Tobi Tobias

Ballet Diary No.9: American Ballet Theatre: All-Classic [Masters] program; ABT Premieres program; Natalia Osipova dancing Juliet in Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet (ABT’s season at the Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC, closed on July 10, 2010)

Note: This is No. 9 in the series “Ballet Diary”–comments on the 2010 spring seasons of New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, along with related performances. To read previous pieces in the series, click here: No. 1; No. 2; No. 3; No. 4; No. 5; No. 6; No.7; No. 8. The completed “Ballet Diary” series will comprise nine essays.

June has given way to July as I write this and I’m beginning to think I’ve taken up residence at Lincoln Center, along with a dozen or two of my dance writing colleagues. Those camp cots parked in the subterranean corner of the Metropolitan Opera House where you can borrow a booster seat (covered in dark red plush, of course) for a small child you’re introducing to high-end singing and dancing? That’s what we sleep on between one day’s performance and the next. Showers? Did you think those were nymphs and satyrs you glimpsed frolicking in the plaza’s spectacular fountain?

New York City Ballet has finished its eight-week season at the David H. Koch Theater and departed to Saratoga Springs for its annual summer stint, while American Ballet Theatre is in the penultimate week of its eight weeks at the Met.

One of my colleagues asked if, after completing my nine “Ballet Diary” essays on the spring seasons of the two companies, I was going to write a round-up. Well, no. I will already have said all I have to say, but, for anyone who needs a quick condensation, here it is.

Both troupes offered some spectacular dancing–all through the ranks, from newbies to reigning stars. Both companies disappointed when it came to repertory, influenced more by commercial concerns than aesthetic ones. This, despite City Ballet’s proud claim to be an institution bent on producing new choreography to new music–a strategy that regularly yielded fruit only when the new work was by Balanchine and, if you will, Robbins.

City Ballet put a name to its season, “Architecture of Dance,” and commissioned seven new ballets along with five scores, hiring a celebrated architect, Santiago Calatrava, to provide décor. In my view, all this looked more like a marketing ploy than an artistic vision. The results, at any rate, proved to be an artistic failure, since only one of the ballets–Alexei Ratmansky’s Namouna: A Grand Divertissement–is worth keeping. Again in my view, of course, but what other view can I offer?

Ballet Theatre settled for a less fancy, less chancy way of selling tickets: Figure out what the public wants and serve it up, enhanced by stars. This resulted in week-long stints devoted to program-length ballets of varying artistic merit. A couple provided nothing more than easy entertainment (Don Q, for instance, hardly speaks to your soul); another two (Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty) were wretched versions of classical ballet’s 19th-century linchpins. Programs of several shorter works were arranged under titles like “All-Ashton” (which was OK as a demonstration of the company’s faith that here was a topnotch choreographer whose style was worth the effort needed to learn it) and “ABT Premieres” (ballets that had been created on the home team), which was plain silly. After all, to quote Gershwin, who cares?

So the delight to be had at performances lay in a few ballets (Ashton’s Dream, Balanchine’s Symphony in Three Movements, to name two) and in the majority of the nearly 200 dancers the companies harbor between them.

□ □ □
The penultimate week of ABT’s season took me first to what was originally advertised as the All-Classic program. Leaving it to scholars with higher brows than mine to debate what constitutes a classic (well, how about “a work that continues to be compelling after the era in which it was made”?), I can report that the evening–shorn of its title in the house program–was pleasurable in part because the five choreographers represented knew and used their heritage while inventing a world according to their singular vision. Equally important was the fact that the dancing ranged from very good to sublime.

In Balanchine’s 1956 Allegro Brillante (which opens with its eight-member ensemble already circling the stage at a run), Gillian Murphy, dancing the female lead, embodied the speed and dazzle the ballet’s title promises. “It contains everything I know about the classical ballet in 13 minutes,” Balanchine said of the piece, and Murphy met and luxuriated in its challenges.

A scene choreographed by Antony Tudor, tactfully termed “Romeo’s Farewell to Juliet” (it’s the aftermath of the young lovers’ wedding night), conjured up memories of the most wonderful Romeo and Juliet of them all–Tudor’s one-act version, created in 1943 and set to music by Delius. As a vehicle for Xiomara Reyes, the least compelling of ABT’s ballerinas, the piece is a godsend. Reyes, who is belatedly adding drama to her dancing, lends herself to the demands of the choreography from the first moment. With Romeo still asleep in her bed, Juliet sits up and strokes the inside of one thigh, remembering, then moves toward the early light streaming into the room and shields her face from it, knowing that her new husband, exiled for murder, must leave her with the coming of dawn. Tudor makes every gesture in the pair’s plangent interaction not simply a dance move but a phrase spoken–about a love that both partners fear will be lost to death.

Earlier I wrote about Ashton’s evocative Thaïs Pas de Deux, with Diana Vishneva’s being about as good as it gets in the musk-scented title role. Now I’ve seen Hee Seo making her debut in the part. Seo’s a corps de ballet dancer who has lately been fed one prominent role after another. (Note: On July 6, ABT announced–to no one’s surprise–that Seo would be promoted to soloist rank in August.) She has a soft dewy quality, astonishingly beautiful feet, and formidable technique that was coupled in the Thaïs duet with the modest demeanor of a dancer who doesn’t yet “own” the choreography. It seems that, with this piece, made in 1971, Ashton created a situation in which sensuousness can be conveyed in markedly different ways.

On the same program, Vishneva, sympathetically partnered by Jose Manuel Carreño, danced the Act I pas de deux from Kenneth MacMillan’s 1974 Manon. Her portrayal had just the right mix of girlish love and wanton lust, and she gave a perfect account of the scene’s mounting passion. I’ll never really succumb to MacMillan’s exaggerated (and often morbid) theatricality and his near-obsession with seemingly impossible lifts meant to express the peaks of emotion, but he clearly knows how to excite a large audience to fever pitch, and Vishneva is aptly cast as the ballerina to help him do it.

I also wrote about The Dream earlier this season, when ABT’s best-realized achievement with the Ashton repertory was danced by Gillian Murphy and David Hallberg as Titania and Oberon, Herman Cornejo as Puck, and Julio Bragado-Young as Bottom. At that moment, I couldn’t imagine another American cast doing as well.

As it turned out, the team of Julie Kent, Marcello Gomes, Craig Salstein, and Isaac Stappas revealed different dimensions of the choreography. Kent’s rendition of Titania was more conventionally fairylike, given the ballerina’s personal beauty and the delicacy and crispness of her dancing. Gomes’s signature authority was put to splendid use in his interpretation of Oberon. While he couldn’t equal Hallberg’s lightness and fluidity in the role’s pure dance passages, he brought unmatchable clarity and force to the mime. Craig Salstein overplayed the mischief-making Puck with his self-conscious cuteness, but Isaac Stappas gave the most natural–almost Stanislavskian–rendition of the Bottom’s Dream solo that I’ve ever seen. The bevy of fairies scurried more deliciously than ever and the two pairs of human lovers did much to make their botanical drug-induced adventures intelligible in their change-partners-and-dance thread of the plot.

The climactic duet of Titania and Oberon was exquisitely performed. Oberon allows Titania to stray from him thus far and no further, the sequence of release-and-retract moves seeming to occur on the spur of the moment. Soon the partners are twisting and flickering, as if to reveal that they are two of the same breed. Titania runs away (knowingly, not very far) and Oberon pursues her, both of them visibly aware that she has no plans to go astray. And, indeed, she soon flies, literally, into his arms. He supports her at arm’s length as she darts into an arabesque–poised for flight yet again–but then she melts back against his body as if acquiescing to the idea that this is her home. The choreography is tricky, to put it mildly, but Kent and Gomes made it look like a natural extension of their unique dance temperaments.

□ □ □

In the same week, I saw the ABT Premieres program. Twyla Tharp’s Brahms-Haydn Variations, created in 2000, was the curtain raiser, as it was for the All-American program, and I wrote about it here. Even so, since there’s always more to see in this ballet, there’s always more to say.

On this showing it was danced with such assurance and calm that its constant contrasts were particularly clear: a pair or two of dancers alternating with a crowd of them, each player confident of his or her place in the choreographic scheme; pure classical form set against impulses that rippled through the entire body, tipped it askew, or turned it upside down; minuscule jokes–about ballet, about myriad ways of dancing, about moving through space in general; celestial harmony juxtaposed with the very different beauty to be found in awkwardness.

Every time I see Brahms-Haydn again, I think that it’s finer than I realized it was the time before. My only quibble with the piece is that it seems too complex to grasp fully on an initial viewing, while because of the hours and dollars that going to the ballet consumes, more spectators than not will be content with a single sighting.

On the Dnieper, made for ABT in 2009 to the eponymous Prokofiev score, is the most deeply Russian of the Alexei Ratmansky ballets that have been performed in the States. Its chief characters–a soldier returning from the front, the fiancée he’s pledged to, and the girl he now finds he wants to marry–are beset by wrenching emotions, and they express them accordingly, like figures in a Dostoevsky novel. In some 40 minutes Ratmansky depicts love, desire refusing to be quelled, confusion, jealousy, regret, selfless resignation–and an unspecific promise of joy.

The choreography is enriched by references–just hints in passing–to landmark Russian ballets, such as the female ensemble’s forming patterns borrowed from Bronislava Nijinska’s Les Noces. Ratmansky is the sort of dance maker who keeps the history of his art in mind and makes it a living element of his own work. Simon Pastukh’s scenery suggests a long-ago rural Russia, a bleak landscape softened by spring’s blooming cherry trees that, all too soon, scatter their petals on the earth.

Having seen and reviewed the first cast of the ballet at its premiere (with Marcelo Gomes as the soldier, Veronika Part as his old love, Paloma Herrera as his new), I chose to see the second cast this season. Gomes remains irreplaceable, but Maria Riccetto, whom I’ve always thought of as a dry, inexpressive dancer, blossomed as the fiancée and was truly touching. Simone Messmer was fascinating as the most innocent “other woman” in ballet history except, perhaps, the Sylphide. In every role I’ve seen her perform, she has looked different–and remarkable. Here she made me wonder how ABT thinks of her: as a character dancer? a dramatic dancer? I’m fairly certain she’s not on the tiara-type ballerina track, but, if the company provides intelligent, steady mentoring, might she not become tomorrow’s Nora Kaye? Or, more likely, more fully and clearly herself?

Jerome Robbins’s 1944 Fancy Free (perfectly matched with its vivid Leonard Bernstein score and its nifty Oliver Smith set) is pure Forties, yet it has remained a favorite to this day. Telling a tale of three sailors on shore leave, hopefully trolling for pick-ups, it maintains a mood typical of American optimism, all the while closely observing realities of individual temperament.

The sailors in the performance I saw were Craig Salstein (as the brash virtuoso, jumping from the corner saloon’s bar to land in a split), Marcelo Gomes (as the guy who does a sexy rhumba partnering an imaginary chair), and David Hallberg (as the wistful fellow, who gets the duet with the loveliest girl). Gomes and Hallberg seemed to be having the time of their lives, freed from the restraints of playing princes. The women were the duly lovely Julie Kent, whose smile can light up a 4,000-seat theater, and Kristi Boone, as the spirited, street-savvy gal with a red shoulder bag, who won’t take any nonsense. Karen Uphoff was a more than plausible choice for the impossibly pretty walk-on.

□ □ □
Then, on July 10, the final day of ABT’s season, there was Natalia Osipova, a phenomenon if not yet a great ballerina, as Juliet, in Kenneth MacMillan’s grand-scale version of star-crossed teenage love.

This was Osipova’s first Juliet ever. She had been resident with ABT for the entire season, learning the role in addition to giving a few spectacular performances in other ballets. The celebrated dramatic dancer Alessandra Ferri taught her the role and she was coached by Irina Kolpakova, the legendary Kirov ballerina, now an ABT ballet mistress, who understands that, in narrative dance, feeling and form must fuse.

Osipova’s interpretation of Juliet will grow with experience, but it’s already on the right track. The young star has proved her mettle by shaping Juliet’s story as a powerful arc that moves inexorably from the last moment of the girl’s childhood, rambunctiously playing with her nurse; through her developing awareness of love as it flowers by stages into unquenchable passion; to her suicide, which becomes the only possible response to her beloved’s.

Osipova also wisely suits her portrayal of Juliet to her own stage appearance and temperament. Abandoning the familiar aspect of Juliet that derives from Margot Fonteyn’s unforgettable portrayal–which makes the spectator feel that the terrible aspects of the tale should not be happening to so lovely a creature–Osipova judiciously abandons any attempt at “being beautiful.” She opts for realism.

This Juliet begins as a hyper-spirited youngster. Slowly, she’s tamed a little by experiencing routine gestures of admiration from Paris, the suitable suitor her parents have chosen for her, and her own shy, then slightly tender response, when she realizes it’s pleasant to be pleasing. This softening is immediately succeeded by her love-at-first-sight for Romeo–an enemy of her household. Once this sudden attraction (and his to her) becomes the sole focus of her being, she embraces its ecstatic fulfillment, which inevitably hurtles her toward death.

Stage by stage, Osipova spells out this evolution from child to adolescent to full-grown woman who makes her own choices and embraces the choices that are dictated by her heart. (Which is just as well, since her father and Paris finally try to bend her to their will with brute force.) Osipova presents Juliet’s trajectory in clear detail, even when events render her grotesque with horror and pain. Every gesture has a reason behind it. She does not–cannot, perhaps–weave a romantic spell, but her interpretation suits her in its boldness and reach. With time and luck, it could make her Juliet a genuinely tragic figure.

