New York City Ballet

Youth’s Sweet Dream

February 4, 2013 by Tobi Tobias

New York City Ballet: Justin Peck’s new work, Paz de la Jolla / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / January 31, February 2, 6, and 8, 2013

Justin Peck, choreographer of Paz de la Jolla for New York City Ballet

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Justin Peck, a 25-year-old member of New York City Ballet’s corps de ballet, seems to have lots of useful ideas and moods in his unstoppably busy brain. His latest work for the company is Paz de la Jolla (the peacefulness of La Jolla) and set to a similarly evocative score along the same lines by Bohuslav Martinů.

The choreography is typical of Peck’s prescience about the useful “rules” of choreography—and those that are not. He is so informed that you feel he’s equipped to make a reasonably commendable ballet in his sleep and that if the results didn’t satisfy him, he could tweak his material until they did.

Beach Boys in Peck’s Paz de la Jolla

Photo: Paul Kolnik

For Paz de la Jolla Peck wisely follows the trite but still instructive admonition to writers at the starting gate of their careers: “Write what you know.” In a good many ways, Paz de la Jolla epitomizes the sensuous pleasure native to southern California culture, in which he grew up. From his description, it was a wonder he ever left—but he wanted to dance and he believed that that would happen most effectively in New York, which, for him, it did.

Sterling Hyltin and Amar Ramasar, as the lovers in Paz de la Jolla

Photo: Paul Kolnik

The warmth of the Californian climate (Peck often lets you see it in the way the dancers move) matched by Martinů’s evocative music arouse the happily susceptible body and soul. Peck sets off the benign effect by slight additions from the underside of joy, and the effect was accidentally enlarged by the first several performances’ taking place in New York during a period of freezing snow, icy streets to navigate, and bouts of high winds that are all too prevalent in our local winter weather. Getting to the theater without incident was an adventure in itself.

Perhaps Peck’s development as a choreographer will one day follow the writer Grace Paley’s instruction: “Write about what you don’t know about what you know.”

The ballet opens with lots of swift brilliant movement, laced with authentic-looking split-second choices about what happens next.

Hyperactive arms and legs, like the long, thin limbs of gangly teenagers, shoot this way and that. It’s clear from the get-go that Tiler Peck (no relation to the choreographer) is the tomboy in the bunch; Sterling Hyltin, the sweetheart; Amar Ramasar, the eternal boyfriend. The ground is the sandy beach; the 15-member corps de ballet, costumed in blue, is the ocean—as dangerous as it is beautiful. The subsequent goings on are melodramatic in a predictable seaside vein, as if Peck were saying “Well, it’s always like this, isn’t it?”.

There’s a lovely—and refreshingly original—moment during the obligatory lovers’ pas de deux when Ramasar moves away from Hyltin for a moment, as if captivated by his own dream, but then returns—as most reliable tales, other than Hans Christian Andersen’s, would insist—to focus on her.

Now and then the water figures have an ominous air. They dally with Hyltin while her boyfriend dozes, then lure her into their midst; when they vanish, she lies on the shore alone, as if dead. The problem here, as well as with the ballet as a whole, is that, with everything happening at top speed, you’re not always sure what’s going on. The choreographer insists upon a happy ending, though; you can’t blame him, he’s still young and Martinů has given him no “death music.”

Hyltin, Ramasar, and Tiler Peck, as the principals in Paz de la Jolla

Photo: Paul Kolnik

The casting for La Jolla is happily conventional: Hyltin is the young woman whose evident, indeed sole, job in life is to be beloved. She calmly accepts her duties without conflict or protest; they are her fate. Tiler Peck is surefooted and delightful as an emissary of exuberance and delight, while Amar Ramasar is, as almost always, the guy immediately recognizable as “the prince.” At first glance you might think the three were sent over from Central Casting, but they’re far better—the very models of their respective roles.

Peck, as the woman who needs no support, in Paz de la Jolla

Photo: Paul Kolnik

All 18 in the cast look terrific in the beach clothes designed for them by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung, as well they might, since their training makes them so eye-worthy.

