American Ballet Theatre

Dvorovenko Moves On

May 20, 2013 by Tobi Tobias

Irina Dvorovenko as Polyhymnia in George Balanchine’s Apollo

Photo: Marty Sohl

On May 18, Irina Dvorovenko gave her final performance with American Ballet Theatre as Tatiana in John Cranko’s Onegin. She plans to continue dancing elsewhere as a guest artist.

Portrait of Dvorovenko

Photo: Gene Schiavone

Interestingly, she probably has a higher rating for good looks than any—except, perhaps, for Julie Kent—of the illustrious ballerinas who have danced with the company in, say, the last decade. This just proves, once again, that in ballet good looks—Dvorovenko is a handsome woman with a statuesque figure—go just so far. She’s best known for her performances in classical ballets and, in the course of her career, has earned her share of medals in that arena. I’ve always wondered why she never extended her repertoire very far or very often past those touchstones? Did she never yearn to do more contemporary works? Or did ABT consider her unsuitable to them?

Dvorovenko partnered by her husband, Maxim Beloserkovsky, in Giselle

Photo: Nancy Ellison

Dvorovenko was often partnered at ABT by her husband, Maxim Beloserkovsky, himself a fine dancer but, being a light, lyrical type—subtle rather than striking—not an ideal onstage match for his wife. He retired from ABT before she did, leaving satisfying memories of his clean technique and poetic style.

Dvorovenko as Odette in Swan Lake

Photo: Gene Schiavone

Dvorovenko’s farewell to ABT found her very much at her present best—with reasonably authoritative technique and a genuine effort to convey the emotions Tatiana must project. These range from shy, youthful innocence stricken with reckless passion in the girl’s first experience of love to the woman’s effort of achieving a deep serenity in a mature coupling. In other words, Tatiana moves from a youthful fantasy triggered by an exceedingly attractive object to the quieter pleasures of a mature love that results in lasting devotion. It must be admitted that few achieve the latter in real life, but the state is truer to the happily-ever-after story than the one described in ballets that quit with a shockingly expensive wedding.

Dvorovenko as Nikiya in La Bayadère

Photo: MIRA

Untitled

October 22, 2012 by Tobi Tobias

American Ballet Theatre / City Center, NYC / October 16-20, 2012

American Ballet Theatre, financially afflicted like many a dance company in these stringent days, gave a Fall “season” consisting of just one “week”—October 16-20. Did the brevity of the run ensure the excellence of the repertory? Presented at the City Center, it consisted of seven ballets or stand-alone excerpts, none of which was filler or “novelty.” Most were safe (and worthy) favorites—Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo, for instance; Antony Tudor’s The Leaves Are Fading; Twyla Tharp’s In the Upper Room. The most thrilling item by far was the first of three new ballets that Alexei Ratmansky plans to set to Shostakovich scores. To this choreographer—Russian-born and trained, once head of the Bolshoi Ballet—Shostakovich is the composer who holds the place that Tchaikovsky did with Petipa, Stravinsky with Balanchine. The new piece is called, austerely, Symphony #9.

ABT’s Polina Semionova and Marcelo Gomes in Alexei Ratmansky’s Symphony #9, named for its Shostakovich score

Photo: Gene Schiavone

But what else might it have been called? It portrays both the literal and the abstract without a second’s pause between modes. Is that a platoon or a corps de ballet going through its maneuvers? It’s both. Simultaneously. And yet the mingle coheres. As Balanchine’s did (and continues to do), Ratmansky’s work trains his viewers’ eyes to see more swiftly and keenly.

The dance, in intimate communication with the music, evokes the inevitable death toll of war juxtaposed with the ecstasy of victory. Ratmansky, well endowed with the ability to perceive myriad attitudes to a situation in close range, revels in such ironic possibilities even to the extent of showing a latent vein of humor in them. Is s/he really dead? you wonder when a body collapses, or is s/he just playing dead? Why are the bodies often stricken in stop-motion mode? And what role do these strange views of the action play in the ballet’s overall treatment of events and emotions? As usual, the moment you’ve seen a Ratmansky ballet for the first time, you want to see it a second time to have questions like these answered as well as having the opportunity to revel in the choreography’s command of structure and its sheer theatrical power.

Semionova and Gomes in Symphony #9

Photo: Gene Schiavone

Unlike some of Ratmansky’s earlier works, even the most rewarding (Namouna, for instance), Symphony #9 was tight as a drum at its premiere on October 18. The dancers’ vitality and precision were at a peak I haven’t seen at ABT in ages.

It’s no surprise that the challenging choreography does much for its leading dancers. Marcelo Gomes looks more than ever like the Big Man on Campus, only one whose personality includes a devilish sense of humor. Polina Semionova discards her usual type-casting as the girl who can do every damn step perfectly and becomes a real (and way sexy) woman. Simone Messmer, hair cropped short like that of the feisty heroines of yesteryear’s books for girls (think Jo March, after she sheds her tresses), proves herself, once again, to be an original. Craig Salstein is the boy who dares—part Rookie of the Year, part class clown—with a serious under layer that should free him forever from roles that conceive of him as “the hero’s best friend.” Ratmansky takes all these talents in hand and makes them more wonderful than they or we could ever have imagined on our own.

Herman Cornejo in Symphony #9

Photo: Gene Schiavone

And I haven’t yet mentioned Herman Cornejo, who, so very rightly, is assigned no partner. He emerges, gradually, as the pivot of Symphony #9 or, if you will, its soul. The audience’s reaction to the solo with which he closed the ballet made me think of an ardor that, almost literally, wanted to devour him. The ballet’s curtain line is his stream of tours à la seconde (the body whirling as if without end, one taut leg extended parallel with the floor) mapping out an earthly geometry. To think that many a viewer once believed he wasn’t tall enough or conventionally handsome enough or whatever enough to be a danseur noble—in other words, fit to play a prince! Cornejo is the model of a post-modern danseur noble—technically breathtaking yet never show-offy, and infinitely thoughtful. I’ve never heard him speak a word. I’ve never needed to.

Needless to say I went back to see the second cast—which proved to be nowhere near as effective as the first, though things may improve to a certain extent with further rehearsal and further performance. In the Gomes role, Roberto Bolle, who can’t act, tried to, ineffectually, while in the Semionova role, Veronika Part, who can, did so, puzzlingly, with soap-operatic exaggeration. Jared Matthews, assigned the Cornejo part, was as valiant as a good dancer can be when faced with a challenge to which he’s neither equal nor suited.

Symphony #9 ensemble

Photo: Gene Schiavone

Symphony #9’s glamorous black and white costumes, by Keso Dekker, feature the slashing contrast of shades. The menswear is hugged by a belt of giant rhinestones; the hems of the women’s striated skirts brush the ladies’ knees as if murmuring to the wearers about what’s going on. The graduated darks and lights of Jennifer Tipton’s illumination provide many an apt mood clue, though the feelings charted by the choreography would be evident even on Times Square in relentlessly dazzling sunlight or in dusk shading ominously toward a complete black-out.