© 2010 Tobi Tobias

Ballet Diary No.8: New York City Ballet: Darci Kistler Farewell; Peter Martins’s Mirage; Melissa Barak’s Call Me Ben, Maurice Kaplow’s Farewell (NYCB’s season at the David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC, closed on June 27)

Note: This is No. 8 in the series “Ballet Diary”–comments on the 2010 spring seasons of New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, along with related performances. To read previous pieces in the series, click here: No. 1; No. 2; No. 3; No. 4; No. 5; No. 6; No.7. The completed “Ballet Diary” series will comprise nine essays.

Darci Kistler was the last ballerina to capture Balanchine’s imagination, and she had a packed, loving house for her farewell performance on June 27 after 30 years with the New York City Ballet.

Kistler grew up in California with four elder brothers, a situation bound to contribute to her physical prowess and her derring-do. She completed her dance training at the School of American Ballet, entered City Ballet at the age of sixteen and was made a principal dancer only two years later. I saw her first at the annual SAB Workshop Performances–a marvel both as a frisky adolescent in a Bournonville duet (even the air surrounding her seemed fresh), and the next year as an entirely credible Odette in Balanchine’s one-act version of Swan Lake. Even then this ebullient teenager, given to rakish street clothes, had an instinct for feeling that allowed her to access the poetic plight and tragic destiny of the Queen of the Swans. Balanchine, who hoped to avert her modeling her interpretation on that of an established ballerina–that is, being anything other than herself–suggested that she visit the zoo to observe the swans; she did.

I recall watching Kistler in Antonina Tumkovsky’s advanced women’s class at SAB. In the last third of the session, according to custom, these uncannily accomplished adolescents divided into two groups to take turns doing combinations of movement that traveled–hurtled is more like it–across the studio floor. The “resting” dancers were expected to stand quietly in the background, catching their breath and giving their muscles and tendons a break, at most marking the challenging combinations with their hands, But Kistler would dance, full-out, with both groups. Tumey, as generations of SAB students called her, shook her head in admonition, while the expression on her face revealed the pleasure she took in this prodigy.

In the prime of her career Kistler was unquenchable: athletic, infinitely musical, radiant–and, where appropriate, so genuinely sweet that she was never cloying. The moment she stepped on stage it was impossible not to watch her. The most technically demanding choreography never fazed her. She seemed to be fueled not simply by the determination that lies behind most stardom but by her sheer delight in dancing.

Early on, however, Kistler was felled by injury and a failed surgical attempt to address it, from which she never completely recovered. This despite the patient, heroic efforts of her most important mentor, SAB’s Stanley Williams. One day Kistler, whom I know only slightly, remarked to me about living with incapacity, “I have a little bit of a handicap in there now, but I always think of it like–well, a horse can run beautifully with reins on it, too.” (Moved by the pathos of her tone and the courage of her attitude, I wrote her words down.) Much later, surgery for a back problem tamed her even further. Slowly but inexorably, her once-glorious technique diminished. Determined–unstoppable, I’d guess–she continued to perform.

As Kistler’s career began, so it concluded–with Swan Lake, this time in the final section of the full-length version of the ballet, staged by her husband, Peter Martins. Nearly all she had left at this point was her innate gift for riveting a viewer’s attention and the ability of an actress who, in her maturity, can offer a deeper, more complex portrayal of character and situation because she has known something of life. Somehow, on this occasion, that was almost enough.

Earlier in the farewell program, Kistler was the unnervingly shaky center of a pair of abstract Balanchine works, Monumentum pro Gesualdo and Movements for Piano and Orchestra. Then she illuminated the stage with the scene from the master’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which, as Titania, Queen of the Fairies, she falls in love–as a child might, given a marvelous toy–with the uncouth workman, Bottom, magically transformed into an ass.

Those ready to say “She should have stopped earlier” are right, as Kistler’s most ardent fans themselves admit, a few of them going so far as to confess that the performances of the late-career Kistler threatened to erode their memory of Kistler in her youth and Kistler in her prime. However they’re not factoring in the possibility that, given this ardent ballerina’s hunger for performing, she may simply have been unable to stop. Aficionados with long memories will recall that a relentless avidity for the stage has characterized some of the most unforgettable dancers–in both the classical and modern camps: Margot Fonteyn, Rudolph Nureyev, Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham. Artists, like ordinary folks, are only human.
As for the curtain calls at Kistler’s farewell performance, they were just as you can imagine. Only more so.

Peter Martins’s Mirage, the last to appear of the seven ballets created for New York City Ballet’s Architecture of Dance festival, was given its premiere on June 22. Despite truly handsome dancing, it looked engineered rather than choreographed, with sterile results.

Martins moves three principal couples and four secondary pairs in stark geometrical patterns–everyone dressed in Marc Happel’s sleek, chic practice clothes of gray and black. The dancers might be the instruments of a puppeteer operating with a prepared chart; they reveal neither personality nor spontaneity. The choreography looks like a highly efficient demonstration of selected skills that are honed by classical dance training, among them sheer power assiduously kept under control and extreme flexibility in the joints, which permits the leg to point to the heavens. The dancing, although understandably monotonous, had a stunning, clear-cut beauty, but nothing about the choreography stirs your mind or touches your heart; indeed, it has faded from your memory by the time you get home.

The ballet’s score, Violin Concerto, was commissioned from the Finnish composer Esa-Pekka Salonen, who conducted it at the premiere. The adroit guest violinist was Leila Josefowicz. While I found the music intriguing, I couldn’t fathom how the dancing connected to it. But then I couldn’t understand–and not for lack of trying–how any of the production’s elements related to the ballet’s title.

An installation by Santiago Calatrava, essentially the architect-in-residence for the season, served as the décor. Hung high above the dancers’ heads, it consisted of two half ovals–think of reading spectacles–that overlapped just slightly. The shapes were filled with thin parallel strips that formed moiré patterns with changes in the angle at which the spectator viewed them. The piece moved gently up and down a little ways and folded slightly in and out as if inspired by origami tactics. For its grand finale it was splashed with variously colored light. This last effect, I believe, was what my mother used to call “a lapse of taste.”

I finally caught up with Melissa Barak’s new ballet, Call Me Ben, commissioned by the City Ballet’s Architecture of Dance festival, and it’s as dispiriting as colleagues and friends who went earlier have been saying. The audience seemed to think so too, judging by its tepid applause.

Barak is a City Ballet alum, now dancing with Los Angles Ballet and choreographing steadily. She has already done a few pieces for her alma mater and its school, which were pleasant but hardly rigorous–not a strong argument for hoping she’d help correct today’s dearth of female classical choreographers. Call Me Ben is bigger and punchier than her earlier work, but pretty much a disaster.

It purports to tell the story of Benjamin (“Bugsy”) Siegel, the legendary gangster with extravagant dreams, credited with inventing Las Vegas and rubbed out at 42 by a gunman who remains unidentified. To get the colorful tale across, Barak resorts to having the dancers talk (almost always a mistake, because they’re not actors and they’re out of breath). Only Robert Fairchild, playing the antihero, manages his lines without sounding like a raw teen in the annual school play. The lines themselves, by the choreographer and company dancer Ellen Bar, are puerile.

The dancing Barak choreographs is efficient but innocuous and does nothing to advance–or even tell–the story. At best, it recalls routine stuff made for Broadway musicals half a century ago. Indeed, you expect the cast to burst into song at any moment. I kept wondering if the piece wasn’t meant to warm up City Ballet followers for the new Susan Stroman creation announced for the company’s winter season.

Barak may have been thinking of Balanchine’s Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, to say nothing of Agnes de Mille’s ensemble work in musical comedy, but to “borrow” so blatantly from Kurt Jooss (for sinister moves around a long conference table) was surely a miscalculation.

Call Me Ben boasts a score commissioned from the wunderkind Jay Greenberg; it seemed to be doing what it was supposed to do, with more panache than the choreography could muster. Santiago Calatrava provided two mediocre painted backdrops, both dominated by palm trees. The best parts of the “décor” were Jenifer Ringer (delectable in the way sweethearts used to be) as Bugsy’s shady No. 1 mistress, Ringer’s tailored suit (which any woman in her right mind would kill to own), the men’s fabulously cut suits in ogle-worthy fabrics, some of the women’s filmy dresses (costumes by Gilles Mendel), and the women’s Forties hairdos. All this must have cost a mint.

June 24th saw another NYCB retirement, not in the Sunday series of dancers’ farewells, but this time of the company’s veteran conductor, Maurice Kaplow. A ballet conductor is usually buried in the orchestra pit, his back to the spectators, except for pro forma bows. On this occasion, given several opportunities to reveal himself to the audience face to face, Kaplow appeared to be the most benign of gentleman–modest, yet radiating joy.

He has been with the company for 20 years and helped rescue the musical ensemble from a dismal period in the early 1990s. Kaplow, who is also a violinist, composer, and teacher, is apparently a master of harmony in his home life as well; a press release about the man the public rarely notices makes a point of noting that Kaplow was also celebrating the 50th anniversary of his marriage, which has given him three sons and five grandchildren.

The first ovation Kaplow received from the audience came when the orchestra, in a bit of magical engineering, was raised from the pit to visible level–just like that organist at Radio City Music Hall–to play the overture to Carl Maria von Weber’s Euryanthe under his direction. Then, after he’d led his musicians in accompanying Peter Martins’s Barber Violin Concerto and Balanchine’s Western Symphony, Kaplow appeared onstage for a solo bow beside a free-standing floral arrangement (surely a communal offering) while the audience rose to its feet, clapping like mad.

Next the ballerinas of the evening arrived to fill Kaplow’s arms with bouquets, followed by the members of the orchestra, each, in high spirits, tucking a single rose into the bouquets he already held, until the man himself nearly vanished from view.

Then Darci Kistler crossed the stage to present Kaplow with a single rose, curtsying deeply to him. Apart from that tender, solemn moment, the prevailing mood was one of affectionate gaiety. Peter Martins added to it by pulling out a baton and “conducting” the musicians in a rendition of “Happy Birthday,” to which the instrumentalists sang simultaneously, joined by the audience. What more was there to do but let scads of multi-hued confetti flutter down to create that tiny theatrical marvel, a tinted snowstorm in summer.

© 2010 Tobi Tobias

Ballet Diary No. 7: New York City Ballet: Philip Neal Farewell; Albert Evans Farewell (NYCB’s season runs through June 27 at the David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC); American Ballet Theatre: The Sleeping Beauty, with Alina Cojocaru and Natalia Osipova as Aurora (ABT’s season runs through July 10 at the Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC)

Note: This is No. 7 in the series “Ballet Diary”–comments on the 2010 spring seasons of New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, along with related performances. To read previous pieces in the series, click here: No. 1; No. 2; No. 3; No. 4; No. 5; No. 6. The completed “Ballet Diary” series will comprise nine essays.

Until a final solo bow on the flower-strewn stage of the David H. Koch Theatre ended his exquisite farewell performance with New York City Ballet on June 13, if you wanted to see the term danseur noble illustrated in the flesh, you could watch Philip Neal.

In his 22 years with the company, Neal was the model of the quiet authority that is earned through purity. His technique had a clarity that seemed to be bred in his bones. His demeanor was modestly reserved; he often seemed to disappear into the dance and was obviously unacquainted with the realm of “show biz.” He cultivated “the plain style”–without excluding grace and elegance. This was evident even in small things: The movement of his hands and wrists, for example, had a loveliness abandoned by most men of his and the rising generation. Among his most significant gifts was his masterly partnering; he helped a ballerina’s individual temperament bloom because she was secure in his arms.

For his final appearance, Neal danced the first-arriving of the two male leads in Balanchine’s poignant Serenade, the ballet for which the twentieth-century’s greatest choreographer thought he might, just might, be remembered, and the male lead in Balanchine’s Chaconne,

Neal’s dancing in Serenade, with Jenifer Ringer, was all tenderness, gravity, and regret. His deference to the presence and plight of the figure Ringer represented seemed to echo Balanchine’s much-quoted declaration “Ballet is woman,” the implication being that man (if the choreographer) is her servant or (if the dancing partner) her cavalier. Neal wasn’t quite all-subservience, though. Dancing alone, for instance, he’d execute a high, wide leap, imprinting the image of his perfectly aligned body on the air so indelibly that he seemed, for a few seconds, fixed in space, while the air surged around him.

In Chaconne (to plangent music taken from Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice), Neal and Wendy Whelan were equals as they danced first among the Blessed Spirits (an ever-shifting matrix of young women with flowing skirts and unbound hair), and then became the monarchs of a kingdom full of delightful if inscrutable protocols that only a scholar of early classical music or a child steeped in fairy tales could explain. As did the originators of their roles, Suzanne Farrell and Peter Martins, Whelan and Neal made the whole business cohere.

Toward the end of the ballet, Whelan, who seemed to be dancing with great joy, streamed all her focus in two marvelous solos toward Neal instead of to the public, expressing–spontaneously, I think–her affection for her longtime colleague.

Then came the curtain calls: the Chaconne cast applauding the retiring star; Neal responding to Whelan with a real kiss; long, swirling silver streamers shot out of nowhere toward the hero of the hour. Next, the parade of former and current colleagues, bearing flowers. Among them were Kyra Nichols, now retired, Neal’s most important partner in the course of his career; Albert Evans, due to give his own farewell performance one week hence (snappily dressed for the occasion, Evans kissed a single red rose before offering it to his buddy); and Darci Kistler (the last ballerina selected by Balanchine), whose farewell will come the following week and close the season.

Peter Martins joined the gang of Neal fans, as did many other members of the company. The “pedestrian” in the congratulatory crowd was Neal’s partner, that gentleman’s walk-on appearance being only suitable since, in recent years, ballerinas have been bringing their husbands and children onstage for similar celebrations. Little nosegays were flung stageward by admirers in the audience, and finally Neal stood alone on the carpet of petals, his posture recognizable from curtain-call photos of the foremost male dancers down the decades. Standing erect yet subtly sculpted, like a classical Greek statue, he held one hand over his heart–as if he meant it.

