to repair inevitable injuries, and the isolation that comes with celebrity and endless touring.

Still, he isn’t turning his back on dance. He’ll continue to lead his own company, Ballet Argentino, and explore the blending of classical ballet with the tango, the signature dance of his birthplace.

© 2006 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on June 9, 2006.

June 9 (Bloomberg) — The New York City Ballet’s Sunday matinee at the New York State Theater offers a small Balanchine gem featuring one of the company’s most precocious stars-in-the-making.

George Balanchine’s 1972 Divertimento from “Le Baiser de la Fee” is driven by the choreographer’s mystical streak. Created in 1972 to a Stravinsky score, it’s an abstract ballet haunted by the suggestion that love and loss are engineered by the workings of Fate.

In the unforgettable closing passage of the dance, a man on an undefined quest and the woman he has found to love are gently but implacably parted in a moving maze formed by their friends.

Casting for the ballet features principal dancer Megan Fairchild, a petite 21-year-old with an air of childlike sweetness. She is also the possessor of a formidable technique and — most telling — the ability to grasp the essence of a role that lies beyond its steps.

© 2006 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on June 9, 2006.

June 9 (Bloomberg) — Finally, some glitter! New York City Ballet’s Diamond Project, intended to stimulate the company’s dancers and its audience through new creations, had been a glum affair until last night’s premiere of the sixth of seven commissioned works, “Russian Seasons.”

Choreographed by Alexei Ratmansky, artistic director of Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet, the piece is astute and appealing. Simple, yet sophisticated in construction, it’s infused with blithe humor and profound human feeling.

The score — by Leonid Desyatnikov, a contemporary Ukrainian composer — is based on traditional Russian songs, set here for string orchestra, solo violin and female voice. Its dozen songs are organized to reflect the turn of the seasons as well as the rituals of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Ratmansky, in turn, borrows familiar motifs from Russian national dancing, while the costumes, by Galina Solovyeva, provide a simple postmodern gloss on native dress.

Nevertheless, “Russian Seasons” is no mere ethnic exercise. Folk dance relies on symmetry. The stage patterns Ratmansky fashions with his dancers are examples of ever-shifting, yet flawlessly balanced, asymmetry.

Folk dance springs from rural camaraderie. Ratmansky’s choreography incorporates that — the communal friendships, the teasing, the playful roughhousing, the sense of generations mingling. But it goes much further.

Anger, Evil, Death

One scene depicts temper flaring out of control, another a malevolent haunting. The dance concludes with a wedding that may, after all, be a death — the white-clad “bride” a cousin to Romantic ballet’s doomed Sylphide.

In its most moving passage, a woman reveals a deep grief to an intimate ensemble of three couples — her near and dear. They draw back, then offer empathy and comfort, but eventually abandon her, reminding us that the keenest sorrow leaves one utterly alone.

The ballet uses a dozen dancers of all ranks, from corps to principal, and every one of them looks terrific — hand-picked and elated to be there.

Apart from Ratmansky’s contribution, the Diamond Project, the focus of the company’s current season, has offered little cause for rejoicing. That has been the case in its past five incarnations. One might well ask if the time, energy and money it consumes wouldn’t be better devoted to cultivating the Balanchine repertory, NYCB’s main treasure and first responsibility.

Of the most recent entries, by Mauro Bigonzetti and Jean- Pierre Bonnefoux, Bigonzetti’s “In Vento” was the more viable. The choreographer, who brought his Reggio Emilia-based Compagnia Aterballetto to New York last fall, aims chiefly for striking effects.

Twisted Poses

Set to an atmospheric score by Bruno Moretti, “In Vento” centers on a soul-searching fellow (I saw the grave Edwaard Liang in the role) in a fathomless dark space.

He conjures up four couples who twist their beautiful bodies into baroque poses. Do they represent his past or his dreams?

Another pair (Maria Kowroski, the company’s Queen of Adagio, and Jason Fowler) emerge as more important than the others, their duet a primal scene.

The prevailing mood is eerie as well as erotically charged. And the whole business is unquestionably gorgeous. But most of what’s happening is pure surface, no inside.

Bonnefoux’s “Two Birds With the Wings of One” attempts to evoke ancient China by means of classical ballet, a strategy destined for disaster.

To ear-catching cross-cultural music by Bright Sheng, the company’s composer in residence, Bonnefoux vaguely outlines the pathos-laden tale of a woman who chooses to join her warrior-mate in death.

Old Chestnuts

The choreography delivers every cliche that has adhered to this theme. Given Bonnefoux’s experience — principal dancer with the Paris Opera Ballet, then with New York City Ballet, now head of North Carolina Dance Theatre — you’d think he’d know better.

The vibrant Sofiane Sylve and her partner, Andrew Veyette, did their earnest best in the discouraging circumstances.