Preview from Seattle

September 14, 2012 by Tobi Tobias

Works & Process: Pacific Northwest Ballet / Guggenheim Museum, NYC / September 9 & 10, 2012

The dance programs in the Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process series, each a 90-minute presentation that shunts between dancing and talking, are viewed, live, two or three times, in the museum’s tiny theater, and telecast simultaneously from sea to shining sea. Most often, these lecture-dems serve as preludes to a run in New York; in harsher words the company that’s featured is shilling for its upcoming shows. The tough practicality of this arrangement is softened by the charm of the programs’ rehearsal-room immediacy—the dancers wear practice clothes and their music comes from a single piano. The audience, of course, adores going “behind the scenes.”

Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Carla Körbes, dancing Balanchine

Photo: Angela Sterling

September 9 and 10 featured the Seattle-based Pacific Northwest Ballet, and all the talking was done by its artistic director, Peter Boal, formerly a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet and a model of pure classicism with a prominent penchant for exactitude. He had a clear theme, which was the way in which, over the years, George Balanchine—essentially City Ballet’s raison d’être—made changes in his works. These different readings of the master’s choreography were illustrated by the dancers’ executing excerpts from Apollo (created in 1928), The Four Temperaments (1946), Agon (1957), and Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux (1960). Thanks to Boal’s predecessor, Francia Russell, Balanchine’s ballets have been central to PNB’s repertory since Boal was a mere (but, even then, marvelous) child at the School of American Ballet.

It required keen and experienced eyes to “get” everything Boal wanted the spectators to see. What was memorable about the occasion was not the detailed analysis, though, but the brilliance and daring of the dancers.

The Guggenheim’s small theater has a stage of Lilliputian dimensions. This cruelly confined space was not only hampering but dangerous as well. Every time a woman was lifted high over her partner’s head, her skull ran the risk of smashing into the overhead lights. A series of swiftly whirling turns seemed to court disaster yet, miraculously, never came to grief. The dancers performed with elated zest—boldly and bravely, adamantly refusing to be discouraged by boundaries.

Körbes, dancing Balanchine

Photo: Angela Sterling

The six dancers involved were indeed good, if nowhere near as stellar as the artists New Yorkers see regularly at City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre. But neither are they what used to be called (damning with a label) “regional”—good enough for second-level troupes but not for the big time. PNB’s men are especially distinguished by an air of having thought long and carefully about their roles. Still, Carla Körbes was unquestionably the most important among the performers. She’s a born ballerina, world-class, who has an unfortunately shaky career behind her. Just now, with PNB, she seems, finally, to have come into her own, fusing superb technique with potent personality and an accompanying delight. Ironically, she was first discovered by Boal in her native Brazil, at the age of 14.

PNB will perform at the New York City Center February 13-16, 2013, offering an all-Balanchine program alternating with Jean-Christophe Maillot’s Roméo et Juliette.

A Ballet Romance

July 18, 2012 by Tobi Tobias

Paris Opera Ballet / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / June 11-22, 2012

Say that, as a dance fan, you happen to have a young child in your life who’s showing a burgeoning interest in—perhaps even an instinctive love for—dancing. If you take her or him to the ballet to see one of the venerable 19th-century classics, you want to be sure it’s a production that’s faithful to its tradition—not savagely cut, skewed, or “reimagined” beyond recognition. The very young, with their acute receptivity, deserve the very best.

The Paris Opera Ballet’s Aurélie Dupont in the title role of Giselle, with the corps de ballet as wilis

Photo: Stephanie Berger

I’ve had the pleasure and responsibility of fostering such a dance-avid child’s interest in ballet for a dozen years. (She’s 15 now—a scholar, a musician, and a runner.) We’ve had the luck of living in New York City, host to American Ballet Theatre, the New York City Ballet, and a plethora of ranking visiting troupes. As time went by, though, there was a diminishing number of satisfactory productions to be seen of touchstone works such as The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake.

Happily, the current visit of the Paris Opera Ballet has brought us the most beautiful and satisfying staging of Giselle that I’ve ever witnessed—and I, too, fell in love with ballet very young (without the help of a fairy godmother). Created for the company in 1841, this is a Giselle that sets the ballet where it belongs—in a pastoral community glowing with sunshine and good will until a dallying prince invades it (his excuse, he claims, is love), then in a dank graveyard populated by vengeful ghosts who can be vanquished only by a devotion existing beyond death (even then it’s a damned close call).

Dupont as Giselle, Mathieu Ganio as Albrecht, and the corps de ballet

Photo: Stephanie Berger

Unusually, this production of Giselle is not entirely dependent on the ballerina playing the title role. Indeed, the work of the corps de ballet, 26 women, moving as one, creating one breathtaking sculptural image after another, is of equal—perhaps greater—importance. The interlacing lines of wilis (maidens who’ve died when their sweetheart betrayed them) crossing the stage in traveling arabesques made me gasp along with the neophyte viewers, though I’d seen the passage again and again. The stunning effect of the corps is no doubt due to the strict principles governing the dancers’ selection, their scrupulous training from childhood through adolescence (with many aspirants falling by the wayside) and, somehow, to their apparent communal dedication to animating the choreography at the highest level possible. It’s a zeal that never flags but is, instead, renewed night after night. I find all of this eerie and marvelous and feel privileged to witness it.

The costumes for the production, after those designed by the celebrated Alexandre Benois in 1924, are ravishing. The lower classes are modestly dressed. Then a procession of the aristocracy (to which the unreliable prince belongs), on its way to the hunt, brings rich color and magnificent detailing—in more or less medieval style—into the picture. The palette includes bright red, crimson, mulberry, violet, peach, cream, and deepest blue, the last offset with ermine trim. The complementary headgear is appropriately outré. Every last one of this 1% looks haughtily stunning.

In the second act, however, the wilis’ nearly surreal white costumes make the gorgeous worldly outfits we saw on the aristocracy look like mere gaudy outer skins of the earthly upper class. The wilis are clad in the uniform of their mystical if horrific rites. The ghostly women, veiled when we first see them, wear neat bodices above long tutus that flair out in quivering concentric circles when the women turn, as if creating a gently whirling cloud around their legs. From the back of their bodices sprout tiny translucent white wings. Where are they going to fly, I wondered, if they’re essentially dead and buried? No matter; once the second act is launched, susceptible observers will have entirely suspended their disbelief. They’ll see nothing but a stream of miracles.

Even the lighting of this Giselle is magical, most obviously in the slow coming of dawn, which robs the wilis of their power, saves the now-repentant prince’s life, and sends Giselle back to the sorrowful and lonely peace of her grave. It’s a peach-tinged light, a glow really, that increases as subtly as sleep finally arrives to an fretful insomniac.