This last goodbye was touching–many in the audience wept–because it made clear as never before how important Neal’s dancing has been to the company’s profile. America doesn’t hold with aristocracy and Neal’s dancing is unmistakably American–plainspoken and without airs–but he is nevertheless a prince.

Farewells stir up memories. I first encountered Albert Evans offstage when New York City Ballet had recently promoted him, Philip Neal, and Nilas Martins to soloist rank and I was interviewing them as a group. When all the obvious points had been covered, the conversation turned casual and Evans mentioned, modesty barely veiling his pride, that he had just moved into a new apartment. “What style are you decorating it in?” I asked. I should have known there could be only one answer, and he came right back with it: “Albert Evans style.”

Time passed. He danced. Evans was a beautiful classical dancer with an on-the-mark yet velvety technique. On appropriate occasions he countered its sheer beauty with streetwise alertness to possible danger–around him or within him. This profile, obviously welcome in contemporary choreography, gave an added dimension to Balanchine’s work, especially the abstract “leotard ballets” that lie at the heart of the City Ballet repertory. In lighter works he gave his sunny personality free rein.

In 1995 the company elevated Evans to the top rank of principal dancer. He continued to dance. When a slew of new ballets was needed for one of City Ballet’s periodic festivals, visiting choreographers vied to use him. He was an extraordinarily charismatic presence, and a showman par excellence. From the moment of his entrance he could persuade the audience that something compelling was going on.

Eventually, as happens to us all, but later, the body began to exact its compromises. On June 20, Evans danced his last performance with City Ballet, appearing in a rakish duet from William Forsythe’s Herman Schmerman; Balanchine’s Four Temperaments, a touchstone of neo-classicism; and a flower-filled, confetti-studded series of curtain calls in which he received an enthusiastic homage from his colleagues, who crowded onto the stage, and from the standing, robustly clapping, vociferously appreciative audience calling out his name.

The two indelible moments in those multiple curtain calls were Evans’s half-reclining on the floor behind the pile-up of bouquets as if he were a jokester mocking his own death and burial, assuring the spectators it was just a prank, and his standing and shedding his soft white ballet slippers (part of the danseur noble’s uniform) and throwing them–as if to say “That’s that!”–into the lush, soft-petalled mound.

Perhaps relinquishing performance at the highest level when you still have half your life to live has to be handled ironically to be endured. But, even if unintentionally, Evans had delivered another–ingenuously hopeful–message at the close of The Four Temperaments. As the parallel lines of the entire cast formed a runway for flight toward some unidentified but implicitly cosmic destination, Evans turned his head sharply away from the audience and into the wings as if he’d suddenly discovered something riveting in the distance and was moving straight toward it.

American Ballet Theatre’s Sleeping Beauty is a scandalously inept version of the Petipa classic. Changes have been made to the company’s current production since its premiere in 2007 in the hope of correcting this or that absurdity–choreographic, narrative, or decorative–to no avail. It’s wrongheaded from the word go and a desecration of the Tchaikovsky score, of which it omits huge chunks because today’s audience is assumed to have no sitzfleish.

Let’s say, to be generous, that the people responsible for the production–Kevin McKenzie, Gelsey Kirkland, and Michael Chernov–fully appreciated the beauty of the traditional version of the ballet, understood its deep metaphoric significance (instead of confusing a fairy tale with realism), and had listened to what the music was clearly telling them at every turn. If so, they were simply unable to bring their knowledge to making a fresh version that a perceptive dance viewer could admire. I’ve stayed away from this Beauty since I reviewed its premiere and returned only to see the Royal Ballet’s Alina Cojocaru and the Bolshoi Ballet’s Natalia Osipova dance Aurora–matinee and evening respectively on June 19, at the Metropolitan Opera House.

Both ballerinas are small, slight women and, for a dancer, anatomy is in part destiny. If the petite dancer bubbles with energy, she’s a natural for soubrette roles; one with more lyrical leanings seems born to arouse pathos.

Cojocaru certainly looks as fragile as a porcelain figurine, but I can’t understand why she chose to portray Aurora largely in the pathetic mode. To be sure, there’s a curse looming over this heroine, yet it doesn’t seem to undermine the radiant ebullience the world’s most unforgettable ballerinas have given her at her Sweet Sixteen party. (Aurora may not even know about the dark prophecy since, seeing a spindle for the first time, she finds it a fascinating toy.) And I suppose, when the Lilac Fairy reveals her to the Prince as an impalpable vision, there’s some melancholy to be found in the notion (ignored in all the other interpretations I’ve seen) of Aurora’s yearning for a love that seems infinitely delayed. But at her coming of age celebration (until the malicious Carabosse intrudes) and at her wedding, Aurora is triumphant, a young woman truly coming into her kingdom.

I imagine the quality Cojocaru is aiming for is reticence–an understated interpretation that would register as refined, elegant, and, in the end, touching. What I saw in her single ABT performance, however, looked dry and constricted–more repressed than refined, more thought through than danced through. No surprise, then, that this Aurora failed to delight.

This is not to say that Cojocaru’s rendition wasn’t technically superb. On the whole it was. And not just in the obvious places–the preternaturally sustained balances of the Rose Adagio and (thanks to Jose Manuel Carreño, a prince worth waiting for) perfection in the series of fish dives that climax the grand pas de deux of the Wedding Scene. Less obvious moments were equally gratifying. Take, for example, Aurora’s traveling down a diagonal line of her kneeling suitors, pausing briefly before each one in arabesque, then descending seamlessly from full point to flat as, with a Japanese sense of propriety, she delicately shades her face from the men’s view.

In the course of the past six years or so, I adored the dancing I’d seen from Cojocaru here in New York, with only slight and occasional reservations about a lack of full-blooded passion. In the Beauty performance I just saw–the ballerina’s single appearance with ABT this season–I felt the balance had tipped in a discouraging direction. Cojocaru can’t go back to what she once was–no artist can–but there’s always the possibility of a heartfelt exploration of what one might be next.

The diminutive Osipova is the ballet world’s young favorite and, at the moment, the general public’s too, having emerged relatively unscathed after being mugged in the Lincoln Center nabe. Her performance of Aurora on the 19th was her very first in The Sleeping Beauty–anywhere.

If the event wasn’t an unqualified success, it’s because she isn’t the Aurora “type.” Lacking both innate charm and radiance, she’s not convincingly girlish in the birthday scene or able to project a womanly glow for the wedding scene. (Yes, these are old-fashioned qualities but Beauty is an old-fashioned ballet–and a keeper nonetheless.) There were many hints in Osipova’s performance that she knows what the story and music require, but she can’t produce these effects yet; they’re still just ideas and they don’t mesh with the personality her dancing regularly reveals. She’s a hoyden–spunky and fearless, a cousin of Tom Sawyer and the heroine of Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo, who wants to ride with the cowboys.

The gods know she applied all her stunning technical skills to the task. Leaping is Osipova’s preeminent gift. She seems to rise up from nowhere and, as Nijinsky described his own uncanny elevation, “just pause in the air for a little before you return” or let herself be blown by an unchartable wind to another lofty niche in space. Just as her preparation for these amazing flights is invisible, her landings may be invisible too. At any rate, I’ve never noticed them.

She’s a world-class turner too. I especially liked her supported pirouettes with the four princes come from afar to woo Aurora. With the first suitor she does a single pirouette; with the second, two, and so on. I’ve seen many a ballerina avoid this challenge, since it’s tricky to keep the triple and quadruple pirouettes clear. Osipova, I suspect, could bring off the feat in her sleep.

And of course there are her sky-high extensions, breathtaking for those who like this sort of thing. I don’t; they make the working leg look detached from the body, as is the case with even the most “realistic” jointed doll.

It’s tempting to weigh Cojocaru’s Aurora against Osipova’s because of the circumstances under which one had to view them, both ballerinas appearing one time only in the role and on the same day. Thus you could find yourself saying, “Well, Osipova’s balances were secure, but Cojocaru’s outshone them” or “Cojocaru seemed willfully to have decided to damp down her interpretation, but Osipova may already be invested in the drama of Aurora’s growth to maturity.” Such remarks might be true but they’re not very pertinent, dance being an art, not a competition, no matter what TV shows and those gold and silver medals propose. Besides, both Cojocaru and Osipova were outclassed by a model who is now hors concours: Margot Fonteyn.

© 2010 Tobi Tobias

Ballet Diary No. 6: American Ballet Theatre: All-Ashton Program; All-American program (ABT’s season runs through July 10 at the Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC; New York City Ballet: Mauro Bigonzetti’s Luce Nascosta, (NYCB’s season runs through June 27 at the David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC)

Note: This is No. 6 in the series “Ballet Diary”–comments on the 2010 spring seasons of New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, along with related performances. To read previous pieces in the series, click here: No. 1; No. 2; No. 3; No. 4; No. 5. The completed “Ballet Diary” series will comprise nine essays.

After giving the general public what marketing believes it craves–three weeks straight of program-length works–American Ballet Theatre gave hard-core (or is it old-fashioned?) dance aficionados a break with a week of mixed-repertory programs. Mind you, the mix was always governed by a specific theme, assuring the ticket buyer, by means of a label, that he or she was making a solid investment. I went to see the All-Ashton and the All-American programs.

Only half of the Ashton program offered a goodly amount of sheer pleasure; the rest was a demonstration of ABT’s efforts to dance in a style foreign to it. Frederick Ashton’s ballets are quintessentially English: On the surface many of them have a fairyland lightness–the exquisite grace of a highly mobile torso set against delicate, precise footwork; at the core lie feelings that pierce the heart.

ABT’s rendition of Ashton’s 1956 Birthday Offering made me think of the Advanced Placement exams taken by college-bound high-school students: an occasion to test their chops in a subject about which they’ve learned a great deal, but hardly everything they need to know for genuine mastery.

Created for the 25th anniversary of the company that had just received its charter as the Royal Ballet and set to deliquescent Glazunov music, the piece is danced by seven couples (one more equal than the others). The full cast opens the ballet with a promenade of the pairs, which then evolves into a group dance that still recalls the idea of a promenade. Ashton knows his trade and provides the obligatory elements of a formally constructed display piece–a duet for the chief couple and an ensemble dance for the men. But the astonishing core of this ballet is seven solos for the women, one after another, each ingenious and difficult in an a unique way. The difficulty is meant to be invisible–masked by the dancers’ prowess. For this you need seven women of the highest technical caliber and individual distinction. I’d venture to say that ABT doesn’t yet have the personnel equal to the task.

Still, the attempt was glorious. Usually, in the performing arts, nothing counts but first-class results, but here you could see gifted, proficient, and experienced dancers learning and trying, learning and trying. Their understanding of how Ashton’s choreography should be danced, along with their persistence and humility, cheered me immensely. Those solos–an echo of Petipa’s individual dances for the fairies at Aurora’s christening–are still at the point where they’re being executed step by step, a concern with correctness foremost. Rarely does the material expand into dancing that flows naturally, as if it were almost spontaneous. Could this facility come with time? Could ABT borrow a significant number of rehearsal hours from the production of new works that are no more than gimmicks and tomfoolery and, instead, spend them on the treasures of earlier decades–the Ashton repertory, the Tudor repertory, even the Balanchine repertory (with people to coach it merely a stone’s throw away)? Classical choreographers of genius being almost non-existent nowadays, might this not be a perfect time to look to–and preserve–the glories of the past?

The Awakening pas de deux from Ashton’s version of The Sleeping Beauty was basically a disaster area, apart from Paloma Herrera’s making a timid but credible attempt at acting instead of merely dancing Aurora with her familiar technical panache. In Perrault’s version of the fairy tale, the young woman says, immediately after her kiss-alarm clock rings, “Is it you, dear prince? You have been long in coming!” I hated to think of this 116-year-old (but nonetheless radiant) princess’s having spent the previous century in the milkmaid-style nightie Herrera wore. The object of her instant affections (although Perrault slyly hints she may have glimpsed him in her dreams) appeared to be sporting the uniform of his soccer team. Played by Cory Stearns, he was not worth waiting for; Stearns lacks both the technique for Ashton’s subtle but challenging choreography and the necessary dramatic presence.

Diana Vishneva’s partner for the Thais Pas de Deux, Jared Matthews, was something of a cipher too, but Vishneva was utterly compelling as the veiled woman who comes to her worshipper as if in a high-minded–almost spiritual–version of an erotic dream. Deliberate and sinuous in her movements to Massenet’s music, blank in her expression but fiercely concentrated, the Russian ballerina slowly drew in the audience with the kind of magnetic force there’s no point in resisting. Through her portrayal Ashton preached his gospel, once again: Woman’s power lies not simply in beauty, but in beauty that’s coupled with mystery.

Created in 1964, to Mendelssohn’s delectable music, The Dream is one of Ashton’s greatest triumphs and ABT did it justice, evoking Shakespeare’s antic and romantic fairyland, forever entwined with the predicaments of mere mortals. The company’s female ensemble succeeded in producing the effect of quivering butterfly wings, while the principals outdid themselves, dancing Ashton’s choreography with both freedom and credible style, at the same time conveying the temperament of their characters.

Gillian Murphy, as Titania, was splendidly imperious and willful; David Hallberg’s Oberon, quick to match her and quick to anger. Hallberg went all out in his dramatic interpretation, with passages of sublime authority (aided by his flawless technique, which combines lyricism with virtuosity)–and little moments in which he indulged in the refined fussiness typical of a dealer in high-end antiques. I can’t imagine ever forgetting his Oberon’s sudden flares of temper, his self-confident haughtiness, or his delivery of the long skeins of assorted turns that Ashton originally set for Anthony Dowell.