As its its right, the ballet is confined to the halcyon side of life in La Jolla, indirectly to its climate and to its lovely long meandering shoreline. For such reasons the place has, in real life, become a paradise for the greatly privileged. (Wikipedia tells us that Mitt Romney has a vacation house there.) Let that pass, but not this: anti-Semitism had a long reign in La Jolla. Still the ballet itself is strong and consistent enough to ignore the darker aspects of the location’s history—from the truly offensive to just plain human failings. Nevertheless, what Peck might most usefully direct his attention to next, is to find ways in which to make his dancers look like real (though imaginary) people. For examples of this he might pay acute attention to Alexei Ratmansky, who delights in the human race.

Bliss!

January 28, 2013 by Tobi Tobias

New York City Ballet / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / January 15 – February 24, 2013

The New York City Ballet’s two-week festival (January 15-27, 2013) of Balanchine’s choreography to music by Tschaikovsky came with a guarantee: no duds, no Eurotrash or other Terpsichorean fads, no feeble imitations of the greats. How wonderful it was to head for Lincoln Center night after night, knowing one was about to encounter dance that was sublime, to music by an ideal partner.

George Balanchine (1904 – 1983)

Photo: Tanaquil LeClercq

The ballets presented were: Allegro Brillante, Diamonds (from Jewels), Divertimento from “Le Baiser de la Fée,” Mozartiana, Serenade, Balanchine’s one-act version of Swan Lake, Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux, Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3, Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2 (once known as Ballet Imperial), and Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3.

Serenade, the first ballet Balanchine made in America, and the one he told Karin von Aroldingen (a dancer in the company who had become a close friend), was the one that might outlast him, proved its claim on immortality once again. Its invention, its pervasive beauty, its hidden story (slightly different, it seems, for every viewer, but universally poignant) worked their familiar magic. The cast I saw was headed by Ashley Bouder, Megan LeCrone, Sara Mearns (making her debut as the principal woman), Jared Angle, and Adrian Danchig-Waring. They and the rest of the participating dancers seemed to have absorbed the choreography through their skin.

I loved Balanchine’s Divertimento from “Le Baiser de la Fée” from the moment I first saw it. He gives it only a touch of plot (from the Hans Christian Andersen tale The Ice Maiden), but it’s enough to knock you flat. The choreographer, who had a mystic streak of his own, portrays the fate that haunts an artist whose talent proceeds from a fairy’s kiss—a blessing, yes, but one that dooms him to destruction. Tschaikovsky, who had a fatal instinct for tragedy, was very much at home with this theme.

The ballet is dense with haunting moves and portrays the implacable separation of a loving couple who seemed, at first, destined for a happy ending. (Does the woman represent one of the “ordinary” joys of life that an artist may have to forego or, perhaps, life itself?)

If you’re old enough and lucky enough, you’ll have seen the originators of the leading roles: Helgi Tomasson—for whom Balanchine here created one of his greatest male solos, full of sweeping, windblown movement—and Patricia McBride, whom I think of as an artistic ancestor of the wonderful Tiler Peck.

Allegro Brillante looked as if it had been made with Peck in mind. She is more than swift, strong, and accurate; she’s musical as well. So her speed and dazzle were tempered—or, let’s say, complemented—by a seemingly intuitive sense of phrasing. Her performance in this ballet is enhanced by her ability to take physical challenges as occasions for pleasurable play. She was partnered by Amar Ramasar, a very attractive fellow, whom the viewer is meant to find persuasive, but hardly a virtuoso.

The Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux was assigned to Megan Fairchild, who can be counted on to nail every step in the classical vocabulary but who but doesn’t manage to tell her audience anything in the process. If Balanchine had been around to give the crew his much repeated admonition “Don’t think, dear; just dance,” Fairchild could be said to take that advice too seriously. She was partnered by Joaquin De Luz, a small high-flyer.

Diamonds, the least compelling segment of the tripartite Jewels, gave us Sara Mearns, back from a long hiatus due to injury, dancing an eloquent duet with Ask la Cour—trained by the Danes (as Peter Martins was), who has suddenly come into his own as an artist.

Balanchine’s one-act Swan Lake shows the master at work at a useful project. “If you want to sell tickets,” he reportedly declared, “make a ballet and call it Swan Lake.” He had keen theatrical know-how and understood that, to fill the house, the company could not live on his “leotard ballets” alone, though they remade classical dancing forever. His abbreviated version of Swan Lake—especially in the work for the corps, placated the popular audience, assuring it that beauty in its simpler forms has its own virtues.

Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky (1840 – 1893)

Imposing and evocative at the same time, Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2 might be said to have marked the coronation of Teresa Reichlen as a ballerina, no longer merely the strawberry blonde with the endless legs and the firm technique. I wrote about this ballet in my previous piece, Tschaikovsky, A Balanchine Muse, and, having seen it again, am still marveling. Once titled Ballet Imperial, with décor and costumes to match, it has divested its storybook trappings to become regal in the abstract.

Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3 goes on for three movements with rather too much pink in the women’s flowing costumes, the women’s unbound hair treated as a fetish, and a pervasive mood of romance. In the fourth and final movement, to a musical theme and variations, it becomes a far sterner and challenging ballet, with Ashley Bouder and Jonathan Stafford leading the proceedings. I found myself semi-susceptible to the piece when I was younger; now those first three movements seem almost jejune.

The sole dissonant note in the two weeks was the rerun of a pièce d’occasion by Peter Martins the occasion of which had passed: Bal de Couture proved to be little more than a catwalk affair to display fancy-dancey costumes by the fashion designer Valentino, whom the company had already made too much of last season. These costumes fail to conform to the needs of the dancing body, making it look slightly misshapen; their palette is simplistic—red, black, and white; and they boast qualities that may be appropriate to high-end social life, but only impede the needs of complex, high-velocity movement. The Tschaikovsky music from the opera Eugene Onegin was not sympathetically served.

I know that Chanel once provided costumes for Apollo and I’ve actually witnessed Christian Lacroix’s raucous wardrobe for ABT’s Gaîté Parisienne. In general, though, I feel that the best resource for dance costumes is—to shift metaphors—cobblers who stick to their last. I can’t fathom any artistic reason for following, in dance, the interests of the rich (and those craving the indulgences of same) in catwalk clothes. For one thing, it’s likely to make the audience suspicious of even worthy attempts to couple dance with glad rags.

NOTE: In my previous SEEING THINGS piece—Tschaikovsky, a Balanchine Muse—I wrote about Balanchine’s Serenade, Mozartiana, and Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2.

Tschaikovsky, a Balanchine Muse

January 18, 2013 by Tobi Tobias

New York City Ballet / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / January 15 – February 24, 2013

The New York City Ballet opened its six-week Winter Season at Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater with George Balanchine’s Serenade, created in 1935 and set to Tschaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings. It was the first ballet the choreographer made in America. (In the two weeks immediately following, the company’s repertory is devoted—with a single exception, a new work by Peter Martins—to this extensive and often felicitous pairing of composer and choreographer.

The New York City Ballet’s Sara Mearns, airborne amongst her sisters, in George Balanchine’s Serenade

Photo: Paul Kolnik

I saw my first Serenade back when the New York City Ballet was still performing at the New York City Center. “The people’s theater,” the then-dingy auditorium was called—meaning that even my schoolgirl allowance could cover the price of a ticket. Back then, as I recall, each season opened with Serenade. The ballet was already an icon—ravishingly beautiful, poignant in ways dependent on how you interpreted it, enormously inventive, and a statement of intent—a model of what a Balanchine ballet could be.

Regular members of the audience would then notice changes Balanchine had made in the choreography since the last season and boo them softly under their breath. How dared he? we were asking—and then remembering, with some embarrassment, that Balanchine, its maker, not his already ardent audience, owned it. But for those of us faithful watchers, it was as if a living being had been ruthlessly altered; season after season, it took us a while to get used to the “latest” Serenade.

The second-night performance of Serenade in the current season featured Sara Mearns—much missed last season because of an injury—who was making her debut in the ballet. Her talent is so prodigious, she’ll unquestionably be wonderful in the role; she’s already unforgettable. Like Suzanne Farrell, she imprints herself indelibly on the viewer’s perception. But, to my eyes, she still seems to be figuring out what the ballet is “about.” I’m eager to see further performances that will reveal her development of who and what she can be in the role.

Sterling Hyltin and Chase Finlay, making their debuts in the central roles of Mozartiana

Photo: Paul Kolnik

The program moved on to an engaging rendition of Mozartiana led by Sterling Hyltln, Chase Finlay, and Anthony Huxley. Every season reveals Hyltin’s progress in the combination of delicacy and strength that makes us think of porcelain. Is it unreasonable to wish that she might develop a hint of a tragic dimension as well? Finlay is still a so-so partner, whose gradual improvement deserves to be coddled because he’s such a gifted and engaging dancer. He has a reasonably gracious partnering manner, but he’s still somewhat deficient in the coordination part of the job.