As I write, I’ve seen three of the POB’s Giselles (and am signed up to see two more). By far the most gratifying was the first of them, Aurélie Dupont (whom I couldn’t resist visiting twice). The others were Clairemarie Osta and Isabelle Ciaravola.

Dupont is not the first ballerina you’d identify with Giselle. She has a devastating personal beauty (not necessary for the role, maybe even distracting) and an authoritative presence, no doubt encouraged by her years as an étoile–the A+ dancers of the company, according to its hierarchical system. Yet, as POB’s aesthetic dictates, she doesn’t “sell herself” but rather underplays and, in doing so, entices the viewer to join in the work of her imagination.

Dupont (center) as Giselle

Photo: Stephanie Berger

In the first act of the ballet, her work is initially impressive only in the fluency and correctness of her dancing. But she’s a master of calibration and when she arrives at the Mad Scene she takes fire. First she looks like a child betrayed, then sketches the history she’s recalling of Albrecht’s (as the two-timing prince is called) courtship of her—making each feeble, jagged gesture a stab to the spectator’s heart, then leaping wildly here and there, as if to escape her sorrow.

Her second act was beyond terrific, her personal glamour sacrificed to create an image that was all air and pathos. She danced and acted as if those two elements might, quite naturally, be tethered to each other. At the moment of her appearance at the command of Myrtha, queen of the wilis, whirling as if seized by some untamable force of nature, she seemed to be a dead soul. Then, gradually, she achieved a piercing half-life through her memory of a love that refused to acknowledge death. She reacted to the now penitent and sorrowing Albrecht as if she didn’t actually see him and couldn’t really touch or be touched by him, yet somehow, deep within her senses, recalled an attachment to him that she would never abandon.

Dupont and Ganio as Giselle and Albrecht

Photo: Stephanie Berger

In all this, she displayed two gifts essential to a ballerina: She makes you look at her (indeed refuses to let you look away) and she makes you believe in her.

Clairemarie Osta is a marvelous dancer—fresh, fleet, and buoyant. She’s no stranger to virtuoso feats where they’re appropriate. For one thing, she does the diagonal of hops on pointe traveling backwards—without in the least seeming to show off. Her Mad Scene has personal touches that are entirely apt. Overall she plays it as if she had slept while the prince-playing-peasant courted her and she responded with shy joy, and has now awakened to a nightmare. And yet Osta’s never entirely convincing as Giselle because she’s just not the type. She doesn’t come across as a fragile, vulnerable young woman to whom tragic things happen. She has the delicious personality of a soubrette; a born Lise in La Fille mal gardée.

Isabelle Ciaravola didn’t endear herself to me in L’Arlésienne and my lack of enthusiasm continued upon seeing her Giselle. Like her fellow étoiles she is amazingly capable. Still, the rank of étoile is supposed to be given for a charisma, a luminescence that is beyond technique. Instead I find Ciaravola dry, angular, even occasionally grotesque, as if she were activated by an unreliable puppet master maneuvering the strings. I’d prefer not to be so negative—especially about a dancer I’d never seen before now—but I understand, just from intermission talk, that she has many admirers, so if I can’t see what’s terrific about her, no matter. That’s the beauty inherent in having a diversity of dancers to interpret a role. The Parisians fielded four in New York and, with three of these close to retirement, no doubt have other candidates back home.

None of the Albrechts I saw seemed just right for the role, one too young and brash paired with a mature ballerina; another too mature to negotiate the technical challenges, though theatrically wise; a third who, with everything going for him, remained indifferent to the story the ballet means to tell. The men’s partnering, though, particularly in the second act, never faltered.

Marie-Agnès Gillot as Myrtha, Queen of the Wilis, in Giselle

Photo: Stephanie Berger

As Myrtha, I much preferred Marie-Agnès Gillot, who alone had the force the role demands and a rare range of emotion. Gillot is one of the most versatile and impressive dancers in the august French company, and her presence permeates the entire second act—until Giselle’s literally undying love for Albrecht defeats her. Emilie Cozette, the first-cast Myrtha, was sweet, small, and tender. What had Casting been thinking of?

Apart from the excellence of the dancing, the company’s style in mime is ideal. Even when it’s in the traditional code vocabulary (for example, tracing a circle around the face means “beautiful”), it’s very underplayed—conversational, as it were. The POB dancers behave as if dancing were their poetry, mime their prose, and the two were intimately related. Think of the relationship between aria and recitative in opera.

The corps de ballet as wilis

Photo: Stephanie Berger

A minor but telling detail (one of many, the Parisians being well-nigh obsessive about detail): Just as in the lithographs of Romantic Age ballerinas, the wilis carry their heads inclined slightly forward, drawing attention to the back of the neck (la nuque, in French)—a part of the body that, according to Japanese culture, is considered particularly beautiful and erotic. Evidently, the Japanese are right.

Led by the Belgian conductor Koen Kessels, the orchestra of the New York City Opera delivered Adolphe Adam’s score sensitively and vibrantly. Ballet music is rarely so well treated in New York. It was a pleasure to hear what’s possible, given care and financial support.

Made in France

July 15, 2012 by Tobi Tobias

Paris Opera Ballet / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / July 11-22, 2012

The Paris Opera Ballet, playing at the David H. Koch through July 22, gets the prize for vintage achievement. Formed in 1669, it has the distinction of being the world’s oldest classical ballet troupe. The academy that produces most of its dancers dates from 1713. Naturally, this legendary institution, absent from New York for 16 years, had to re-introduce itself.

The Paris Opera Ballet’s Aurélie Dupont (center, held aloft) with fellow artists of the company in Serge Lifar’s Suite en Blanc

Photo: Stephanie Berger

The first of the three ballets it performed on its opening night in New York declared that exquisite technique rules the company’s aesthetic. Serge Lifar’s Suite en Blanc, set to Édouard Lalo’s score for Namouna, is essentially a compendium of steps, steps immaculately executed by the dancers—almost all trained at the company’s school from early childhood—so that they seem to be the definitive, textbook, version of that step. The goal is, quite simply, perfection. Onlookers will find this sublime, curious, or off-putting, according to their taste. As for its being a ballet about ballet, it’s a distant cousin of Harald Lander’s Études, often performed by American Ballet Theatre, but neither gaudy nor wild. Suite en Blanc is completely confined within the parameters of good taste.

Some, almost random, particulars:

The women’s feet—in their spanking clean, neatly tied pink satin pointe shoes—seem to caress the stage floor and, incredibly, make no sound on the landings from jumps and leaps or on gentle pitter-pattering runs.

The women’s arms are graceful and ornamental, tracing filigreed patterns on the air. The head, neck, and shoulders harmonize scrupulously to produce an effect called épaulement, something Balanchine ignored, because it interfered with the speed he wanted and, perhaps, because it looked old-fashioned.