Murphy made much of the lust Titania has for Bottom, the workman temporarily transformed into an ass, pressing the long donkey ears to her breasts and deeply embarrassed when Oberon confronts her with her transgression. These passages provide an important contrast with the duet–surely one of the jewels of twentieth-century choreography–at the end of the ballet in which Titania and Oberon find their way to a perfect union. As exasperated feminists will assert, she succumbs to him, but Ashton makes it clear that she does so of her own will.

The twisting, high-flying motions of Puck is just another feather in Herman Cornejo’s cap. This extraordinary dancer left his personal mark on the role by giving it a grotesque and servile tinge that was almost scary yet just right.

Julio Bragado-Young, as the transmuted Bottom, earns special mention for his point work. Without forsaking his masculinity, he delivered the unwavering line through the legs and the neatness of foot (hoof, if you will) that might be the envy of the girls in the advanced class of the company’s school.

Encountered first in a flyer for ABT’s season, the umbrella title “All American” for a ballet program seemed contrived to me. What difference could it possibly make that all three choreographers happened to be natives? All the difference in the world, as the performance proved. The trio of ballets–Twyla Tharp’s Brahms-Hayden Variations, Jerome Robbins’s Fancy Free, and Paul Taylor’s Company B share the lustiness of purpose, the theatrical ingenuity, and the bravado needed to pioneer uncharted ground that are typical of American ventures. It helped, of course, that all three ballets are keepers.

For The Brahms-Hayden Variations, choreographed for ABT a decade ago, before Tharp became dangerously distracted by Broadway, 30 dancers assemble to create ever-shifting matrixes, the beautiful logic of which you sense, profoundly, even if you can’t grasp–or even see–all of the marvels on a first viewing. Admittedly, this ballet is too dense–it’s like advanced math, visualized–yet any little passage, or even phrase, that you do seize seems perfect for its moment in time and position in space. The piece has a crackerjack organization that’s gravely formal even when what’s going on step-wise seems decidedly peculiar.

As is her custom when operating in the classical-dance world, Tharp roots her choreography in the academic ballet vocabulary, but that’s just a base. She takes every traditional move to the extremes she envisions for it, infiltrating the material along the way with borrowings from jazz, modern dance, gymnastics, pedestrian moves–you name it. Watching this dance, you feel blasted by possibility.

ABT’s dancers stepped up to the challenges, eager and able. Despite a couple of tricky moments, they gave the piece the high-caliber performance it demands and deserves.
What’s American about Brahms-Haydn? Tharp’s self-invention and stubborn drive to push beyond what we already know; the polyglot nature of her dance language; her belief that complexity needn’t be abstruse but, actually, fun.

An instant hit in 1944, Fancy Free, a collaboration between Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein, is one of the rare ballets that tells a story but needs no libretto. It’s perfectly clear and perfectly wonderful. Three sailors–fast friends–on shore leave in the big city, on the lookout for dates. One, then two gorgeous prospects stroll by. After a sassy encounter, then a tender duo the question remains: How to divvy up these terrific femmes? All five repair to the corner bar (the brilliant set showing both sidewalk exterior and watering-hole interior is by Oliver Smith) where each guy struts his stuff in a solo revealing his temperament: poetic; athletic; sexy. The competition being inconclusive, the guys naturally resort to fisticuffs. The girls depart in a huff. Bereft, the sailors reconcile under the street lamp, ruefully accepting their failure with the fair sex, until . . . Just before the curtain falls, gorgeous prospect number three strolls by, and they go chasing after her, full-speed.

Having watched Robbins teach Fancy to New York City Ballet dancers–the sessions included consulting a film of the original cast–I can guess that the choreographer’s well-known obsession with accuracy down to the last detail has played a major part in the ballet’s surviving its transmission to several generations of dancers pretty much intact. The ABT cast I saw this season produced not only the steps and gestures but also–equally important–the personalities of the characters, even to the incredibly beautiful blonde walk-on, who may provide the shortest description ever made of the term narcissist.

Best of cast prize goes to Jose Manuel Carreño, who does the solo originally danced by Robbins himself. It was inspired, Robbins has said, by the sight of a sailor dancing in a bar, his arms wrapped around a chair in lieu of a flesh-and-blood partner. In the choreography, the chair is gone and the arms embrace empty space (enticing the imagination), but the rhumba’s swiveling hips are definitely there. Carreño adds his own seductive personality.

What’s American about Fancy? It gives us the U.S. of A. in a nutshell–a land of good-natured dreams about youth, buddies, easy pick-ups with no dire consequences (indeed, no consequences at all), and living contentedly in the moment (even if there’s a war going on). Some of those dreams have corroded in the last sixty-six years, yet the ballet remains effective and beloved.

Like Fancy, Paul Taylor’s Company B, created in 1991, refers to World War II. It’s danced to recordings of the Andrews Sisters’ irresistible pop songs and, though its men are in mufti, often dancing ebulliently with sweetie pies in bobby-sox, from time to time they march in silhouette behind an upstage scrim, shooting and falling. Towards the end of the ballet, the war impinges directly on the world of upbeat spirits: The irrepressible antics of the bugle boy are quenched with a single bullet and a woman mourns the death of her soldier husband, acknowledging that while life will go on for her, he will never be replaced in her heart.

ABT gave the work a cast largely composed of artists who can play down-to-earth people; no one on stage seemed to be longing for roles as impalpable spirits, abstract choreography, or point shoes.

What’s American about Company B? As with Fancy, the picture of a memorable era in our country’s history–this time created in retrospect and letting the dark veil the light. The jitterbug moves, all the rage in the Forties, that Taylor embeds into his modern-dance choreography. The absence of swans.

Cater-corner from the Metropolitan Opera House, at the David H. Koch Theater, New York City Ballet presented the premiere of Mauro Bigonzetti’s Luce Nascosta (Unseen Light) on June 10. The sixth of seven new works the company has commissioned for its “Architecture of Dance” festival, the ballet has music commissioned from Bruno Moretti, a frequent Bigonzetti collaborator, and an overhead–in the middle, mercifully a good bit elevated–sculptural installation by Santiago Calatrava, who has been the festival’s architect in residence, so to speak, available for the new works.

The piece opens with figures barely visible on the darkened stage. Above them hangs Calatrava’s contribution, a glowing, bronzed sun that, in the course of the dance, will extrude several baby suns to either side, then gather them back, hinting at some metaphoric significance that’s never defined. As the space grows marginally less dim, a couple dances what looks like a jagged version of an apache duet, the steps and rhythms skewed, as if taunting classical-dance harmony.

Actually the dancers’ costumes are the first thing that strikes you. The men are bare-chested, with supple black trousers given a boot cut gone wild, splitting the garment’s seams from the calf down. The women are bare-midriffed. You might suspect that the fabric thus “saved” is then re-purposed to give them their long, skin-tight sleeves. Most prominent are the ladies’ short, black, extravagantly ruffled skirts, which suggest the plumage of an exotic bird. (Later, when the spectacularly long-legged Teresa Reichlen performs her solo of distortions, using her glutes to thrust her skirt out behind her, she resembles an ostrich. A charming ostrich, you understand.)

Anyway, by the time you’ve taken in the initial maneuvers and sized up the costumes, the full cast forms a double horizontal line, women foremost, the men stalking them. They look like a Spanish-style chorus line preparing for stardom in Vegas. Singled out next is a woman (Ashley Bouder) whose face is nearly hidden by a stylish loose bob. She seems to be the comedian of this errant troupe–though you must understand that nothing about Luce Nascosta is in the least funny–so after a peculiar solo she gets to do a grotesque pas de deux. Now and then, the men execute bits of gesture from Indian dance–maybe to indicate the power of ritual, maybe in homage to Maurice Béjart.

Well, you don’t need to hear much more about the goings on. They remain simultaneously pretentious and tawdry–until Moretti’s score changes its disjunctive tune (duly larded with festive scraps of “world music”) and grows sentimental and sappy, as if for the happy ending of a pre-Sixties romantic movie. The population duly takes its cue and manages to move, halfway anyway, to a less fraught life style. For me, the endless reconciliation passage, with the women skidding on point into their partners’ arms, was the last straw.

To distract myself from my dismay at the cheap aesthetic (if that’s the word) of Luce Nascosta, I tried to grasp what the ballet is “about.” I concluded, half-heartedly, that it deals with the sexual mores of foreign climes that are too weird for us–not being Margaret Meads–to understand, but not too weird to titillate us. Then I realized that I have never once wondered what Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco is about.

© 2010 Tobi Tobias

Ballet Diary No. 5: School of American Ballet Workshop Performances / January 5 and 8, 2010 / Peter Jay Tharp Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC

Note: This is No. 5 in the series “Ballet Diary”–comments on the 2010 spring seasons of New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, along with related performances. To read previous pieces in the series, click here: No. 1; No. 2; No. 3; No. 4. The completed “Ballet Diary” series will comprise nine essays.

The School of American Ballet is in the top echelon of conservatories that train promising young people for what the great 19th-century Danish ballet master August Bournonville remembered his father calling “the most glorious career in the world.” At its annual Workshop Performances, the school presents a selection of its students in a program that almost always features choreography by George Balanchine, since SAB is, after all, the official academy of New York City Ballet. This year was no exception. In three performances–two on June 5, one on June 8–students for whom high school is merely an extra-curricular activity gave spirited renditions of Balanchine’s Valse Fantaisie and Bourrée Fantasque.

Staged by Suki Schorer with her customary élan, Valse Fantaisie (to a now lively, now romantic Glinka score) was the most wonderful item on the program. A pair of lovers accompanied by a quartet of women sweeps through the space swiftly and lightly, creating a vision of the exuberance that may accompany joy–especially in the young. The women’s pale tulle skirts waft behind them as they leap, swirl around them as they turn, making you think of clouds sent scudding across the sky by the breezes of a perfect spring day.

Attending the matinee and evening showings on June 5, I saw two different casts of principals, all four dancers being adequate and interesting. Both men, Peter Walker (born buoyant) and Spartak Hoxsa, were suitably limber and fleet, very likely destined, by anatomy and perhaps temperament, for “dreamer’s” roles, such as James in La Sylphide and the Poet in Les Syphides. Physically (and, no doubt, emotionally) they have some years of growth ahead of them, but they’ve been given all the right ideas about dancing–moving on a large scale, cleanly and with assurance, leaving uncertainty and affectation behind.

Claire Kretzschmar, Walker’s partner, was thoroughly musical, with a lovely leap. She looked as if she were effortlessly clearing hurdles made of whipped egg whites, knowing the hurdle couldn’t hurt her if she failed and crashed into it and knowing, too, that she’d never fail. Hoxha’s partner, Bianca Bulle, was very competent and self-possessed; she does need to relax her face, though, so that her beauty is not a weapon but an invitation.

Schorer was unquestionably the most significant contributor to the production. Under her staging and coaching, the dance seemed to be exuded on a single breath. Eliciting your rapt attention from the very start, it appeared to take no time at all; when it ended–its spell broken by the familiar ritual of applause, bows, flowers–all you wanted was to see it again.

Susan Pilarre’s staging of Bourrée Fantasque was fine, apart from an exaggerated emphasis on the quirkiness of the angled, off-balance moves of the first section. These are rakish enough without the performers pushing the point home. Otherwise the dancers’ youthful vitality was exhilarating, both here and in the third movement, a Broadway-worthy finale that assembles the ballet’s full cast and has them doing things like space-cleaving leaps in large crisscrossing phalanxes. If Workshop’s dancers lack the gift of stillness, which would make the fireworks, by contrast, even more dazzling, it’s simply because of their age. Only one of them has turned 20; they will acquire composure as they mature.

The middle section of the ballet is romantic and enigmatic; Chabrier’s score creates–perhaps even indulges in–the mood. In a dream-world ballroom, ravishingly dressed in midnight colors (thanks to Karinska’s original designs), a yearning man and woman continually thread their way through an ever-shifting maze of eight undifferentiated women (representing Fate, perhaps). The would-be lovers lose, find, and lose each other once again. And again. As it’s presented here, the situation is so generic, I’ve often wondered if Balanchine, much given at times to the theme of doomed love (Serenade, La Valse, Scotch Symphony), was possibly being ironic here, suggesting that, absent a subtext, he could produce this sort of material by the yard.

Jillian Harvey was stunning as the quietly impassioned woman in this section. There is nothing in her build or technical strength that guarantees she’ll be a leading dancer one day. It’s her perception of who she is in this role that is so striking and so moving. She’s made a story for her character–or, at the very least, taken her coaching deeply to heart–and this story suffuses every move she makes. Though it is not told outright, it fires our imagination. Harvey may never become a ballerina, but she is already an artist.

The two Balanchine ballets–neither of them, mind you, thought to be among the choreographer’s most significant achievements–made Christopher Wheeldon’s ponderous and self-conscious Scènes de Ballet, which opened the Workshop program, look as if its maker belonged to a lesser order of dance creators.

Wheeldon’s ballet, originally made for the Workshop Performances of 1999, borrows its name from the Stravinsky score to which it’s set. It aims to depict the development of a classical dancer from childhood to the cusp of professional status. It’s a very prettified version of the tale, which I found saccharine though others will undoubtedly think it charming.

The ballet’s heavy décor suggests a studio in old Russia–a reference, perhaps, to Balanchine’s beginnings–and uses twin ballet barres that stretch diagonally down the stage floor to indicate the partition between reality and mirror image, an ever-present factor in a dancer’s life. Just about all the ensuing choreography respects this divide and maintains the old theatrical device of having two dancers seem to be just one body and its reflection.

Wheeldon exploits the endearingly tiny, fragile look of the youngest children, opening with a pair of girls in pastel tunics who probably haven’t yet learned their multiplication tables. To these wisps of promise and possibility he methodically adds, level by level, pre-teens, teens, and fully developed late adolescents about to sign their first contracts. He arranges this youth squad in studied, picturesque displays, all necessarily involving the imaginary mirror that bisects their space. A few of the formations are clever, even appealing; however, there is no room for real dancing to be going on. What’s more, while the hierarchy of the bodies of different ages and degrees of mastery is clear, the very spirit of dancing is ignored.