© 2006 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on June 5, 2006.

June 5 (Bloomberg) — Made for each other, the shy young woman and her awed princely partner can barely let their eyes meet, let alone allow their hands to touch. Yet in the space of a few minutes their hesitant dance escalates into an ecstatic declaration of love — the kind that lasts forever after.

This appealing duet is a high point of James Kudelka’s 2004 “Cinderella,” given its New York premiere by American Ballet Theatre on June 2 at the Metropolitan Opera House.

Set to the familiar Prokofiev score and tweaking the old story with pop psychology, the three-act ballet is the centerpiece of the troupe’s spring season, which runs through July 15. It was originally created for the National Ballet of Canada, the choreographer’s home base, and staged by the Boston Ballet in 2005.

Instead of a Cinderella who’s the victim of malice, Kudelka conjures up a suburban heroine who is emotionally deprived by an alcoholic stepmom and a pair of materialistic stepsisters.

He has chosen to banish Dad and any hint of the benevolent biological Mom, whose death led to her daughter’s sorry plight. This is his privilege, of course, though in exercising it he banishes some of the pathos crucial to the Cinderella theme.

Kudelka, who says in interviews that he loathes the idea of a moneyed, powerful hero playing savior to a passive heroine, also introduces the idea that Cinderella and the Prince rescue each other.

More Jokes, Please

Via Cinderella, the Prince can flee a court corrupted by excessive luxury and social snobbery. The happy pair settles down at Cinderella’s address, in the cozy domesticity of well-swept hearth and well-cultivated garden, miraculously rid of dysfunctional relatives.

Unfortunately, these concepts aren’t easily conveyed through dancing. They’re more the stuff of interviews and program notes. And Kudelka’s tinkering, simultaneously, with life’s realities and beloved “myth” is a dangerous business. What’s more, the comic elements of the ballet, such as the stepsisters’ unseemly antics at the ball, are uninspired slapstick.

However, several passages of pure dancing are very good indeed — suave and inventive. The mutual declaration- of-love duet blends naturalism with the standard classical- dance vocabulary and comes up with poetry. Solos for the four spirits of nature who transform Cinderella into a belle of the ball are distinctive for their color and charm.

Myopic Stepsister

The dances for the ensemble are intricate yet windowpane-clear. And David Boechler’s snazzy art deco costumes — contrasting black and white with riots of color — make everyone look compelling.

Leading the opening night cast, Julie Kent and Marcelo Gomes were picture-perfect, with dance capabilities to match. Erica Cornejo’s radiant glee made the outlandish behavior of the myopic stepsister tolerable.

Two cameo roles stood out. As the stepmother, Martine van Hamel, a beloved ABT ballerina of the 1970s and 1980s, portrayed a lady as desperate to maintain her dignity as she was to procure her next drink. Ballet mistress Susan Jones brought Dickensian depth to a Fairy Godmother conceived by Kudelka as a benevolent, slightly bossy Edwardian dowager.

Ashton, Disney

Kudelka hasn’t created a “Cinderella” for the ages. The unforgettable treatments of the theme are the perennially touching 1948 ballet by Frederick Ashton — to be presented in October by the Chicago-based Joffrey Ballet — and Charles Perrault’s sly and elegant 17th-century rendition of the tale.

There’s no ignoring the 1950 Walt Disney film, either. Once seen, it’s never forgotten, even if you despise it. But for an evening’s entertainment — or, better yet, an afternoon’s, in the company of a child — Kudelka’s “Cinderella” will do.

© 2006 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on June 1, 2006.

June 1 (Bloomberg) — A pair of trim-bodied teenagers are dancing in a huge Lincoln Center studio rimmed with ballet barres. The petite, sweet-faced young woman zooms across the space like a plane on its runway and, airborne, flings herself at her partner head first, body horizontal. He catches her deftly, saving her from sudden death and managing to look princely about it.

These beautiful daredevils are rehearsing for the annual School of American Ballet’s Workshop Performances — this year, two on June 3 and one on June 5 at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater — that display tomorrow’s classical-dance stars, nearly all of them under 20. Their academy, founded by George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein in 1934, is the chief purveyor of dancers to the New York City Ballet and a rich source for other ranking companies in the U.S. and abroad.

It’s a training ground for finalists. Entry is by a highly selective audition even for the first year’s 8-year-olds. Beginning with the intermediate division, scouts scan applicants nationwide and bring them to the academy’s boarding school.

As the youngsters mature, their instruction becomes progressively more intense. At every level, students who prove to be unsuitable for a professional career are let go. Kirstein liked to call SAB “the West Point of ballet academies.”

Workshop performances are among the most thrilling shows in town because of the pre-professionals’ dazzling technique and stage presence. They’re touching, too, for the glimpses they offer of nascent artistry.