There are women who can balance forever on one foot—en pointe, of course—turning themselves into an unwavering middle-weight piece of sculpture, apparently through sheer will or perhaps a code of honor.

Everyone in the company, it seems, can turn like mad, some even like gyroscopes. Among the men the finishes—always the telling part of a turn—are sometimes uneven.

The men bend their knees slightly and shoot their bodies directly up into the air, beating their feet together, clearly and firmly, then landing neatly. Missteps, even on a first performance in an unfamiliar theater, are few and clearly destined for eradication.

The men are not only adept partners, but also infinitely polite and respectful cavaliers as well. And they manage to pull off impressive athletic feats without looking like cavemen. True this unremitting chivalry and control may exasperate the New York spectator. We’re simply not used to it.

Throughout, there’s not much variation in the weight of a step. Even in the air, the dancers don’t create the illusion of being ethereal—or, on the ground, impressively forceful. What they’re aiming for, I guess, is sublimity.

Aurélie Dupont and Benjamin Pech in Suite en Blanc

Photo: Stephanie Berger

The high point of Suite en Blanc is a duet in which I saw Aurélie Dupont, a ravishing dancer nearing the company’s compulsory retirement age of 42, sveltely partnered one evening by Benjamin Pech and the next by Mathieu Ganio. Dupont is undeniably a beauty—in both face and figure, a superb dancer with the lush quality of a Suzanne Farrell or a Sara Mearns, and a role model of calm, confident serenity. She exemplifies the rank of étoile (star)—which the company awards to those artists who have a luminous quality that draws viewers’ attention like a magnet and makes them rejoice in what they see. There’s a marvelous moment in the duet where the man walks forward holding her body above the floor and she “walks” too—on air. And another in which she lifts her arms over her head and intertwines her fingers as if to indicate at once the crown of a regent and the halo of an angel. If I had known about her earlier, I would have traveled to Paris more often.

Isabelle Ciaravola and Jérémie Bélingard in Roland Petit’s L’Arlésienne

Photo: Stephanie Berger

It took me a second viewing to figure out the tale Roland Petit’s 1974 L’Arlésienne was trying to tell and even then the story felt wrong-headed. The title itself, The Woman from Arles, appropriated from the Bizet score to which it’s set, is a red herring because the central figure of the ballet is a young man. He and the woman his fellow villagers—a 16-member corps—assume he will marry and settle down with, can’t make their relationship work because the youth has visions—visions of a love that’s utterly beyond earthly reach. Think of La Sylphide, in which James, slated to marry the charming, down-to-earth Effie, feels trapped in the ordinariness of his bride-to-be and the domestic life their community expects them to lead together, and so dreams of a love that’s literally unearthly. You know how that one ends.

The woman, played paper-doll style (is this how Our Hero thinks of her?) by Isabelle Ciaravola and more humanly and sweetly by Nolwenn Daniel, approaches her intended again and again—this is a tediously long ballet—and the two do try to connect, to no avail. He grows more and more possessed by his visions and allergic to her overtures and at last jumps out of a suddenly and conveniently appearing window to his death.

Jérémie Bélingard in Petit’s L’Arlésienne

Photo: Stephanie Berger

The dancers I preferred in the leading roles were Jérémie Bélingard in the opening night cast—his acting was so convincing I almost believed in the goings on–and Nolwenn Daniel (who played a sweetheart any man would be proud to win) in the second performance.

Bolero: You know that Ravel music. And it’s still just as long as you remember. It belabors a simple melody, assuming that repetition, hand in hand with escalating volume and augmenting instrumentation, will hypnotize the hearer. The composer, it’s said, told a friend that he found the little phrase itself “insistent.” Apparently Bronislava Nijinska thought so too and was the first to choreograph the score, in 1928.

Nicolas Le Riche in the central role of Maurice Béjart’s Bolero

Photo: Stephanie Berger

The Paris Opera Ballet does Maurice Béjart’s 1961 version. It’s an audience pleaser, god knows; I find it unbearable. The choreography features a man or a woman (I saw Nicolas Le Riche on opening night, Marie-Agnès Gillot the following evening), discreetly wearing as little as possible under the circumstances, standing on a red oval table to pulsate, gyrate, and gesticulate nonstop with increasing fervor. He (or she) is bordered on all three sides of the stage by a row of dancers who become drawn into the rite until, at the finish, they close in and lunge at the figure on the table, suggesting a synchronized orgasm.

Nicolas Le Riche and the male ensemble in Bolero

Photo: Stephanie Berger

My guest for the opening night program, with which Bolero concluded—with a bang, you might say–condemned the piece, which she was seeing for the first time, as incredibly vulgar. I was bored by the trite choreography, but deeply impressed by the sensuous power and selfless dedication to the enterprise of the two dancers I saw in the leading role. It was definitely a case in which maturity counted. The audience as a whole went crazy for it. Standing ovation and all that. Yelps of delight.

The POB’s mixed repertory program will be followed by Giselle, created for the company in 1841. I can’t wait.

Swans

June 30, 2012 by Tobi Tobias

American Ballet Theatre / Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC / through July 7, 2012

In the past week American Ballet Theatre has been offering a handsome array of dancers to play Odette/Odile and Prince Siegfried in Kevin McKenzie’s version of Swan Lake. Steeling myself against the choreography—as mistaken and misshapen as Peter Martins’ Lake for the New York City Ballet—I chose to see three pairs: Paloma Herrera and Ángel Corella (in his farewell performance with the company); Polina Semionova and David Hallberg (currently dancers in transit); and Isabella Boylston and Daniil Simkin (making their debuts in the roles).

Angel Corella, in his farewell performance with American Ballet Theatre, as Prince Siegfried in Kevin McKenzie’s version of Swan Lake

Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

Onstage, Ángel Corella has always seemed to be the happiest of men, radiating good cheer and sheer delight. He’s one of those people for whom the glass is neither half full nor full, but eternally brimming over. These qualities—along with an only partly muted version of the masterly dancing that made him a star—were evident in his official farewell performance with the company on June 28th.

He was given the usual send-off: One by one, the artists who have been his colleagues, all known by sight to committed dance fans, appeared to offer flowers and embraces, until the stage was crowded with well wishers, its floor a carpet of blossoms and laurel leaves, the air shot though with glittering confetti. In Corella’s case the routine goodbye ritual was vibrant with the affection his peers feel for him. The audience clapped and cheered wildly, as have so many of Corella’s audiences before, and, for an inordinately long time, even after the house lights went up, steadfastly refused to go home.

Nevertheless, the amazing part of the evening was Corella’s demonstration of his artistry in playing Siegfried. He remains as compelling as ever—you might say even more now that his physical virtuosity is diminished—in sheer theatrical know-how (timing and tone, for instance), and especially in creating a character who is alive at every moment. When his mother, the monarch of the realm in which their story takes place, tells him that, having reached his majority, he’s obliged to marry, he makes it clear and keeps it clear that she has sounded his death knell. He doesn’t go back to the upbeat company of his friends but continues to be shrouded in a dark cloud of gloom. He’s not angry or sulky but rather in what the medicine men of the 20th century would have called a chronic depression.