© 2010 Tobi Tobias

Ballet Diary No. 4: New York City Ballet: Christopher Wheeldon’s Estancia (NYCB’s season runs through June 27 at the David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center); American Ballet Theatre: John Neumeier’s Lady of the Camellias; Don Quixote; Alicia Alonso’s 90th Birthday Celebration (ABT’s season runs through July 10 at the Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center)

Note: This is No. 4 in the series “Ballet Diary”–comments on the 2010 spring seasons of New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, along with related performances. To read previous pieces in the series, click here: No. 1; No. 2; No. 3. The completed “Ballet Diary” series will comprise nine essays.

If you want to revel in evocations-of-the-untamed-land, go to Willa Cather’s My Ántonia or raid the kids’ bookcase for Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” series. Do not, for love of Terpsichore, consult Christopher Wheeldon’s latest effort, Estancia, for New York City Ballet’s “Architecture of Dance” season.

The piece, which had its premiere May 29 at the David H. Koch Theater, is named for a score commissioned from the Argentinean composer Alberto Ginastera by Lincoln Kirstein for Ballet Caravan, one of the forerunners of City Ballet. George Balanchine was to have provided the choreography but the little company folded before he set to work and the music, composed in 1941, wasn’t given a dance realization in the States until Wheeldon came along.

The title of Ginastera’s score, which Wheeldon co-opted for his ballet, means ranch. And that’s where Wheeldon takes us–to Argentina’s Pampas, a landscape that features dizzyingly wide horizons to which one gazes across enormous stretches of untrammeled space and mettlesome people who live close to the earth. Wheeldon’s treatment lends the gauchos (something like America’s cowboys) a pack of wild horses instead of more prosaic individual mounts. It can’t fail to remind audiences of Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo, which conjures up our western plains, their settlers’ bond to its wide horizons, and, for the men, a life on horseback.

Estancia tells a story derived from Ginastera’s own synopsis and a poem–about the beauty of the simple life–that inspired him. A city boy (Tyler Angle) yearns to become part of the rural workers’ domain, identifies a potential sweetheart (Tiler Peck) there, is rebuffed by her, then accepted when he tames one of the natives’ wild horses. Midway through this unlikely scenario, a group of city folk, thinking themselves superior because they’re urban, insult the locals as they try to lure the young man back to town. The two sectors reconcile so the ballet can end with a lusty dance of celebration.

Here’s where Wheeldon goes wrong:

(1) Everyone in Estancia–human and equine alike–moves like a highly trained ballet dancer, the women on point. Even the formal stage patterning recalls conventional classical ballet. This doesn’t help the viewer imagine the down-to-earth beauty of life in the Pampas.

(2) The Horses: Humans as horses are tricky. Ballet dancing humans as horses–lavish manes and tails whipping about a vertical body–are ludicrous. Four mares (on point) in a bit of pas de deux-ing with a quartet of gauchos are beyond the pale. Wasn’t their lone stallion (Andrew Veyette, undeterred by absurdity) enough for them? As for The Boy’s getting reins on the most slightly built mare and thus winning The Girl, the taming is a non-event, both physically and dramatically. Maybe Wheeldon should have had The Boy tackle the stallion to create a more striking, evenly matched contest.

(3) The Girl of His Dreams: She starts out as feisty as they come, a role model you’d want for your goddaughter. But the moment she begins to reconsider The Boy as a romantic partner, she starts to melt into sweet, soft sentimentality. The couple’s love duet, which ends with their cuddling on the floor, is so generic and sappy as to be embarrassing.

(4) The Singer: A distinguished baritone (Philip Cutlip) performing in operatic style–in the Pampas?

(5A) Class Conflict: Wheeldon’s depiction of the snobbish city folks is simply too crude: ladies of the Forties dressed for visiting outlying districts–hats, gloves–being disgusted by horse droppings, and so on.

(5B) Class Rapprochement: Every musical-style show needs an upbeat finale, so rural and city folks unite for a generic display of joy, waving red bandannas. If Wheeldon is being ironic here, lovingly parodying old-time Broadway musicals (as, say, Alexei Ratmansky might), he’s changing his tune too late in the game.

I don’t blame the dancers. Even if the ensemble occasionally seemed half-hearted, the leads, Peck and Angle, gave the material their all and Veyette retained his self-contained visceral power (to say nothing of his dignity) in his peculiar assignment. Nevertheless, Estancia ranks high among the dopiest ballets I’ve ever seen.

The décor for Estancia–mainly a jazzy front cloth and a blurry backdrop giving a domesticated impression of the Pampas–is by Santiago Calatrava, whose scenic treatments are supposed to be the lynchpin of the City Ballet’s “Architecture of Dance” festival. He does far better work designing buildings. Carlos Campos created the costumes–from the outré equine disguises to outfits for the city folk that focus more on period detail than on theatrical impact. The Boy, for instance, initially wears a business suit and tie–complete with tie clip.

□ □ □I’ve been a sucker for La Traviata, the Verdi opera, since I was in my mid-teens. I fell for Camille, the Garbo movie, shortly thereafter: Oh, that ivory, arching throat! Oh, the wrenching pathos of the story! Oh, those ravishing Adrian outfits! I succumbed to the heady extravagances of Marguerite and Armand, Frederick Ashton’s vehicle for Fonteyn and Nureyev, because of its dramatically potent stars and because only Ashton could have understood these artists so well. I even read–in the original French, no less–La Dame aux Camélias, the Alexandre Dumas, fils, novel that inspired the theatrical versions of the story. So of course I showed up for ABT’s company premiere of John Neumeier’s 1979 Lady of the Camellias. Twice.

Need a reminder of the story? It takes place in Paris back in the mid-19th century, when a diagnosis of TB was a sure death sentence (and a favorite component of the era’s art). Marguerite, who maintains a heady lifestyle as a courtesan, is young, irresistibly attractive, and infected. Armand, who comes from a well-placed family that presents an unsullied façade to society, meets her, and, as the annals of high romance would have it, their fate is sealed. Their love grows from wild fling to passionate commitment. Armand’s straight-arrow dad begs Marguerite to let his son go. She complies, deserts her lover without explaining that she is sacrificing her own happiness to his good reputation, and, lacking other resources, returns to her demimondaine trade. When she and the stricken Armand meet again, he humiliates her publicly. Time goes by, eventually bringing a poignant reconciliation, but of course it’s too late and Marguerite expires.

Obviously a good bit of this tale is impossible to realize through dancing. How, for example, is a spectator supposed to know the contents of portentously delivered letters and a diary? Neumeier refuses to admit that written text and human movement in space don’t employ identical means of expression. He has a slew of other problems as well.

He loves to tell a familiar tale from an unusual perspective. In Lady of the Camellias he manipulates the narrative’s time frame. The ballet opens at a postmortem auction of Marguerite’s possessions, with all the key elements of the story told in flashback and–or so the program note claims–from the various points of view of the three main characters. (Neumeier, like William Forsythe, makes himself understood more clearly through program notes than via what he sets on stage.)

What’s more, Neumeier can’t resist complicating matters. His ballet follows the suggestion of the Dumas novel and draws a parallel between Marguerite’s fate and that of Manon, told in the Abbé Prévost’s 18th-century novel of that name and later popularized through the eponymous opera by Massenet and the ballet by Kenneth MacMillan.

Of course if Neumeier didn’t make so much of the Manon story and if he cut out all his ballet’s padding–most of the ensemble work is mere window dressing–all he’d be left with is a one-act show. Perhaps this is as much as the core story needs, or so Frederick Ashton demonstrated.

Further complaints: Neumeier likes to combine the realities of everyday life with “artistic” fantasy. While he constantly juxtaposes the two modes, he never succeeds in getting them to blend naturally. The Manon business, for example, starts as a ballet within a ballet, which Marguerite attends, and extends into the realm of the hallucinatory when the figures actually invade her life. Neumeier gives this transformation stock treatment so banal that it’s unlikely to persuade the most credulous viewer to suspend his disbelief.

And then there’s the TB element, perfect for Neumeier, whose work so often dwells on the association of erotic desire and death. He takes his titillating morbid streak to macabre extremes here, with simulated sex punctuating the heroine’s wasting away and dying at tedious length.

As for the choreography per se, most of it is boiler plate, the ensemble work especially. But then there are those lifts. The ballet’s many intimate duets are rife with them. Up and around and upside down or twining like vines overdosed on Vigoro. They’re often awkward even when they come off as planned. When they don’t, quite, you fear for the dancers’ life and limbs. The worried spectator, noticing the near misses, is unlikely to understand the lift as ballet’s ultimate expression of ecstasy.

Of course the spectator has other matters to distract him. If, when listening to the score Neumeier has culled from Chopin’s piano works, both solo and accompanied, he recalls the choreography made to some of the same pieces by Robbins (in Dances at a Gathering) and Ashton (in A Month in the Country), he will have grave reservations about Neumeier’s skills. The fact that The Lady of the Camellias coarsely parodies Robbins’s choreography for the climactic “Grand Valse” of Dances at a Gathering hammers the final nail into Neumeier’s coffin.

Given the weaknesses of their material, the dancers worked hard for a credible interpretation of their roles and did their courageous best with passages that should earn them danger money.

It’s hard to know which is the more riveting–Diana Vishneva’s technical prowess (the articulate footwork, the fluidity, and so on) or her unflagging investment in a narrative ballet’s story and the life of the character she plays.

No, she’s not magical; she has no “perfume.” But she’s so very good at what she does that you’ve got to admire her–even, as her hordes of fans do, love her. As Armand’s stern father slowly and touchingly recognizes, Vishneva’s Marguerite is a courtesan with soul.

For reasons best known to himself, Neumeier has choreographed Armand as an awkward wimp. Mercifully, the fellow stops bumping into things early on as he explores the naughtier venues of yesteryear’s Parisian high life, but it takes a while before he stops throwing himself at Marguerite’s feet–literally as well as metaphorically. Marcelo Gomes–an imposing, solidly built, darkly handsome guy whose dancing is uniquely forceful and self-possessed–is not the man for this role.
Both artists were nevertheless superb at portraying the moments in which Marguerite’s flirtation and Armand’s infatuation turn into soul-stirring love, the kind that’s supposed to defy death or at least–in the fantasy realm of ballet, anyway–earn the couple an apotheosis.

Julie Kent and Roberto Bolle gave the leading roles a different cast and were more believable as a pair. Bolle’s lanky raw-youth looks made his seeming innocence and initial haplessness convincing (though I don’t know that the implied disparity of age between his Armand and Kent’s Marguerite was part of the original story). Given his height, harmonious proportions, and charming face, Bolle has inevitably been trained to play princes; you can see him aiming for purity in his every move. As for feeling, he seems to be striving to follow every bit of coaching he’s been given. He doesn’t act from his own heart yet, but his efforts alone are disarming.

Kent has spent the latter part of her long career expanding her ability to act. This has stood her in good stead in the last decade and does so again in her portrayal of Marguerite. At first she appears harder and more glittering than the vulnerable characters she plays so tenderly–so often and so well. From then on, she slowly reveals the progressive ravages of Marguerite’s illness, which go hand in hand with the deepening of her love until she seems to be a near corpse, kept alive only by passion. This effect is not simply something that can be taught or learned; it’s rooted in a charismatic quality one is born with. No matter how hard he tries, Armand can’t get Kent’s Marguerite out of his mind–and neither can her audience.

□ □ □
Apart from its exquisite vision scene, ABT’s version of Don Quixote–the venerable faux-Spanish crowd pleaser originally by Petipa (jazzed up by Gorsky)–is efficiently circusy, but largely without feeling. On June 1 it served as an ideal showcase for the Bolshoi Ballet’s young wonder, Natalia Osipova, who is gradually building a guest-artist relationship with the company.

As Kitri, the heroine of the piece, she made a flamboyant leaping entrance, slicing the air before her, sailing through it as if aided by a tail wind. Incredibly–I guess you had to be there, to see it for yourself–the afterimage she left wasn’t at all assertive but rather buoyant and fleecy.

As the ballet progressed, Osipova repeatedly displayed her uncanny balance, perching on point on one leg while her free leg proved to be equally comfortable flung up high as if reaching toward the heavens, stretching to the side like an implacable road sign, or curved behind her, parallel to the floor. No matter what extravagant sculpted shape the choreography demanded, she remained poised, relaxed but unmovable, for seconds that seemed like forever.

If this weren’t enough, she proved again and again that she has the gene for turning. Either you’ve got it or you don’t; Osipova’s a human gyroscope. In her rendition of the third act pas de deux, often given alone as a party piece, her execution of the infamous 32 fouettés (fierce whipping turns rooted to a single spot) suggested that the feat might well be retired until a new generation of dancers beats her alternating double whirls with singles–all produced with an aplomb suggesting she could probably up the ante to 64.
Interestingly, while most ballerinas play Kitri as a soubrette, Osipova, with her prodigious energy and her lack of sensual allure, made her a hoyden. When she hurls herself cross-stage, as horizontal as a flying bullet, confident of landing happily in her partner’s arms, you see that daring is her sole charm. She’s as brave as they come. And she could count on the catcher–Jose Manuel Carreño, playing Basilio, Kitri’s Mr. Right.
Carreño had splendid feats of his own to display, the most marvelous being multiple pirouettes from a single preparation in which the pointed foot of the working leg snakes down from the knee to the ankle of the rotating leg and, by the final turn, has the toes tracing a circle on the floor, like the pencil of a compass.
Still, so much about Carreño’s appeal as a dancer comes from his personality: the sweetness, the modesty; the undercurrent of erotic possibility; the masterly partnering that’s based on a keen awareness, at every moment, of his ballerina’s needs. His temperament shows up in all of his roles. It’s perfect for dancing Basilio with an electrifying technician goading herself on to even greater achievement. Carreño doesn’t try to dominate Osipova or compete with her; he enables and sustains her. His Basilio seems to be saying to this Kitri, Everything I do is for you.
Subsidiary Players:
Daniil Simkin–small, blond, and bare-chested–hit the air like a hand grenade in the Gypsy Camp scene that opens Act II. His role provides theatrical contrast to the romantic atmosphere of an exotic world at twilight. Simkin delivered ballet steps expanded, phenomenally, as if by an Olympics-grade gymnast. The effect was stupefying, thrilling, and grotesque.
Tiny, precise, and swift, finger coyly crooked to chin, traveling cross-stage with bourrées like a string of seed pearls, Yuriko Kajiya stole the Vision Scene as Amour (Cupid). The crispness of her dancing helped her avoid the cuteness endemic to this cameo role.
Victor Barbee, ABT’s Associate Artistic Director, enhanced the entire production with his intelligent portrayal of Quixote–a frail, tattered old man undaunted in the pursuit of his ecstatic visions.