Basic Balanchine

Ten days to showtime, Suki Schorer, a former NYCB principal, is polishing her production of Balanchine’s “Square Dance” (created in 1957, revised in 1976). Her detailed instructions to both ensemble and three alternating casts of principals reveal the basics of Balanchine-style dancing. The emphasis is on extravagant energy, clarity even at breakneck speed, and profound musicality.

One of the girls assigned the ballerina role looks no older than a ‘tween. She has the technique of a prodigy, but her performance is entirely innocent, devoid of personality. Schorer reminds her to inflect it with an occasional smile here, a rakish twist of the shoulders there. “Keep it juicy,” she counsels.

Susan Pilarre, another NYCB alum, is rehearsing Richard Tanner’s staging of Balanchine’s 1949 “Bourree Fantasque.” Like Schorer, she has meticulously deconstructed the choreography so that her dancers understand the precise shape of every step and where it belongs in space and time.

Equally important, she has taught her proteges to put the discrete bits back together. They flow so well now, the dance looks almost spontaneous.

All on Target

The opening section of this ballet is all verve. The middle part is dreamy and romantic. The finale is an organized maelstrom. Here everyone must be on target at every moment: whirling, jumping, leaping, interweaving in kaleidoscopic patterns.

If the execution isn’t nearly perfect, the result will be chaos. Pilarre eyes a run-through intently. Before she delivers her corrections to her breathless crew, she concedes, “A lot of that was good.”

David Prottas, an 18-year-old who has two featured roles in the coming performances, explains why a young dancer needs more than classroom training: “In school it’s easy to forget that dance is actually a performing art. And I want to be known as a performer, not just a technician. When you’re on stage, a certain amount of theatrics is just as important as the movement aspect. In workshop I’ve had a chance to nurture that.”

The program will be completed by Christopher Wheeldon’s “Scenes de Ballet,” created for the NYCB in 1999 and performed by 64 School of American Ballet pupils. In the present cast, the youngest dancer is a fourth-grader; several of the principals aren’t yet old enough to vote.

Toe Shoes and Tears

The piece, a theatrical fantasy on the training of classical dancers, capitalizes on the mystique that surrounds the subject. Those familiar with SAB realize that the process is more prosaic — and tougher. It begins with very young, flexible and well- proportioned bodies and, after some nine years of sweat, toil and tears, produces capable practitioners and the occasional unforgettable artist.

Among the advanced students appearing in workshop performances, some will stay on at SAB for a year or two of further instruction. Others will be launched immediately into their careers. Nearly all of them work with single-minded devotion. And ambition. No one is looking for a safe berth.

Former SAB students include Jacques d’Amboise, Suzanne Farrell, Gelsey Kirkland, Arthur Mitchell, Ethan Stiefel, Wendy Whelan and Edward Villella. The present crew wants to be like that.

© 2006 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times on May 28, 2006.

I SEE Cinderella not only as a fairy-tale character but also as a real person, feeling, experiencing and moving among us,” Sergei Prokofiev has been quoted as writing of his score for the ballet “Cinderella.” Composed in 1945, it has inspired numerous choreographers with very different takes on the theme, among them, recently, James Kudelka. His “Cinderella,” created in 2004 for his home company, the National Ballet of Canada, will be given its New York premiere by American Ballet Theater on Friday at the Metropolitan Opera House.

Mr. Kudelka’s primary intentions seem to echo Prokofiev’s statement. “I wanted to give the characters a human texture,” he said in an interview at the company’s studios.

He shied away from “Cinderella” for at least a decade, he said, because he disliked the rags-to-riches scenario: the idea that the Prince, with his wealth and power, condescends to rescue poor Cinderella. In his ballet the two rescue each other. Cinderella allows the Prince to escape the superficial life of his court, while he offers her the single-minded attention and love her unthinking, unfeeling stepfamily never provided. Attracted by the transformation theme in the tale, Mr. Kudelka takes it from pumpkin-into-coach level to personal evolution. “Call it dime-store psychology, if you will,” Mr. Kudelka said, “but I think it works here.”

His Cinderella is a young woman who is not so much put upon as confused. “She doesn’t know it’s love she’s looking for, because she’s never experienced it in her dysfunctional family,” he explained. “The stepmother and stepsisters are suburban social climbers who care only about appearances.”

Cinderella’s prince suffers similarly as heir apparent in a court devoted to luxury, vanity and social one-upmanship. Once the hero and heroine meet, find that they “complete each other,” as Mr. Kudelka puts it, and conquer the obstacles in their way, they choose to settle down in simple domestic tranquillity. “My main objective, from beginning to end,” Mr. Kudelka said, “was to make this story make sense.”