Anthony Huxley, one of the City Ballet’s several young men fulfilling their early promise, performing the Gigue in Balanchine’s Mozartiana

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Huxley offered the best account I’ve seen of the jester role, as I think of it, in a long time; he just needs to “throw it away” more so that you realize his character comes from the noble art of clowning. The whole ballet was meticulously danced as if, indeed, it had been meticulously rehearsed—not always the case at City Ballet, which frequently sacrifices polished renditions to presenting a large repertory. Balanchine himself had mixed emotions about “correctness.”

Teresa Reichlenand and Tyler Angle, icons of royalty, in Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2, formerly known as Ballet Imperial

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2, which closed the program, was presented, rightly, as a compelling, large-scale event that, alone, would prove the company’s right to top-drawer status in the classical ballet world. Actually, it presents a world in itself—so convincingly varied yet cohesive, it arouses complete belief. The company happily managed this effect with grace and musicality as well as grandeur. Teresa Reichlen, who danced the critical female role, still needs more experience in roles requiring ballerina authority—just now she’s wonderful but somewhat too reticent. Her modesty is refreshing, though; it’s a virtue our culture honors all too rarely. In fashioning the choreography, Balanchine seems to have used everything he learned from Petipa and then doubled it in terms of invention, complexity, and sheer crowd control. The piece got more and more thrilling as it went on, all the while inviting—no, urging—its viewers to watch more keenly than ever.

Ailey News

December 12, 2012 by Tobi Tobias

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater / City Center, NYC / November 28 – December 30, 2012

I went to an Ailey matinee and the space was filled with children, onstage and off. The dance-trained kids were inserted into Revelations where the choreography had no need of them, yet they seemed beautifully schooled, spines marvelously erect yet flexible, without a glimmer of ersatz showbiz in them, and, like the New York City Ballet’s wunderkinder, utterly at home being ogled by a huge audience—from classmates and loved ones to hordes of strangers. Whatever the Ailey’s school is doing to produce this effect, other schools might usefully take note. Yes, even classical ballet schools.

Dancers of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, led by Jacqueline Green, in Kyle Abraham’s new Another Night

Photo: Paul Kolnik

I was at the theater especially to see to see Another Night, by the youngish, much-feted choreographer Kyle Abraham. It’s set to Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers’ rendition of Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia.” (Hence, I assume, the title of the dance.) But here Abraham’s often-daring subject matter and tone were oddly defanged, perhaps relegated to less Big Deal venues. The choreographer is also frequently noted for freely combining different dance genres, but that is done so regularly nowadays, we hardly notice. At any rate, I was underwhelmed by this piece, which seemed to fit right in with much of the earlier Ailey repertory.

Of course there were lovely passages in the dance. Not for a moment would you doubt either Abraham’s skill or imagination. He translates the dancers’ extraordinary physical strength into sailing through the air—often in complex contortions—and landing with delicacy and confidence. And he takes the humanity these dancers display the moment their feet hit the floor and their upper bodies reach into space and makes it something every pedestrian can share.

The dancing itself was no less terrific than we’ve learned to expect from the Ailey, with each of the performing artists making his or her work unique—as if only this body, this individual way of executing a step or phrase, this indication of intent made an essential contribution to the effect of the whole.

This dichotomy in quality between mediocre choreography and stellar performance is a situation that has long plagued the company, but as the repertory continues to expand—not simply in number, but in genre–the tide may turn. Meanwhile the Ailey keeps putting on shows that keep a world-wide audience watching.

On December 9, Renee Robinson, a member of the Ailey company for 31 years, celebrated that amazingly long tenure with the troupe, surrounded by the splendid and loving efforts of colleagues who had danced beside her at various stages of her career.

Renee Robinson, veteran of 31 years with the Ailey company, in the founder’s classic Revelations

Photo: Andrew Eccles

For this retirement-from-the-company’s-stage event (she hasn’t announced her plans for the future yet) Robinson herself took on key roles in the 1974 Night Creature (set to music by Duke Ellington) and in Revelations (created, in 1961, to traditional songs of the black community). In Night Creature the lady she plays is sexy as all get-out (yet, typically of Robinson, not raunchy) and convinced that she’ll emerge a star. Robinson herself says she had to travel a long road to stardom, but I think the essentials were already there by the time she studied at the Jones-Haywood School of Ballet, the only classical dance academy in her home town of Washington, DC, that accepted black dancers. (Interestingly, she has transferred from classical to modern dance smoothly. That alone is quite a feat.)