□ □ □

Don Q was performed again on June 3 for Alicia Alonso’s 90th Birthday Celebration with a different pair–Paloma Herrera and Marcelo Gomes, Xiomara Reyes and Herman Cornejo, Osipova and Carreño–leading each of the ballet’s three acts. The Cuban-born Alonso, who blended sizzling technique with dramatic power and lyric eloquence, became a star of Ballet Theatre and then returned to her homeland to found the National Ballet of Cuba. Her dependence on the support of Fidel Castro gave her American admirers political qualms and her own uncompromising dictatorship over the company she brought into being against all odds frustrated the younger generations of dancers she bred. Still, she was a great artist and a woman of amazing courage, working half-blind through most of her career and dauntlessly pursuing her seemingly quixotic vision of a Cuban base for classical ballet. The dance world owes her a tremendous debt.
The celebration opened with a recent filmed interview interspersed with photos going back to Alonso’s childhood and film clips of her clearly remarkable dancing. The interview, which occasionally caught her close to tears, is filled with potent one-liners. Obeying medical advice on healing the detached retinas that ravaged her sight, she recalls, “I spent one year in bed, and I danced with my mind.” She refers to ballet as “the thing I love most in my life” and concludes with a rhetorical question: “Don’t you think that beauty and happiness of life is better to fight for than war?”
The film was followed by Alonso’s rising in the auditorium’s center box to accept the audience’s standing ovation. When the performance concluded over two hours later, Carreño and McKenzie escorted her onstage. There she received a lavish bouquet; the applause of the ballet’s entire cast, which had assembled behind her (leaving a respectful gulf of space between them and her); and a gentle shower of confetti wafting down from above. She wore the most ravishing evening dress–all filigreed steel gray and the palest of blues–somehow glinting in the bright light that was beamed at her. The most powerful women in Europe and the Americas would do well to ask her the name of her dressmaker.

© 2010 Tobi Tobias

Ballet Diary No. 3: American Ballet Theatre: Opening-night gala; La Bayadère (ABT’s season runs through July 10 at the Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center); Unrelated Solos / Baryshnikov Arts Center / May 19-22; New York City Ballet: Benjamin Millepied (NYCB’s season runs through June 27 at the David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center)

Note: This is No. 3 in the series “Ballet Diary,” commenting on the spring seasons of New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, along with related performances. To read the previous pieces in the series, click here: No. 1; No. 2. The completed “Ballet Diary” series will comprise nine essays.

American Ballet Theatre’s opening night gala, May 17 at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, served as a tasting menu. The program comprised a selection of excerpts–almost all from ballets known to please. It gave every star at the top of the company’s roster a chance to shine, and showed off the corps de ballet not just once but twice.

The program was too long, of course, and the myriad excerpts that made it so were almost all too short to give the audience more than a glimpse of the fascination dancing compels when it’s allowed to be expansive. But there were several lovely–even glorious–moments. True, a few items misfired but, hey, it’s ABT’s 70th anniversary and it would be rude to rain on its party.

The preliminaries included a walk-on, in gorgeous mufti, of seven artists who have been essential to the company’s history: Lupe Serrano, Martine van Hamel, Nina Ananiashvili, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Alessandra Ferri, Natalia Makarova, and Frederic Franklin. Then there was speechifying by ABT’s artistic director, Kevin McKenzie, Caroline Kennedy, Blaine Trump, and the evening’s honoree, David H. Koch. Koch donates generously to big-time cultural institutions like ABT. (He made a major contribution to the renovation of the New York State Theater–the New York City Ballet’s home–and got the place renamed for him.) Here he reiterated his promise of substantial support for a lavish Nutcracker that will premiere at BAM this winter and make the company lots of money. Said to be the 10th richest man in America, he came across, disarmingly, as just an ordinary guy.

Then came the dancing. The event on the program was the guest appearance of the Bolshoi Ballet’s young phenomenon, Natalia Osipova, partnered by ABT’s immaculate classicist, David Hallberg, in an excerpt from Act II of Giselle. Osipova’s rendition of Giselle as a lyrical wraith, returned from the dead to dance for one last time with the feckless lover who understands true love too late, was refined seemingly beyond human limits. In the famous adagio, her interpretation was pristine and spooky; then, when the tempo accelerated, it became feathery, weightless. The overall effect wasn’t tragic, since the performance seemed more the result of endless coaching rather than instinct, but it was thrilling none the less.

Another development that may be the result of intense coaching is Michele Wiles’s adding a dimension of artistry to her familiar technical prowess. Performing the Rose Adagio from The Sleeping Beauty–a test of balance and timing that gives the most assured ballerinas the quivers–she managed to cloak the challenges in the springtime softness and pleasure of a princess meeting her first suitors on her 16th birthday. Yes, this burgeoning still looks learned rather than instinctive but, for Wiles, it’s an essential step in the right direction.

The Act III pas de deux from Don Quixote supplied the gala’s requisite dose of bravura at its most flamboyant. Gillian Murphy and Ethan Stiefel, both certified virtuosi, were in fine form, Murphy tackling the notorious 32 fouettés by making many of the turns multiple ones, and generally applying modesty and wit to her assignment. Stiefel was a shade too show-offy, embellishing the completion of his feats with hand flicks à la russe that are blatant signals for applause. Yet one forgives him almost anything witnessing his near-miraculous recovery from an injury that might have ending his dancing career.

Frederick Ashton, the most poetic of Britain’s choreographers, was represented by two ballets–the haunting Thaïs pas de deux and an excerpt from Birthday Offering, a survey, both aristocratic and graceful, of the choreographer’s neo-classic mode, which gave the Royal Ballet its profile. Needless to say, ABT’s dancers haven’t been bred to dance Ashton, but their efforts to grasp the nature of his style are sufficient to reveal both the beauties of the choreography and the dance-making intelligence that pervades it.

Nearly all of the excerpts on the gala program will, as if via the magic wand of Cinderella’s godmother, turn into full ballets in the course of ABT’s season, which continues through July 10.

How many times in close succession can you enjoy seeing La Bayadère? ABT launched its weeks of repertory with eight performances in a row of Marius Petipa’s Russo-Indian creation–full of hokey melodrama and ersatz local color, yet intermittently divine. Indeed, on two days, thanks to the magic of matinees, you could see it twice.

This is typical of ABT’s current programming style. Many followers of the company, including me, prefer the old repertory system, in which programs of shorter ballets were changed daily and the components were not forced to be related by theme. Truth to tell, one Bayadère a season is enough for me, though I could look at the ballet’s ineffable “Kingdom of the Shades” scene frequently, to satisfy my craving for the sublime. Last week, faithful to professional duty, I saw the full ballet twice, first with Diana Vishneva, Gillian Murphy, and Marcelo Gomes, respectively, in the leading roles of Nikiya (the pure, put-upon girl who is dead for half the ballet), Gamzatti, (a jealous poisoner, perhaps with some cause), and Solor (like many a man, of two minds when it comes to a major choice). The next day I saw the Julie Kent-Hee Seo-Jose Manuel Carreño cast.

Natalia Makarova supervised the production she had staged first in 1980, revivifying it with close attention to both the purity of classical technique and detailed dramatic motivation. If a few of her decisions are questionable–such as the achingly slow tempi for adagio work, a conceit of Russian ballerinas who want to look ineffable–most justify the 19th-century ballet’s claim to ongoing life in the 21st.

Vishneva made a terrific Nikiya, her steely technique operating under the guise of melting vulnerability and the notion that a heart can remain faithful even in the next world. She’s one of the most accomplished actor-dancers around. If the multi-faceted passions she portrays seem synthetic at times–their lack of spontaneity is the giveaway–she often persuades even the most recalcitrant viewer to succumb to her spell. Kent, granted, trumps Vishneva in pathos–her willowy body and fragile beauty make her look born for the pathetic mode–but some of Bayadère‘s physical challenges are now beyond her.

Murphy, who has technical confidence to spare and an uncanny resemblance onstage to Bette Davis, was just right for the proud, icy hearted Gamzatti, a rajah’s daughter to whom no one has ever before said no. When offers of jewels and the haughty assertion of rank’s privileges fail to persuade Nikiya to relinquish her claim to Solor’s love, what’s a handsome, filthy rich, singularly self-involved young woman to do but send her rival a bouquet in a basket that happens to harbor a poisonous snake?

The alternate Gamzatti, Hee Seo, has risen so quickly at ABT that she’s still listed among the corps de ballet. Her technique is impressive and she has the magnetic presence of a star. Yet thus far, in the realm of artistry, she remains an enigma. You have no idea of who or what she is as a dancer. As for what she might become, time will tell. Just now she smiles and smiles, presenting herself as a blossom worth plucking.

Both Gomes and Carreño surpassed themselves as Solor, their several solos making their customary bravura feats exceptionally clear and precise, rather than (as such astonishing exploits usually are) undertaken on a wing and a prayer, with a wild surge of energy. Both men moved with velvety texture–Gomes with the gravity that so becomes him, Carreño with his trademark ingratiating sweetness–towards his partner and, I’d guess, in homage to the joy of dancing. Gomes had the advantage over Carreño in that he was working with the more impressive co-stars, and the performance I saw of the Gomes-Vishneva-Murphy triad was nothing short of spectacular, one artist taking fire from another.

The female corps de ballet of the “Kingdom of the Shades” scene was better than ever; the choreography’s demand for impeccable adagio dancing in unison seemed to have the 24 women breathing as one. As it’s presently performed, this passage is a perfect argument for the idea that an ensemble can be a main character in a ballet.

The High Brahmin, the kind of secondary role so easily treated as a cipher, was given persuasive and individual meaning by Victor Barbee (Vishneva cast) and Roman Zhurbin (Kent cast). In each portrayal you saw, phrase by phrase, the conflict of a religious dignitary, glorying in his power, who finds himself overcome by lust for the most exquisite vestal virgin in his temple. The fact that Nikiya already has a boyfriend, Solor, whom she will lead to Paradise –when all is said and done and everyone perishes in the destruction of the temple–is one of the several things making Bayadère seem silly, but never mind.

Mikhail Baryshnikov was the leading dancer–isn’t that a given whenever he appears?–in Unrelated Solos, May 19-22, part of the inaugural season of the Jerome Robbins Theater at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. The new performance space is small, austere, and glum. Without distinction of design, it serves its purpose in a workaday fashion.

The key pieces on the program were Benjamin Millepied’s Years later (to music by Philip Glass) and Alexei Ratmansky’s Valse-Fantasie (to the fervid Glinka music of that name). The two choreographers offered strikingly disparate views of the extraordinarily gifted dancer whose athletic prime ended at least two decades ago and who has yet found myriad ways of carrying on.

The Millepied solo depends on film footage of the 17-year-old Baryshnikov as a student at the Vaganova Academy, from which he’d be launched into the Kirov Ballet. Captured in grainy black and white, he’s a prodigy with an angelic face, performing feats of classical perfection in a barren studio. The astonishing dancing image is projected on the backdrop of Years later for today’s Baryshnikov to interact with. Even when Baryshnikov is not being challenged by his youthful self, Millepied’s choreography manages to make the 62-year-old artist appear stiff and desiccated. The fiery energy seems quenched; the elasticity, vanished; the flow of movement through a supple body, blocked. Basically, Millepied’s piece tells us, “Yesterday wins.”

Ratmansky, on the other hand, draws on everything Baryshnikov can do–can be today–obliterating a veteran spectator’s sense of what has been lost in favor of a lyrical and luminous now. The little ballet opens with a recorded voice telling the tale of Glinka’s thwarted infatuation with a young woman: At the time, it broke his heart, but some years later, when he met her again, he had no feeling for her at all.

The story is choreographed as a rapid succession of segments that, like fireworks, illuminate the space, then just as swiftly fade from view. Ratmansky uses the gifts that Baryshnikov still possesses in good measure: harmony of line, precision of placement, acumen in mime, a sense of humor, and undiminished charm. Most important, the choreographer finds a way to restore to Baryshnikov the flow that is pretty much essential to dancing. As Baryshnikov cruises through space, he might be an emblem of freedom and joy.

The choreography is well-nigh Chekhovian, proposing that the past floods through you at moments in the present, when you can have a good look at it armed with the experience and wisdom of your maturity and laugh at it, scorn it, or refuse it–but never forget it.

Ratmansky gives us a man–an artist–who is fully alive in the
present.

The program’s six solos were indeed unrelated, as promised. The veteran postmodernist Steve Paxton appeared in a seemingly endless string of restricted, even crippled, moves that gradually ensnared one’s attention and eventually ignited one’s imagination. Choreographed by Paxton and called The Beast, the piece made me think of Shakespeare’s Caliban–a creature with just enough sentience to feel trapped in his limitations. David Neumann performed two of his solos; reminiscent of Daniel Nagrin’s character studies, they sorely lacked Nagrin’s finesse.