Corella partnering Paloma Herrera as Odette in Swan Lake

Photo: Gene Schiavone

Corella appears to be completely convinced by the story the ballet tells. When he does the interpolated solo about being alone in a world that finds companionship easy, he seems to be thinking and moving at the same time. Armed with his crossbow, hunting alone, he encounters Odette and is all amazement. At one point in his pas de deux with her, he leans back as if swooning because he has met sheer loveliness. He seems to believe that a creature so sublime could exist only in the imagination. (As perhaps Odette does, but that’s another interpretation of the tale.) When he climbs the rocky promontory to commit suicide in the wake of Odette’s desperate plunge, he stands poised at the top for a moment, as if getting his emotional bearings, then simply drops into the space below as if there were nothing that could hold him any longer on earth.

As for the technical side of the performance Corella did what he could do without showing strain. It was a lovely “sunset” performance like those of Kyra Nichols in her last seasons with City Ballet, the wise opposite of Nureyev’s in the last decade—or more—of his life. This farewell was one of the greatest performances I’ve seen Corella give and I’ve seen many that were glorious.

Corella’s partner as Odette/Odile, Paloma Herrera, is most gratifying in ebullient roles that show off high spirits and a rock-solid virtuoso technique. She makes a delicious Kitri in Don Quixote, but she’s clearly not a born Odette. She knows exactly what to do in the role but she’s just not fully convincing doing it. She’s a robust creature of the earth, not a figure of enchantment. And, alas, her own technique has begun to erode—just slightly but discernably nevertheless. Oddly enough, she was no more convincing as Odile, even though dynamic divas used to be hers by birthright. In truth, the most touching element in her performance was her devotion to Corella, her long-time colleague and friend.

Corella will continue to dance, he’s announced, with the Barcelona Ballet, still a very green troupe, which he founded and runs because, as he’s said, Spain didn’t have a classical company and should have one.

*

Polina Semionova as Odette, partnered by David Hallberg as Prince Siegfried

Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

I think of them as the Commuter Couple: Russian-born, Polina Semionova trained in Moscow at the Bolshoi Ballet School. Upon graduation, laden with prizes, she joined the Berlin State Ballet as a principal dancer. She danced with ABT last year and this as a guest artist and has now been invited to join the company full-time as a principal, beginning with its fall season. David Hallberg, an American, trained at the Arizona Ballet School, the Paris Opera Ballet School, and ABT. He became a principal dancer at ABT in 2005 and now divides his time between ABT and the Bolshoi Ballet. The legendary Russian company, jealous of its own importance, is hardly in the habit of adopting foreign artists, yet it took Hallberg on as a star and enhanced the power of his gifts.

The narrative arrangement of Swan Lake lets us find out a lot about Prince Siegfried long before he encounters his enchanted, fatal swan. We meet him enjoying the company of the aristocrats and the peasantry of his long-ago-and-far-away kingdom in the run-up to his coming of age party. There we see immediately that Hallberg’s execution of the classical ballet vocabulary is so flawless that every step he executes looks like a Platonic version of that move.

When Siegfried’s mother presents him with the handsome crossbow for hunting—apparently just what he craved—she also takes him aside to remind him that, upon his coming of age, he’s obliged to marry, although a bride seems to be the last thing he wants. Hallberg makes Siegfried’s feelings apparent and then gets to do, poignantly, the interpolated solo of longing and loneliness. And then he meets his swan, if not the gift of Fate, at least what the casting department has selected for him.

Hallberg as Prince Siegfried partnering Semionova as Odette

Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

Semionova and Hallberg are well-matched in height—she’s tall for a ballerina—although it can be argued that they otherwise make a poorly mated couple. She is all force and unwavering control, while he is lyrical by nature and disposition, and beautifully fluid in both action and in the feelings that lie behind that action. Semionova is an Odette in the line of Cynthia Gregory: technically assured and majestic. She differs from Gregory, alas, in that there’s no plaintive quality in her dancing—no sorrow, no pathos, no feeling of any kind. Even her mime is governed by exactitude. She’s a dancer who is all about control—and perfection within that severe realm. This is not good news.

The pair offered a white swan pas de deux that a dance notator might dream of seeing in the studio to facilitate her job of recording every move in scrupulous detail. The tempo was so clear, careful, and slow—slower even than Makarova famously preferred—that it often felt like stasis. It helped Hallberg look like a better partner than he’s shown himself to be elsewhere, but not an eloquent one.

And what about the Odile part of Semionova’s role, you may well ask. It was just like the Odette part, adorned with a few purportedly wicked grimaces. Semionova’s crackerjack technique serves her well here but, just as she didn’t exude the purity of Odette, she fails to embody Odile’s glittering evil. The multiple fouettés, well seasoned with doubles, were spectacular, though Hallberg outdid her in his gyroscopic response.

*

Isabella Boylston as Odette, with Daniil Simkin as Prince Siegfried

Photo: Gene Schiavone

Hope and promise were very much in the air, when Isabella Boylston and Daniil Simkin jointly made their debuts in the leading roles at a matinee of Swan Lake. Their technical prowess and professional acumen alone were worth a shower of gold stars.

Because of the way ABT has, quite reasonably, cast him in the past, Simkin—small, swift, strong, and seemingly fearless—has made his mark as a virtuoso. If the McKenzie version of Swan Lake had a jester—as many takes on this ballet do—the role would automatically become Simkin’s. He’d steal the show. Instead, he was given a chance to play Prince Siegfried—though he lacks the height, the looks (he resembles a sweetly appealing child), and the air of command the role calls for. He earned that chance, as was evident in his impeccable rendition of the ballet’s classical-dance passages. Indeed, his perfection of line and the seamless flow of his dancing are very much like David Hallberg’s, but his type—and type remains obdurately significant in yesteryear’s dances, no matter what liberties today’s artistic directors take—still refuses him the keys to the kingdom.

As for acting, he simply doesn’t do it yet and, in general, ABT seems to be oblivious to its importance. This is a self-defeating policy. The absence of drama in the performance of a story ballet means that, beautiful as the dancing may be, nothing about it will feel urgent.

Boylston as Odette

Photo: Gene Schiavone

Isabella Boylston, doesn’t act either, relying on a slight change of how she does the steps to show the difference between Odette (all purity and longing, a role she was born to own) and Odile (an evil seductress, a role that might well contribute to her development). No matter—at least for the moment. Boylston is a consistently lovely dancer, a fact that the company has been slow to recognize fully. Her rendering of the two ladies of the lake was executed admirably, lacking only the kind of magnetism that rivets the attention of a huge audience. This quality is bound to grow with time and experience.