In the “Wading in the Water” section of Revelations, Robinson uses her umbrella—with its generous white fabric—almost as a fifth limb, a mark of herself as a beauty created by wisdom and experience. In the irresistible finale of the piece, “Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham,” as its community gathers for what promises to be ebullient worship, she demonstrated the joyful sassiness—greeting her girlfriends with the camaraderie that, I suspect, has saved many a troubled soul and keeping the menfolk from taking “friendship” too far.

Highlights of Robinson’s fellow dancers’ efforts included Matthew Rushing, an unusually romantic dancer in the male contingent—one of the few who looks as if could never go to war—performing “A Song for You” with loving—and specific—devotion. Linda Celeste Sims, another longtime company favorite, danced an excerpt from Alvin Ailey’s famous 1971 solo Cry—an abstract, yet viscerally touching account of a black woman’s experience, surviving a life without privileges. The piece was done on this occasion with two additional women echoing the main figure. (The Ailey has never yet admitted to itself that “more” is often “too much.”)

The mood of the program and its reception was rejoicing—celebrating a long life in a merciless art that, at its best, provides ecstasy—for both performers and their witnesses. Not a tear was shed, at least not onstage.

Renee Robinson

Photo: Andrew Eccles

Making It New

October 6, 2012 by Tobi Tobias

New York City Ballet: Premiere of Justin Peck’s Year of the Rabbit / David H. Koch Theater. NYC / October 5, 2012

Old-time followers of the New York City Ballet used to yearn for “another Balanchine”; today’s fans are more realistic. They count themselves lucky to discover “another Christopher Wheeldon”—an astute practitioner of the classical craft even if he doesn’t regularly fire the imagination. At 25, Justin Peck, a member of City Ballet’s corps, stands out in the crowd of aspirants to that status and has already achieved far more. Proof: his Year of the Rabbit, set to a score by Sufjan Stevens, which entered the company’s repertory on October 5, and is slated for three subsequent performances this season. Can it be just wishful thinking that I found it thrilling?

Justin Peck’s Year of the Rabbit for the New York City Ballet—full cast

Photo: Paul Kolnik

In a September Works & Process program—part of the marvelous annual show-and-tell season at the Guggenheim Museum—Peck had delineated his own “process” in detail and at length until I, for one, wondered how dancing as I knew it could result from such a complex and mechanical system. They do say that Petipa worked out his choreography on a chess board, but Balanchine, equipped with his profound musical understanding, pretty much just walked into the studio and worked directly on the dancers. À chacon sa méthode. Peck’s method provided a skeleton for a brilliantly ordered dance for three couples: Ashley Bouder and Joaquin De Luz, Teresa Reichlen and Robert Fairchild, Janie Taylor and Craig Hall (the last pair rather more equal than the other two), and a corps that almost proved Peck’s desire—stated at the W&P event—to make corps and principals equal partners.

Ashley Bouder and male quintet in Year of the Rabbit

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Peck’s choreography for the three featured couples and a 12-member corps pushed City Ballet’s dancers beyond the extraordinary physical prowess we’ve already seen from them. The challenges of the choreography displayed their strength, speed, and daring, coupled with its opposite—control, which makes immaculate precision possible. Peck played ceaselessly with the idea of the individual in contrast to the group, not with the entities as rivals for the available space or the viewer’s attention but as partners in creating his singular world of youth at play and, inevitably, in love. Jerome Robbins’ Interplay, which now seems corny (and was always arch), might still be usefully thought of as Year of the Rabbit’s godfather.

Joaquin De Luz and trio in Year of the Rabbit

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Most “emerging” choreographers fold references to their elders and betters into the new work they’re making. Like the best of them, Peck slips this sort of material into his own matrix with wit and understanding as well as admiration. Needless to say Balanchine is always there—as in the moment when the dancers are seen half in and half out of the wings the way they are in Symphony in Three Movements, but Peck has them lying supine, visible only from waist to crown. I enjoyed most the takes on Bronislava Nijinska—because they’re ingenious and beautiful of course, but particularly because they seize upon a school of classical dancing that is not part of the Balanchine legacy. (Peck is a product of the School of American Ballet, from which he moved directly into City Ballet.)