For a finale Baryshnikov danced a “solo” that recruited three members of the audience–Susan Marshall’s For You. It is, perhaps, an exploration of a star performer’s relationship to his spectators. But who knows? Marshall’s a subtle and canny one and the piece was billed as a work in progress.

When I wrote briefly about Benjamin Millepied’s Why am I not where you are–one of the seven new ballets commissioned for New York City Ballet’s “Architecture of Dance” festival, I said–having seen its premiere under the hectic circumstances of the company’s opening night gala–that I’d comment further on it. I’ve seen it a second time now, but can’t bring myself to write about it. I think I’m doomed not to “get” Millepied’s choreography. Although I’ve tried assiduously over the years, I simply can’t discover what there is to admire, let alone love, about it.

Granted, Millepied uses the classical vocabulary (and one must be grateful for that in our tradition-scorning era), but he fails to achieve anything organic or even adept in his deployment of bodies in space, let alone anything that stirs the heart or soul. All I see is arid, often awkward, calculation. Nevertheless, he has carved out an impressive career for himself. Ballet fans have cautiously begun to name him along with the best of his generation, Ratmansky and Wheeldon.

© 2010 Tobi Tobias

Ballet Diary No. 2: Introduction to the “Ballet Diary” series; New York City Ballet: Wayne McGregor’s Outlier; Alexei Ratmansky’s Namouna, A Grand Divertissement / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / NYCB season: April 29 – June 27

Note: This is No. 2 in the series “Ballet Diary,” commenting on the spring seasons of New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, along with related performances. To read the previous piece in the series, click here: No. 1. The completed “Ballet Diary” series will comprise nine essays.

Outlier, commissioned from the British Wayne McGregor by New York City Ballet for its “Architecture of Dance” festival and set to Thomas Adès’s Concerto for Violin–Concentric Paths, had its world premiere May 14 at Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater. I can’t say that the earth moved.

McGregor’s work is new to New York but his reputation has preceded him. Two years ago, though he was known as an ostensibly cutting-edge dance maker, he was appointed resident choreographer of the London-based Royal Ballet, much to the consternation of the company’s fans accustomed to a repertory dominated by traditional classical ballet.

Dance aficionados began talking about McGregor as a major player in the avant-garde when he founded his own small troupe, Wayne McGregor | Random Dance, back in 1992. (Notice the bracing vertical line instead of the conventional leaning slash. Talk about eloquence in punctuation!) Eventually the group became the resident company of Sadler’s Wells, the London half of an ambitious producing organization; New York’s City Center is its Stateside partner.

Random Dance is purportedly a poster company for “making it new.” Its repertory is often set to sound scores that are not your grandmother’s music. Its movement typically ranges from the fractured (think Jorma Elo) to seemingly boneless fluidity (I can’t help thinking of this as “the worm effect”). Frequently it reverts to a base of classical ballet technique commanded in an underpowered way by the group’s otherwise attractive dancers. The choreography revels in co-opting the ever-burgeoning paraphernalia being developed in the fields of science and communication and is naturally multi-media inclined. Of course this aesthetic influences McGregor’s work for some of the world’s topnotch exponents of classicism.

Actually, from the videotapes I’ve seen, none of McGregor’s choreography looks very new to me–not new in the sense of the early-through-middle-period Martha Graham and Twyla Tharp.

Outlier is a suave piece of work. It is neither dumb nor vulgar; this, I reckon, is a plus. The reticent backdrops (by McGregor and Lucy Carter, who also designed the lighting) and the costumes by Moritz Junge (essentially practice clothes in muted colors, set off here and there by a bare male torso or uncovered legs) almost shout “good taste.” The Adès score is a brainy post-modern affair. (An explication of it, handed out to the press, is written in a highfalutin style that would have made E.B. White chuckle.) The music itself requires a close concentration well-nigh impossible to give it while focusing on the choreography it accompanies–at least on one’s first experience of the two elements.

The choreography capitalizes on the extreme elasticity that is a by-product of a classical dancer’s training, but surely not the chief goal of that training. To my mind, the arduous, nearly decade-long process of preparing a carefully selected aspirant for a professional life in ballet aims to teach him or her to move with clarity while maintaining rhythmic phrasing, physical flow, and expressive eloquence. Pliability (an element essential to gymnasts and contortionists), is important but it doesn’t lie at the center of the art of dancing.

The initial duet in Outlier reveals McGregor’s limitations straight off. A man prowls around a woman, then co-opts her as his partner. First he gently explores her flexibility, sculpting her body into extreme shapes and treacherous positions. He’s a Pygmalion fixated on his subject’s ball bearing joints. She doesn’t seem to have any say in the matter, even when he briefly gets a touch rough-handed with her; her role is to agree, to submit. More dismaying than this possible violation of pc behavior is the fact that there’s no physical logic to the movement sequences. One phrase glides smoothly into the next, but an ensuing move never feels like the inevitable consequence of the preceding one.

Later, a sextet makes various connections, with all of the participants appearing to be in a state of anomie, subservient to their fate. In a quartet for three men and a woman, one of the men has a push-me pull-you duet with the woman, followed immediately by a more balletically conventional one with one of his buddies. On the whole, though, the presence of academic steps in Outlier is sparse, while the vocabulary used is gravely limited.

The piece was handsomely executed by its eleven dancers, Craig Hall, Wendy Whelan, and Tiler Peck being exceptional. These three were so in control of the strange movement, they could make it look almost natural–as if it spilled directly from their guts. And still it failed to offer any meaning.

Of the four new ballets unveiled so far in New York City Ballet’s “Architecture of Dance” festival, the one to get excited about is Alexei Ratmansky’s Namouna, A Grand Divertissement. On its first showing I wrote about it briefly in Ballet Diary No. 1. Having seen it again, twice, since its premiere, I want to say more.

Born in Russia and trained in the school of Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet, Ratmansky failed to make it into the parent company and danced with a series of geographically disparate troupes, all the while developing his gifts as a choreographer. Eventually–talk about irony!–the Bolshoi called him home to become its artistic director. No happy ending–yet. He found that the administrative work of the job left him insufficient time in which to choreograph and tendered his resignation. He then flirted with New York City Ballet (for which he’d already made a pair of well-received pieces) as a possible replacement for Christopher Wheeldon, who was giving up his position as the company’s resident choreographer to form his own group (which he has since abandoned). When the City Ballet opportunity went up in smoke, Ratmansky became–as quick as you can say “about face”–American Ballet Theatre’s artist in residence. He made certain that his arrangement with ABT allowed him to choreograph elsewhere as well–like Wheeldon, he’s in demand worldwide–and so City Ballet has his wonderful Namouna.

The music for Namouna, by the French neo-Romantic composer Édouard Lalo, was originally created for a ballet by Lucien Petipa (brother of the more celebrated Marius) that had its premiere at the Paris Opera in 1882. Neither the ballet nor its score–accused of being “too symphonic”–caught the public’s fancy, and the production disappeared from the repertory after a mere 15 performances. Confident that he had composed something of value, Lalo repurposed his music into two orchestral suites and other pieces for the concert stage. For his ballet, Ratmansky marshaled 16 of the numbers that had been recorded by David Robertson and the Orchestra of Monte Carlo on a CD of these pieces.

The music is a mélange of myriad perfumes, by turns exotic, nostalgic, dramatic, sensuous, playful, and lamenting. It is full of rhythmic vitality, grace, and charm. And, despite what the Parisian audience thought in the 1880s, the orchestration is lovely.

The original ballet for which the Namouna score was created was apparently a kind of Le Corsaire affair (possibly tinged with a musky Arabian Nights atmosphere) and boasted a plot that would be considered outlandish today. Ratmansky jettisoned the idea of narrative but continually hints at stories through the “characters” he’s created.

The ballet opens with the entrance of an ensemble of 16 seemingly identical women, dressed in gowns of chrome yellow falling below the calf. They’re capped with pitch-black wigs severely styled in the manner of Louise Brooks’s iconic bob; black chokers circle their necks. Their arms are flung backward, giving them a heroic–and faintly menacing–air. At first they step slowly and deliberately in a straight line, but then the line swirls into a circle, next into a pair concentric circles, and soon Ratmansky assigns them, one at a time, increasingly aberrant actions that define individuals within this sisterhood of clones.

Our Hero (Robert Fairchild) is a fresh-faced young man in a white sailor’s suit, who, throughout his several solos, maintains a relaxed, modest air while delivering amazing technical feats. Gradually we come to realize that he’s searching for Ms. Right, a role for which three women “audition.” They are Jenifer Ringer (in French blue), at once sweet and, dancing a long solo with a lit cigarette, sassy; Sara Mearns (in midnight blue), who recalls Suzanne Farrell in the amplitude, suppleness, and daring of her dancing; and Wendy Whelan (in the palest ice blue imaginable), who counters Mearns’s primal energy with her reticence and delicacy. Whelan wins out (though she never competes) and so gets to perform the tender closing pas de deux with Fairchild. Highlighting this duet is a sequence of remarkable lifts, in which she appears both weightless and luminous, as fragile as spun glass. The curtain falls on the pair sealing their bond with a prolonged Hollywood kiss.

One step lower in importance, yet indispensable to the proceedings, is a trio of diminutive dancers in bronze: Daniel Ulbricht–of the bulging muscles that allow his spectacular tours de force, yet as buoyant as a helium balloon–and a pair of piquant women, Megan Fairchild and Abi Stafford. Presumably, the job of these three is to provide variety through steps particularly suited to their body type and to show us the cunning ways in which a trio, and only a trio, can be manipulated.

At one point Ulbricht repeatedly picks up one of his playmates and shifts her position from one side of him to the other, then does the same for the second petite miss. Although he repeats this action several times, nothing really changes. (This amusing bit of business points to a significant irony: dance is like its sister arts in which, as Auden tells us, “Poetry makes nothing happen.”) Finally Ulbricht carries his erstwhile partners into the wings, one in each burly arm. It’s possible to think of all three figures as life-size wind-up toys or perhaps a set of mechanical dolls created by the ingenious Dr. Coppelius.

The women in yellow who opened the ballet and have important choral work in its course also double (with a speedy costume change) as a chorus of naiads with a complaint that chronically reduces them to tears: none of them becomes Our Hero’s chosen one; none of them stands a chance. In blue, then, the female ensemble can express human emotion. In their yellow guise, however, the women are simply enigmatic and powerful–messengers of fate, perhaps. In one of their most striking and eerie passages, they assemble as if rimming a large semi-circle, small brass cymbals in their hands. At intervals, they strike these together to produce a tiny, even-paced, metallic ringing. Now and then, they hold the glinting cymbals to their eyes and the musical instruments seem to morph into cameras or opera glasses–both tools designed to “steal” images. As always, their faces are completely devoid of expression.

Last, though hardly least, is an octet of men who might be, guessing from their costumes, members of a motorcycle gang. They are chivalrously present whenever a bunch of feisty guys is needed–rescuing a maiden from drowning, for instance, or partnering the yellow gals in a spate of deep-rooted folk dancing.

Shunning plot and specifically identified characters, Ratmansky was hardly likely to pin down the setting of his ballet, but it’s surely somewhere by the sea, that realm of fanciful dreams. At times, the action even seems to take place underwater; those women in blue might be mermaids. And the sea might well be the Mediterranean; Lalo wrote his score for a ballet set on Corfu and, some 130 years later, isles-of-Greece hints survive in Ratmansky’s choreography.

Almost as if in passing, Ratmansky quotes from every ballet you’ve ever loved–seen or merely heard about–and no doubt several that flew under your radar. Some of the most obvious references are to: the arabesques voyagées of the corps of wilis in Act II of Giselle (which Ratmansky assigns to the motorcycle-gang octet); the frantic gestures of Gennaro, the hero of Bournonville’s Napoli, when he thinks he has allowed his beloved to drown (which Ratmansky gives to a woman); a lexicon of Danish mime gestures, themselves borrowed from France or Russia–“beautiful,” “love,” et al.; the elegiac dance of the ensemble of swans that opens traditional versions of Swan Lake‘s Act IV, now heinously omitted from zippy new versions of the ballet because it’s thought to slow things down; bits of Balanchine plucked and tweaked from sources as diverse as Apollo, La Sonnambula, and Mozartiana; and even a few signature devices of Paul Taylor’s. Ratmansky singles out these moves, wittily shifting their context and purpose, in ways that simultaneously reveal their absurdity (for ballet is essentially both absurd and sublime) and his delight in them.

Blessedly, the scenic investiture of Namoura consists simply of a backdrop onto which Mark Stanley plays light in various colors. (A Santiago Calatrava installation–like those created for five of the season’s seven new works–would surely have been a roadblock.) Marc Happel and Rustam Khamdamov designed the costumes. In some instances these are handsome–Mearns’s long-skirted navy gown, for instance, gives a luxuriant dimension to the term “accordion-pleated.”

Elsewhere–especially when it comes to the ladies’ thick white “bathing caps,” suggesting cresting waves or perhaps a Marcel wave of the Twenties–they are over the top.

I loved Namouna from its first showing at City Ballet’s opening night gala, but it was on a second viewing that everything fell into place for me. What had seemed to be the busiest and one of the longest one-act ballets ever made was suddenly fully clear–in its beauties, its wit, and its ability to induce waves of nostalgia, even for things I had never seen firsthand.

© 2010 Tobi Tobias

Ballet Diary No. 1: Introduction to Ballet Diary series; New York City Ballet: Opening night gala / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / April 29, 2010

Year after year New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, the kingpins of classical dance here in the States, insist upon competing with each other at Lincoln Center. As springtime slips into summer, the two troupes play mostly overlapping seasons–this year, eight weeks each–at abutting theaters (City Ballet will be at the David H. Koch, April 29 – June 27; ABT, at the Metropolitan Opera House, May 18 – July 10). How’s a dance critic to cope? Perhaps taking the easy way out–though any other arrangement I devised seemed artificial–I decided that this year I’d cover the scene with a ballet diary, describing and commenting on the lavish procession of events weekly or bi-weekly. Let’s hope this works. No aspect of a life in or near dance comes with a guarantee.

With its opening night gala on April 29, New York City Ballet inaugurated a blockbuster eight-week season. Under the umbrella title of “Architecture of Dance: New Choreography and Music Festival” and honoring the 50th anniversary of Lincoln Center, it will present seven new ballets, five of them using decor designed by the distinguished architect Santiago Calatrava.

The commissioned choreographers are Alexei Ratmansky (working to a score by Édouard Lalo, world premiere April 29); Benjamin Millepied (commissioned score by Thierry Escaich, April 29); Wayne McGregor (score by Thomas Adès, May 14); Christopher Wheeldon (score by Alberto Ginastera, originally commissioned by Lincoln Kirstein, May 29); Melissa Barak (commissioned score by Jay Greenberg, June 5); Mauro Bigonzetti (commissioned score by Bruno Moretti, June 10); and the City Ballet’s ballet master in chief, Peter Martins (commissioned score by Esa-Pekka Salonen, June 22).

The season looks both forward, with these new works, and backward, with farewell performances for Yvonne Borree (June 6); Philip Neal (June 13); Albert Evans (June 20); and Darci Kistler (June 27, which marks the closing of the season). All the farewells are 3:00 Sunday matinees, so diehard fans can bring their children, urgently whispering to them as the curtain rises, “Remember this.” Needless to say, the strategy probably won’t work. (I took my then very young daughter to see Margot Fonteyn toward the end of her career; though already hooked on ballet, the child didn’t recall the performance even the next day.) Nevertheless, adults often enjoy their effort to provide a youngster with material for future nostalgia. I did. And still do.

Well, the gala opening night program began not with dancing but with a video, explaining and illustrating the “Architecture of Dance” concept, which, truth to tell, feels more like branding than an artistic vision. Created by Kristin Sloan, a former City Ballet dancer, this canned introduction was a string of all too brief takes, moved along so speedily as to be almost beyond comprehension to anyone not reared on video games. It featured personable chat from Calatrava and Martins as well as other collaborators in the venture and footage of the dancers in rehearsal. It was succeeded by the live presence of Martins, standing before the golden bronze stage curtain to toast Calatrava and his wife, picked out by a spotlight from where they were seated in the First Ring. The gesture was rather dry; only the special three got to drink.

When the curtain finally rose to reveal Calatrava’s stage design for the Millepied ballet, Why am I not where you are, it certainly let the air out of any balloons of anticipation. Calatrava is known not merely as an architect, but also as an engineer, a sculptor, and a painter. Although this is his first venture into design for dancing, he seemed to be just the right guy for the job. His freehand sketches, in what looks like an oily chalk, for the season’s prospectus aptly suggest movement in space and, where the human body is concerned, if not originality at least the savvy taste to have chosen Rodin (who captured Isadora Duncan so effectively) as a mentor.

In the end what the Millepied ballet got was a huge, imposing structure very much in the style of Calatrava’s striking buildings. It’s a silvery double arch, one section brooding over the other. The two are joined by slender parallel rods, creating an environment that lends mystery to the dancers when they move behind it, becoming half hidden, though still certifiably visible. The inner arch hovers over empty space, which registers as a dusky cave through which dancers can enter the unblocked, brightly lighted part of the stage in which the more fevered action occurs.

Millepied deals with the situation dutifully, but not imaginatively, though he says in a brief interview for the house program that the relationship between his choreography and the architect’s structure was a collaboration between him and Calatrava. By the end of the one-small-page Q&A, the choreographer is telling a somewhat different story: “It’s a large sculpture that sits on the stage, so I had to incorporate it into the choreography.”

The choreography itself reflects the attempt by a number of younger classical-dance makers to overcome the sterility they find in today’s ballets. They believe this arid state is the result of several decades’ overemphasis of abstract dance. These choreographers rarely blame Balanchine directly–and it would be hard to sustain the argument that Concerto Barocco, The Four Temperaments, Agon, and Symphony in Three Movements are sterile. But today’s classical choreographers do miss the presence of feeling that they think narrative and character brought to a dance. Since they reject “story ballets” from Petipa to Tudor as being, as it were, “so yesterday,” they’re trying to devise choreography that will touch the heart without reliance on plot. I would quibble with their logic, yet I’ve got to admire their effort to do something about the frustrating situation in which they find themselves.

Millepied’s Why am I not where you are works by demonstrating feeling–something he’s not naturally good at–in tiny passages, sometimes mere phrases, in between which he reverts to objective stuff. I thought his piece was specifically “about” something–a soulful man who stands outside the group that dominates his society (he’s just not a frat boy, if you will), who succumbs to the temptation to give up his real self in order to join that group, and is thus doomed to disaster. In his case he loses the young woman destined to be his soul mate, though she never gives any indication that she is (she seems to be a typical sorority girl–one of the “In” crowd) before it’s already too late. When I proposed this interpretation to a colleague, however, she looked at me doubtfully and said, “Really?”

The music for Why am I not where you are was commissioned from Thierry Escaich. French like Millepied, Escaich is the noted organist and composer in residence for the Orchestre National de Lyon. His score, The Lost Dancer, proposes shifting emotions–threat, excitement, fear, exhilaration, despair. It is full of possibilities.

In his Namouna, A Grand Divertissement, Alexei Ratmansky addresses the same issue Millepied tried to resolve, but then he usually does, and never seems to find it a problem. A significant part of this choreographer’s profile is a love and respect for the old, so he often borrows from the devices of eras past, typically giving them a fresh life that makes them seem contemporary–that is, contemporary, but with marvelous ancestors.

Namouna takes brilliant advantage of the riches of nineteenth-century ballet–the Russian school of that period, the French school, and the Danish school (that is, the Bournonville school), which reshaped the French principles and held on to many of them to this day. Ratmansky, who was trained at the Bolshoi Ballet’s academy and returned to head the company for several years, to say nothing of doing a stint with the Royal Danish Ballet, evidently absorbed everything he was exposed to like a sponge. These delights–the mime, the dazzling details of the complex footwork, the major role assumed by the corps de ballet (sheer Petipa)–are all present and all transformed in Namouna.

An example of the transformation of the corps de ballet work, impressive enough in its old guise, with at least 16 dancers moving in unison in clear, simple geometric patterns, is enlivened for today by small, piquant deviations from unison activity without any loss of force. Complications of the patterns that enrich the original tactics are at once deliciously inventive and gently amusing. For instance, where the corps would shape up in straight lines, confronting the audience head-on, Ratmansky says to himself, Why not put the lines on the diagonal? Where you have a large number of gorgeous bodies costumed alike, why not vary the number of bodies in each line? Just about all his variations of this nature are clever and endearing–even to viewers who know little to nothing about the original conventions.

Ratmansky’s music for this ballet is Édouard Lalo’s Namouna, made for a 19th-century French ballet. His “scenic investiture” is, unlike Calatrava’s attention-riveting constructions, no more than a backdrop that accepts the projection of light in colors that vary with the mood of the moment. The dance is unconscionably long, yet never repetitious or boring. Its stars are Wendy Whelan, Robert Fairchild, Jenifer Ringer, and Sara Mearns.

These comments on the first two new ballets in the “Architecture of Dance” season are just a first impression, formed in the hectic gala atmosphere engendered by the patrons in the prime seats, who make generous contributions to the company’s coffers and for whom opening night is as much a social occasion as a theatrical one. I’ll have more to say after a second, calmer look when each work is given its first showing to the general public–the Ratmansky on May 5, the Millepied on May 22.

© 2010 Tobi Tobias

1.2.3 Festival / Joyce Theater, NYC / April 13 – 25, 2010

Opening night of the 1.2.3 Festival at the Joyce was the tasting menu. The three (count ’em) companies involved in this yearly event–ABT II, AILEY II, and Taylor 2–contributed one substantial, and revealing, dance to the program. Each little troupe is an offshoot of a top-notch, grand-scale company: American Ballet Theatre, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and the Paul Taylor Dance Company. The junior groups serve as ambassadors of dance, touring to venues that lack the space, budget, and sizable audience needed to host the grander companies, all the while increasing their professional aplomb. The young members of the second companies are, for the most part, on their way to the big time, and the evening at the Joyce displayed both the style that distinguishes the parent company of each and the dancers’ individual gifts.

Taylor 2 opened the program and won the day with its rendition of Company B, engagingly set to bubbly or yearning songs popular in the Forties, sung by the Andrews Sisters. Taylor’s choreography shadows the moods of the music with images of World War II, in which many a lighthearted boyfriend or cut-up suddenly found himself an armed soldier facing the enemy and, often, death.

In this way, “There Will Never Be Another You” becomes not just an ex-sweetheart’s lament over a romance that has gone awry, from which both parties are likely to recover eventually, but rather for a romance cut off in one fell swoop by a visit to the young man’s parents from a pair of somber emissaries of the United States Armed Forces.

Similarly, Taylor gives an extra dimension to the lyrics of “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” by having a young woman’s wistful query about the unresponsive object of her affections answered by images in silhouette of two fellows who only have eyes for each other. Elsewhere, in “Pennsylvania Polka” and “Oh Johnny, Oh Johnny, Oh!,” the impulse is chiefly one of ebullient cavorting, something, it seems nowadays, that America will never retrieve.

The Taylor 2 dancers embodied the unfettered feelings of youth required for Company B, yet their skills and assurance are utterly professional. The combination is irresistible. Two of the three men in the company are, understandably, throwbacks to the beefy types Taylor often commandeers for his main company; this may be part of the “blast at ballet” that choreographers of his generation needed to make as they carved their own, idiosyncratic, path.

As a group, the guys are irrepressible; the sun seems to shine on their innocent rowdiness. The three women are very individual and capable, bless them, of conveying mood and emotion through dancing rather than add-on histrionics. Latra Wilson was my favorite–juicy and teasing in “Rum and Coca-Cola” as a Trinidad native exhibiting her charms to a trio of American soldiers who lie lazily on the ground, ogling the object of their generic desires. She is, deliciously, “working for the Yankee dollar,” and she’s worth a million.

ABT II’s contribution to the program was the evening’s weakest entry, but this was not primarily the dancers’ fault. The choreography of Edwaard Liang’s Ballo per Sei defeats them, being both physically illogical (hardly a step in it segues into a move that the body would instinctively do next) and unmusical (an untenable response to its Vivaldi score). What’s more (or, rather, less), for long stretches the piece is intolerably boring. ABT II has, for some time now, prided itself on commissioning new works to be made on its dancers, who would then be part of the “creative” endeavor, as if dancing itself were not creative. I’ve felt all along that an emphasis on performing the classics might serve them better.

Still, Liang’s choreography wasn’t entirely to blame for the not-so-hot performance of the dancers. The current company members are nowhere near such able practitioners of their trade as, for instance, the members of Taylor 2. Comparing them, more aptly, to a classical group, their technique lacks the sharp edge and brilliant footwork on view at the annual performances given by the School of American Ballet, which grooms dancers for the New York City Ballet.

The young women of ABT II are more capable technically than the men who, moreover, do not always make reliable partners. And yet all the performers gave the audience glimpses of talent that just needs time and guidance to mature. The one passage of fully fledged dancing came from Brittany DeGrofft in the long adagio duet at the heart of Liang’s piece. DeGrofft had evidently convinced herself that her role was expressive, and expressive she was in her rendition. Her performance wasn’t profound–she’s probably too young in experience for that–but she obviously knew what it should be like. In time, with better material, she may be wonderful.

The denizens of Judith Jamison’s Divining, presented by Ailey II, seem to be an ancient nomadic tribe given to mystical rituals. A small group of them that opens the piece and an expanded one that appears at the end move together, suggesting a powerful collective consciousness. For the all-important middle section of the dance, these strong-bodied, strong-minded people conjure up a female goddess–to protect them and lead them, it would seem; perhaps to inspire them. Danced by the remarkable Ghrai DeVore, this central figure is one you’re not likely to forget.

DeVore rivets your eyes the moment she sets a foot, delicate but sure, on the stage. Just physically, she’s stunning. Her arms have the fragile beauty of a slender pre-adolescent child’s; her thighs are those of a mature athletic woman, full and vigorous. Her head, exquisitely shaped, is perfectly poised; her neck might be its pedestal. Large eyes, emphasized by ebony makeup. A luscious mouth. The cut of her black hair must have been designed by a sculptor: close-cropped but thick from crown to earlobes, then shaved away below. Granted, beauty is as beauty does, but here it does fantastically.

In action, DeVore is vehemently expressive, yet subtle in detail. She can shift, with no visible transitions, from tiny vibrations to steady extended balances, from staccato thrusts to soaring leaps. At one point she jackknifes over, one palm slapping the floor, while the opposite leg reaches straight skyward, the foot seeming to pierce the atmosphere like a fatal arrow. For DeVore, an action like this is not a feat; it’s business as usual. No, she’s not on her way to stardom. She is already a star.

Subsequent performances in the 123 Festival will be devoted to full programs by a single one of the three participating companies. Taylor 2 is offering the most captivating show–Aureole, 3 Epitaphs, Company B, and Esplanade–four masterworks by the choreographer in which joy or fun has the upper hand, not one of them suggesting, as a good part of Taylor’s complete repertory does, that life is nothing but an amalgam of evil, madness, violence, and despair. (Think of Last Look). What better way to lure prospective fans than the combination of excellence and pleasure?

© 2010 Tobi Tobias