Boylston is petite, with a beautifully proportioned body. Her technique is perfection itself—strong, clear, fluent, and musical to boot. She has only to shed the look of Prize Pupil and take over the territory that is hers by rights. Surely it’s time for ABT to nurture a nascent ballerina of its own making.

Five-Alarm “Firebird”

June 14, 2012 by Tobi Tobias

American Ballet Theatre: Alexei Ratmansky’s new Firebird / Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC / season runs through July 7, 2012

I can’t imagine what Alexei Ratmansky was thinking of in creating his New Look Firebird. To begin with—and this is the first thing you notice–it‘s dressed for Las Vegas by Galina Solovyeva, with complementary décor (including a sci-fi forest with hints of porn) by Simon Pastukh. It wrests the fairy-tale narrative that Michel Fokine created for his 1910 L’Oiseau de Feu (in which good, abetted by generosity, duly conquers evil and is rewarded with love) into a tale that is sardonic at best, sleazy at worst.

Marcelo Gomes as Ivan and Natalia Osipova as the Firebird in Alexei Ratmansky’s re-imagination of Firebird for American Ballet Theatre

Photo: Gene Schiavone

Am I prejudiced by past experience? I first saw the Fokine version back in the day with Margot Fonteyn and can still remember her entrance and her boldly plucking a golden apple from a painted tree. The one civilized thing Ratmansky accomplished with his version was to use the full Stravinsky score instead of the customary suite. Of course that only lengthened the discomfort of the naysayers.

Judging from all I’ve seen of his earlier work, I’m convinced that Ratmansky is a humanist at heart. His ballets exude a wide and deep sympathy for the flawed human race; call it love, if you will, or, rather, love leavened with humor. As an artist—and he’s a major one, the very best we have in ballet—he has every right to see the world as loathsome, but he’ll have to make his case better than he does here.

Osipova with part of the Firebird ensemble

Photo: Gene Schiavone

Just so you know, the Firebird in this version comes as a multiple. There’s a whole flock of this rara avis, available in both genders. In real-life birdland—with the cardinal, for example—there’s a color distinction or other marking of the genders. Not here. Male and female alike, they’re poured into screaming-red unitards and sport headpieces ornamented with sheaves of feathers that reach into the air like flames, threatening to consume its oxygen.

Of course there’s a main Firebird, as well (her get-up includes a feathery bustle at the rump). I saw her danced by Natalia Osipova. Ratmansky has chosen to ignore this ballerina’s remarkable buoyancy and, with his enormous insight into who and what an individual dancer is, concentrated on another aspect of her dancing persona—a toughness that she seems eager to discard. It’s shown off very well, though, in her battle with Ivan—a tsarevich type played by Marcelo Gomes, who’s the curiosity-driven hero of the ballet—when he tries to capture her. He releases her finally and she rewards him with a red feather that he can use to summon her when he’s in need. Just as everything in the ballet is “too big,” so is the feather.

David Hallberg as the monster Kaschei with the Maidens under his spell

Photo: Gene Schiavone

The Maidens (lovely, gentle, and presumably virginal according to Fokine) whom the monster Kaschei holds in his thrall are, chez Ratmansky, plain and simple sex slaves. The choreographer makes this clear by, for instance, having them assemble, packed body to body in a horizontal line, so that he can slide his lips onto each mouth with a single kiss. There’s a main Maiden, intended in the end as Ivan’s reward, who not only shares a grotesqueness (and a turquoise wardrobe) with her sisters but is, as played by Simone Messmer, also wittier.

As Kaschei, David Hallberg (the incomparable classicist who, half an hour earlier, had been dancing the title role in Balanchine’s Apollo) was clearly having the time of his life being a campy Essence of Evil. But Ivan, after wielding the Emergency Feather, discovers the egg that harbors K’s soul and smashes it, leading to an unearned, unconvincing, and dumbly inept Happy Ending.

The Maidens, free at last

Photo: Gene Schiavone

I should add that there’s almost no distinctive dancing in the piece but this, given the circumstances Ratmansky set up or succumbed to, was inevitable.

Armchair Travel

May 25, 2012 by Tobi Tobias

American Ballet Theatre / Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC / through July 7, 2012

We are in India, a long and mythical time ago. A Brahmin priest lusts after Nikiya, the loveliest of the temple dancers, a situation acceptable neither to his gods nor to the young woman. She loves the warrior Solor, who returns her feelings. Solor, however, has been promised to the rajah’s daughter, Gamzatti, who, in desperation (or an access of evil), finishes off her rival with a poisonous viper embedded in a basket of flowers. Nikiya has a busy time of it in her afterlife—beginning with the sublime Kingdom of the Shades scene and ending in cataclysm, after which she and her beloved are finally joined for keeps in a luminous apotheosis. American Ballet Theatre takes us on this tour with Natalia Makarova’s staging of Marius Petipa’s La Bayadère, a combination of colorful hokum and classicism at its purest.

In a single week ABT fielded no fewer than seven ballerinas in the role of Nikiya. Of those I saw, the one that ignited my imagination was Veronika Part. Shedding her long uncertainty about her technical capability, she has come into her own to the point that her rendition of the role extinguished my desire to see any other.

Veronika Part (as Nikiya) and Marcelo Gomes (as Solor) in Natalia Makarova’s production (after Petipa) of La Bayadère for American Ballet Theatre

Photo: Gene Schiavone

Possessing extraordinary personal beauty in face and figure (tall, exquisitely proportioned, with just enough flesh to give her a voluptuous air), Part is, just physically, a perfect object of desire. Strangely enough, though, In the world of classical ballet, good looks don’t count all that much; dancing is unquestionably the key factor. Galina Ulanova, among the greatest of the 20th century’s ballerinas, was plain-faced and stocky, but the eloquence of her dancing—which I saw only at the end of her career and then only briefly—remains one of my touchstones.

At least half of the ravishing dancing Part did in Bayadère was predictable. For some time now audiences have reveled in her softness and liquidity. Her Nikiya seems to be dancing on plush and moving, as people once said of Margot Fonteyn, like honey poured from a jar. Her line has always been magnificent—an ever-shifting picture of grace, harmony, and royal breeding—but only now does she display it with full confidence, giving her audience example after example of what classical dance (that strange, exacting art) makes possible. What’s more, nothing she does looks forced; she doesn’t appear to be making any effort at all. (Needless to say, this is an illusion.)

Other elements in Part’s evolution—the strength, the control, the precision—are probably the last thing her admirers expected. In the past, although she offered her fans enough for them to consider her unique and wonderful, she’d hold back in her attack on a step, a phrase, a balance, or a lift, apparently through anxiety about her ability to execute it securely. Her hesitation was frequently so evident that her spectators grew nervous too. Now she trusts herself more and the audience can trust her in turn.

Part and Gomes in La Bayadère

Photo: Gene Schiavone

Part’s interpretation of Nikiya has a distinct through-line logic. Her Nikiya personifies the powerful innocence of a child; she’s a creature who knows exactly what she wants (Solor, forever). Single-minded, she pursues her goal, dangerously loath to recognize evil—shocked time and again by its manifestations—or even opposition. Confronting Gamzatti to insist upon her claim to Solor, she’s completely unaware of the conniving familiar to the world of wealth and power.

At the same time she’s impulsive—ready, literally, to plunge a dagger into Gamzatti if her rival insists on co-opting the man she loves. When the priest offers her an antidote to the viper’s poison (as I’ve suggested, the narrative of Bayadère requires utter suspension of disbelief), she sees Solor leaving the scene with Gamzatti and opts for death. Part’s Nikiya is also, tragically, incapable of realizing that people can be of two minds about an issue of utmost importance, Solor being the poster boy for that state.

Of course I doubt that Petipa was concerned about subtle motivations for his characters. It’s the people who subsequently staged Bayadère who tried to make the narrative acceptable for their own time, so that Petipa’s choreography, similarly adjusted, would be remain available.

Part and Gomes in the apotheosis of La Bayadère

Photo: Gene Schiavone

Part was matched with the Solor perfect for her—Marcelo Gomes, who is not merely an imposing dancer, but also an intuitively supportive partner; no ballerina could do better than to be in his care.

Gillian Murphy, who plays Nikiya on other occasions, here gave the role of Gamzatti a sympathetic psychological dimension. At first she’s the rajah’s daughter, assuming her entitlement to Solor. Then, in an affectingly developed solo, she realizes that her beauty, her regal status, and its accompanying stupendous wealth are not enough to possess him. Rightly, she doesn’t go so far as to realize the unpredictable, irrational (or at least inexplicable) nature of love, because that would make the ballet a tragedy when it was surely first conceived of as an entertainment—albeit an entertainment created by genius.

The quality of the dancing throughout the ranks was excellent; the female corps de ballet in the Kingdom of the Shades scene was superb. Throughout, from its reaction, the audience, ensconced in its red velvet chairs, seemed to know what was good enough, what was really good, and what was beyond belief wonderful. Without question Veronika Part’s dancing fell into that final, sparsely populated, category.

Starry Night

May 16, 2012 by Tobi Tobias

American Ballet Theatre: Gala / Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC / May 14, 2012

The 15 items presented in American Ballet Theatre’s gala opening night program proceeded, one after another, like items on a To Do list. The individual numbers, most of them familiar (at least half of them overfamiliar), provided many an occasion for multiple fouettés for the ladies, kamikaze feats both old and startlingly new for the gentlemen, and crises of passion for the couples. The show fulfilled its ostensible purpose of presenting every principal dancer on the roster—and many of the soloists. As a whole, though, it was exhausting to the eye and the spirit.

Considered individually, of course, almost every entry contained something very fine or at least instructive to notice. Here’s what I noticed:

American Ballet Theatre dancers in Christopher Wheeldon’s Thirteen Diversions

Photo: Gene Schiavone

Sections of Christopher Wheeldon’s Thirteen Diversions (music: Britten) opened and closed the program. Every dancer participating seemed as swift and sleek as a human being could be. However, the choreography—to my mind, some of Wheeldon’s best—suffered mightily from being broken up.

Strangely excerpted from Le Corsaire (Anna-Marie Holmes, after Petipa and Sergeyev; music: Adam), three Odalisques revealed clear individual temperaments. Sarah Lane demonstrated the beauty of small things rendered with exactitude; Misty Copeland represented vitality; Isabella Boylston proved, once again, that clarity has a spiritual dimension.

David Hallberg in La Bayadère

Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

Trailing clouds of glory, David Hallberg showed that his concurrent work as a member of the Bolshoi Ballet is the graduate schooling for his talents. In the Act II pas de deux from La Bayadère (Makarova, after Petipa; music: Minkus) with Polina Semionova, his dancing was clearly more spacious and forceful, with no loss of subtlety. Semionova is not the best partner for him, even though she does complement him in height; she’s too much of a strongwoman, while he projects dreams you can understand as if they were your own.

The program returned to Le Corsaire—a ballet clamoring to be excerpted—but Paloma Herrera and Cory Stearns failed to distinguish themselves in the “Bedroom” pas de deux. Without doubt, Herrera is technically superb, but her representation of feeling always looks painstakingly learned, not experienced. As for Stearns, he is perhaps not the guy you’d want to trust to let go of you mid-air.

Veronika Part is invariably fascinating to watch, but even she can’t transform Susan Jaffe’s Blue Pas de Deux (music: Alessandro Marcello) into a silk purse. Her partner was Thomas Forster, unprepossessing in the role, though not even Marcelo Gomes could have saved the day.

Gala programs frequently harbor a piece for a star in a guise other than the one he’s accustomed us to. The slot was filled this time by the acrobatic virtuoso Daniil Simkin proposing himself as a French low-life who hangs out in seedy cafés. Ben Van Cauwenbergh’s Les Bourgeois, set to a Jacques Brel song of that name, had Simkin clowning around, to be sure, but only in between executing never-before-seen feats.

Probably the most famous duet in classical ballet, the Act II pas de deux from Swan Lake (here, “after Ivanov”; music: Tchaikovsky) was danced by Irina Dvorovenko and Maxim Beloserkovsky. The two are poorly mated for double work in the traditional vein because (1) she overwhelms him physically and (2) their stage temperaments clash. She’s a Russian diva type; he’s essentially a Romantic dancer whose ideal Odette might be Alina Cojocaru.

Polonaise D’Enfants (music: Glazunov), choreographed by Raymond Lukens, a member of ABT’s education and training team, presented a selection of students ranging from grade schoolers through ABT’s junior troupe. The two littlest boys were irresistible; a medium-sized boy displayed a virtuoso’s ambitions; the young female teens were outranked by their School of American Ballet counterparts. The members of the junior company, who have not necessarily come up through the ABT school, have already jumped, unscathed, through flaming hoops.

Marcelo Gomes and Diana Vishneva in Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet

Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

In the Balcony pas de deux from Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet (music: Prokofiev), Diana Vishneva created a motivation for her every move. I loved the way she walked out onto her balcony and raised her arms to the sheltering night sky and her initially running away from her newly beloved like a moth terrified of being trapped. Her Romeo, Marcelo Gomes, was nowhere near as febrile as she but so adept as a partner that he seemed an organic part of her own dancing.

It was marvelous to see Herman Cornejo in fine fettle once again after a long recovery from injury and last season’s comeback performances. His partner, in the Act III pas de deux and coda from Don Quixote (after Petipa and Gorsky; music: Minkus), Xiomara Reyes, has nothing like his artistry, but she’s a spiffy technician. Fouettés—of which we saw far too many in the course of the evening, each set with its quirky variations—are child’s play to her.

Angel Corella and Alina Cojocaru in MacMillan’s Manon

Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

In the Act I pas de deux of MacMillan’s Manon (music: Massenet), Alina Cojocaru, sympathetically partnered by Angel Corella, coupled the theme of sexual urgency with that of irresistible youthful sweetness. The dismal fate of these lovers was foreseen only by viewers familiar—as many balletomanes are—with the long, tangled tale.

Gillian Murphy and Vadim Muntagirov made an odd couple in the Act III pas de deux and coda of Swan Lake (after Petipa; music: Tchaikovsky), she playing an Odile only America could have bred (athletic, straightforward evil), while he was an Old World Siegfried (all elegant balletic manners, no rough urgency). He’s Russian born, trained in Perm and at the Royal Ballet. They might learn a lot from each other.

Ironically, in the Act I pas de deux from John Cranko’s Onegin (music: Tchaikovsky), Roberto Bolle, who hasn’t yet learned how to act, looked far too young and unsophisticated for the role, while Julie Kent, a veteran ballerina, was utterly convincing as an inexperienced young girl suddenly hurtling from virginal innocence to reckless passion. Cultivating acting as part of her skill set has lengthened Kent’s career by a decade.

Natalia Osipova in Flames of Paris (after Vainonen)

Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev brought the gala performance to a rip-roaring close dancing the Flames of Paris pas de deux (after Vainonen; music: Asafiev)—a party-piece for super-adventurous virtuosi. She astonished with her ability to levitate. He was a wild man, eager to risk life and limb—he did even fall once—in order to be swifter, higher, more physically inventive than any danseur or stunt man in the movies. Fortunately he brought some mocking wit to the undertaking, which diminished its vulgarity.

What’s New?

May 12, 2012 by Tobi Tobias

New York City Ballet : Spring Gala, Á La Française / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / May 10, 2012

New York City Ballet’s spring gala treated its extravagantly dressed audience to two new ballets—one by Peter Martins, who heads the company, the other by the dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied, who recently retired from performing with the company and will be pursuing an ambitious project in Los Angeles. The evening was called Á La Française (in the French manner) and was duly decked out in French references—in the musical choices and, most pointedly, in the attempt at high-chic costumes.

New York City Ballet’s Claire Kretzschmar and Taylor Stanley in Peter Martins’ Mes Oiseaux

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Martin’s Mes Oiseaux (literally My Birds, make of this what you will), is set to a score for violin, cello, and piano by Marc-André Dalbavie that’s at once delicate, strong, and complex—like a spider web. The choreography, for a sole man and three women, can be understood as a Judgment of Paris affair (the mythical version, inflected by Antony Tudor’s ironic take), in which the gentleman must choose the “fairest” among three goddesses. In a process that’s too neatly organized and too long, Martins shows the fellow trying out each of the ladies, failing to arrive at a decision, and, of course, losing all three. The flighty trio goes off on its own—perhaps to set up a ménage á trois that has no need of him. Their identity lies in their togetherness more than it does in their individuality.

The three women’s dancing is immaculate. Lauren Lovette, Ashly Isaacs, and Claire Kretzschmar (whom I’d laid my bet on as the winner, from the way she rides the air)—looked capable of any challenge Martins set for them, no matter how esoteric. Everything they do is, presumably at Martins’ instruction, terrifyingly stripped of feeling.

Taylor Stanley, the Paris of this excursion, is not merely wonderful here, but unique in general. He has a muscular, sinewy quality, which can verge on the feral. This is rare in classical ballet, which assigns its most gifted men either to the noble prince or the virtuoso category. Tudor would have found a dramatic dancer in him. If Stanley were in a company like American Ballet Theatre, someone would already have created a latter-day Streetcar Named Desire to showcase him. At any rate, if ever there were a deeply three-dimensional dancer, it is he.

The costumes for the piece, by the fashion-world designer Gilles Mendel (supervised by Marc Happel, City Ballet’s director of costumes) clothe the trio of women in archly cut black tunics, each accented with a different sharp color. Stanley is given a less chichi equivalent, which you barely notice because of the deeply textured nature of his dancing. When, I wonder, will the dance world accept the fact that fashion designers, primarily intent on an immobile visual effect, are rarely a reliable choice for outfits subject to vigorous physical activity?

Tiler Peck and Tyler Angle in Benjamin Millepied’s Two Hearts

Photo: Paul Kolnik

If the Martins ballet was disappointing, Millepied’s Two Hearts—set to a score by Nico Muhly, the choreographer’s favorite composer—was completely discouraging. Two terrific dancers, Tiler Peck and Tyler Angle, waste their time playing a couple that seems to suffer from fear of commitment (a prevalent postmodern malady). Or is it just a fear of sex? At any rate, embedded in an ensemble that’s a dozen strong, they seem to be working their way to a gratifying ending when the subject of the ballet shifts somehow into the threat of war, with the oversensitive couple making love before the man goes out to die.

If Millepied’s submerged stories remain chronically vague, his choreography is as inefficient as his hints at narrative. Any passage in it, no matter how small, seems not only disjunctive but improbable. It’s all one thing after another, with no relationship among the things. This inevitably puts musicality out of his reach, though Muhly’s scores are hardly dansant. The moves Millepied gives his dancers look arbitrary, constructions made for an absurdist human anatomy.

For the record, the costumes were equally hard on the eyes. Created by the sister designers of Rodarte, Kate & Laura Mulleavy, and “supervised by” Happel, they’re all uncompromising variations of jet black stripes on harsh white. When the full cast of 14 assembles and revs up the action, the designs might cause an epileptic seizure; even in repose, they’re jarring. After the two new ballets had been performed back to back, I was muttering Thoreau’s “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.”

Sara Mearns and Jonathan Stafford in the second movement of Balanchine’s Symphony in C

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Thankfully the final item on the program was a Balanchine masterwork, so coherence, musicality, and natural-looking invention were restored to the evening. The ballet was Symphony in C, set to the very dance-worthy Bizet score; it has finally been given new costumes. I don’t love the new Happel-designed ones, but at least they banished the folded dinner napkins that used to adorn the women’s tutus. The ballet, created in 1947 for the Paris Opera Ballet, was originally called Le Palais de Crystal (Crystal Palace) so it’s reasonable that now both the women’s white tutus and the men’s black velour tunics are thickly adorned with Swarovski crystals. The glitter is fun—somehow elegant and tacky at once, like a child’s fantasy of aristocratic elegance.

The ballet was well danced all through the ranks: principals, demi-soloists, and corps. Still the standout was Sara Mearns’ rendition of the second movement. In its own way, it ranks with the interpretations of Allegra Kent and Suzanne Farrell. Those two ballerinas, however, aimed for the sublime; Mearns doesn’t. She’s a specific woman, in our own place and time, fraught with the emotions of a life deeply—perhaps too deeply—experienced.