Craig Hall and Janie Taylor in Year of the Rabbit

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Rabbit is structured within an inch of its life. The stage pattern, shifting like a kaleidoscope running on High, is always balanced—which would, of course, be wearisome if it weren’t arranged in such refreshing ways and rearranged every few seconds. The qualities of romance and its best friends, melancholy and yearning, make their appearance in several passages that are not as original or imaginative as the presto sections. They are workmanlike to be sure, occasionally touching, but I hope, one of these days, to applaud the moment in which Peck invites legato out on a date.

Throughout the ballet, Peck’s authority is evident. As is his earnestness of purpose. Both qualities will help him push forward. In time, if we’re lucky, he’ll allow the unplanned to expand what he’s doing.

Earlier this season, though unable to write at the time, I marveled at City Ballet’s rendition of Balanchine’s choreography in three programs devoted solely to the master’s work. I wondered then, as I have on several other special occasions, why the company allows lackluster performances when it can render the work with the empathy and brilliance it deserves.

A special evening was also devoted to honoring the fashion designer Valentino whose “costumes” can give a society woman marvelous éclat, but who doesn’t get—and why should he?—the very basics of ballet costuming. Valentino gave his “dancing girls” tutus in peculiar and unflattering shapes worn over white panties that might have come from today’s equivalent of Woolworth’s. The women’s legs were sheathed in tights in the dreadful pancake-makeup tint that, in bygone times, was supposed to represent Caucasian flesh. (To my knowledge City Ballet includes no African-American women.) The leg line—classical ballet’s hieroglyphic—was set afire at its tip by the inevitable red pointe shoes, red being the designer’s signature color. The effect traduces the Moira Shearer film that got it just right.

Anyone will tell you that these gala evenings are not meant for the critics but rather for the company’s donors, as one of several means of inducing them to keep up their much-needed, much-appreciated financial support. But what could we learn from the Valentino evening—that wealthy patrons of the company, communally, have tawdry taste?

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.

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.

Wunderkinder

June 7, 2012 by Tobi Tobias

The School of American Ballet’s Workshop Performances / Peter Jay Sharp Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / June 2 matinee and evening; June 5, 2012

School of American Ballet’s Workshop Performances: Austin Bachman in Peter Martins’ Les Petits Riens

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Students at the School of American Ballet and the in-group that cares about it call it, simply, The School, as if it had no equals. So far it doesn’t, at least in the States. It’s the training academy of the New York City Ballet, which skims off the cream—according to its particular needs and taste, of course—and releases the others to companies across the United States and sometimes around the world. Every spring it presents three of what it calls Workshop Performances (same program, alternating casts in the principal roles) so those interested can get a good look at the teen-age pre-professionals, for many of whom the very next step is to find a job.

Silas Farley in George Balanchine’s Cortège Hongrois

Photo: Paul Kolnik

As usual, once a spectator recovers from the shock of seeing these painstakingly trained and lavishly accomplished late adolescents, he or she will recognize—or at least sense—the particular qualities of an SAB “product.” At SAB, some of them shepherded from childhood as well as through adolescence, the students learn what the celebrated 18th-century dance artist Jean-Georges Noverre itemized as the basics of dancing: to bend, to stretch, to rise, to leap, to dart, to glide, to turn. They learn to perform infinite elaborations of these basics with exactitude, profound musicality, grace, style, and assurance—all effort concealed. (George Balanchine, who established the school even before forming his first company, understood dancing as the work of angels, anonymous and transcendent.)

This year’s Workshop offered two challenging ballets, Balanchine’s Cortège Hongrois and Les Petits Riens (Little Nothings) by Peter Martins, who heads the school as well as the parent company. I saw two performances—the matinee and evening shows on July 2.

Cortège Hongrois was created for the New York City Ballet in 1973 to honor the veteran ballerina Melissa Hayden on the occasion of her retirement. Juxtaposing the classical- and character-dance veins, it was the choreographer’s most extended take on Marius Petipa’s 1898 Raymonda, set to a Glazounov score that, once heard, has you humming its high points for weeks, often against your will. Petipa’s ballet was an imaginary account of a highborn young woman in the Middle Ages—lovely, proud, and emotionally susceptible—who can’t decide which of her two suitors to favor: the pure Christian knight (good guy) or the sexy Saracen (bad guy).

Silas Farley and members of the character- and classical-dance ensembles in Balanchine’s Cortège Hongrois

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Balanchine had already dealt with the material better, notably in his brisk, all-classical Pas de Dix. Cortège, however, was a vehicle eminently suited for Workshop because it provided roles to three dozen dancers in the two contrasting styles. And, defying all expectations of tedium, the ballet was ignited by the young dancers’ verve. Responsibility for staging the piece was split between Suki Schorer (classical) and Susan Pilarre (character); both, former dancers with City Ballet, are stalwarts in the development of SAB’s advanced students.

The classical segments of the ballet were performed by students working far beyond their years (no one in the whole program yet qualified as a twentysomething). The technical requirements were very well mastered; the aplomb was continuously amazing.

Claire von Enck and Austin Bachman as the leading classical-dance pair in Balanchine’s Cortège Hongrois

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Balanchine chose to keep his Cortège choreography abstract, avoiding any reference to narrative and character. Still, both the women I saw in the leading role gave her interpretation a subtext, which presumably taught the many little girls in the audience how a princess-type—especially one with “issues”—should behave. Claire von Enck and Austin Bachman, who led the evening’s cast, topped the matinee pair (Mikayla Lambert and the wonderful Silas Farley) but when I’d only seen the matinee cast, I didn’t think anything was missing.

As for Bachman, I’ve been watching him and marveling since he arrived at SAB as a boy. He’s blessedly capable all round: jumps, leaps, turns—the whole vocabulary. Clear in every step, he’s soft and airy as well. His skill as a partner is still minimal, but that’s probably due to inexperience. He has the most beautiful and elastic feet, which shoot him into the air and, even more important, enable neat, cushioned landings. He has the face of a shy country boy unaware of his charm, and the good manners that prevent him from over-estimating his importance. If he continues to be diligent and lucky, he’s likely to go down in the history books.

Elinor Hitt, leading the character-dance segment in Balanchine’s Cortège Hongrois

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Although dancers usually prefer to play royalty than peasantry, the character work in this production of Cortège glowed with vehemence and joy. The booted dancers in their preposterously fringed costumes looked as if they were participating in a lusty ritual they believed in wholeheartedly. Dancing the female lead in the character dances at the matinee, Elinor Hitt, a rail-thin blonde who doesn’t look as if she grew up in America, was a standout. (The house program insists that her home town is Arlington, Virginia.)

Peter Martins’ Les Petits Riens (Little Nothings) uses its title ironically. Named for its score (Mozart’s only music intended for ballet) and given its premiere by City Ballet in 1987, it’s a pretty big deal, which SAB’s young cast brought off deftly. Though a chamber work in scale (four couples), it poses a slew of technical challenges as Martins, typically, explores how far he can take the academic vocabulary—along with his specific gift for men’s work and special fascination with partnering—without flouting tradition entirely. The verdict proves to be “pretty damned far.” That doesn’t mean, though, that the spectator is having a good time, let alone undergoing a transformative experience. For those small miracles you have to go to Balanchine.

The full cast of Martins’ Les Petits Riens

Photo: Paul Kolnik

The craft Martins displays is refreshing—until the craftiness becomes annoying or, simply, a bore. The fact that, as in several Martins works, there is no main couple, adds to the loss of affect; ballet is, by its very nature, a hierarchical world. Worse, Martins seems not to have been in the studio back when Mr. B. declared for the umpteenth time, “Put a man and a girl on the stage and there is already a story.” For all his invention and his understanding of what a male dancer might accomplish, Martins appears to lack the human-interest gene.

The ambitious Workshop program had a curtain raiser, Sean Lavery’s 1990 Twinkliana, set to Mozart’s Twelve Variations on Ah! vous dirai-je, maman (the tune to which Americans sing the “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” lullaby). The ballet is both an entertainment and a lesson, illustrating the various stages of a dancing youngster’s development. Its revival just now is a bow to Lavery’s long, varied, and significant service to City Ballet and its school. Of course I remember him best as a classical dancer, in particular in Balanchine’s Tschaikovsky Concerto No. 2 (formerly Ballet Imperial). I can still envision him at a particular moment in that work, when he deploys two strings of women, one from each hand, and maneuvers both chains of pliable beauties so that they curl softly this way and that at his ever-gentle yet compelling demand. I’ve always thought of this passage as “Balanchine’s Dream.”

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.