The Cinderella story is an ancient one, having first appeared in print in ninth-century China. It was first published in Europe in the 1630’s in an anthology of folk and fairy tales recounted lustily in Neapolitan dialect by Giambattista Basile. The versions best known today, if often in bastardized form, come from the Frenchman Charles Perrault and the Germans Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.

Working in the first half of the 19th century, the Brothers Grimm conjured a “Cinderella” heavy with horror: torture, self-mutilation (to make the foot fit the shoe), birds pecking out the eyes of the wicked. Perrault’s version, by contrast, is urbane: elegant and witty. Despite his sly social satire he offers an optimistic view of human nature, allowing Cinderella’s virtue to extend to forgiveness of the evils previously done to her once she has come into her kingdom.
“Cinderella” was performed as a ballet long before Prokofiev wrote the music now so closely associated with it. Records of European productions date to the early 19th century. Marius Petipa may have had a hand in a production at the Maryinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1893. And in 1938 Michel Fokine took it up for the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo with less than memorable results.
Meanwhile the Cinderella theme is said to have tempted no less a composer than Tchaikovsky, and Johann Strauss turned to the tale for his only ballet. But it was Prokofiev’s score that provided the catalyst for Cinderella ballets that would last. Which is not to say that it makes the choreographer’s job easy. A sardonic and foreboding tone underlies the ecstatic passages, contradicting the idea of virtue rewarded and suggesting instead that evil lurks just about everywhere.

This score, though intended for the Kirov Ballet at the Maryinsky Theater, was first choreographed in 1945 by Rostislav Zakharov for the company’s Moscow-based rival, the Bolshoi Ballet. A year later Konstantin Sergeyev created the Kirov’s version, revising it in 1964, presumably following the trend of the time to replace mime with dancing. Typical of Soviet ballet, those early versions delivered the story in a simple, straightforward way, making clear its core sentiments: rage, scorn, pathos, pity, wonder and romantic bliss.
Frederick Ashton created one of the most rewarding “Cinderella” ballets to date, interweaving the tender, the comic and the luminous. It was choreographed in 1948 in London for what is now the Royal Ballet. Its enduring appeal was evident in its enthusiastic reception at the Lincoln Center Festival’s Ashton Celebration of 2004. It will also be presented in Chicago by the Joffrey Ballet this fall.

Ashton was fortunate in his original cast, whose individual gifts seem imprinted on the roles. The ballet was intended for Margot Fonteyn (though an injury kept her from dancing at the premiere). The character of Cinderella called upon her natural ability to convey unadulterated goodness, wistfulness and spunk, and to chart the course of love, from its burgeoning to its elated fulfillment.

Inevitably more recent years have brought newfangled takes on “Cinderella.” Maguy Marin’s 1985 version for the Lyon Opera Ballet, a bleak, haunting view of childhood, outfitted the dancers in grotesque masks and body padding to turn them into life-size dolls. Rudolf Nureyev’s 1986 production for the Paris Opera Ballet, which gave the story a Deco-era setting and a heroine who yearns to be in pictures, was all colorful, outlandish fun. Alexei Ratmansky’s 2002 version for the Kirov depicts family and society as cynical environments barely tempered by the hero and heroine’s tender romance.

Although Ballet Theater has had two earlier productions of “Cinderella” in its repertory — a quirky version by Mikhail Baryshnikov and Peter Anastos, created for the company in 1983, and Ben Stevenson’s popular conventional production, acquired in 1996 — Kevin McKenzie, the company’s artistic director, thought it was time for something new.

“I was delightfully engaged by James’s approach,” he said of Mr. Kudelka’s version. “It’s serious theater that is very funny. Its humor is innocent and, at the same time, sophisticated and irreverent. It has some of the most complex choreography imaginable, yet overall it looks simple and natural.”

While Mr. Kudelka’s “Cinderella” is unusually heavy on ideas, it doesn’t neglect dancing for its own sake. The complex patterning for the fairies, with four soloists weaving at high speed through an ever-shifting maze formed by the ensemble, looks like a close-call victory of order over chaos. By contrast, the dawning-love pas de deux for the hero and heroine embodies Mr. Kudelka’s ideal of “dancing that has such a natural flow the audience doesn’t realize it’s seeing steps,” he said. “The dancer simply looks like an emanation of the music.”

The ballet also provides sheer entertainment. The shenanigans of the stepsisters aspiring to high society have a near-slapstick quality. The shoe theme is given sly running commentary, beginning with a barefoot Cinderella who graduates to pink-satin point shoes only when she has reached glass-slipper stage, which they symbolize. Not least there’s the airborne pumpkin that descends on the royal ballroom to deliver Cinderella as if it were her private helicopter or a glowing orange spaceship.

Copyright © 2006 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission.