The Dance

What do we expect from something called Romeo and Juliet—or, as in the case of Mark Morris’ new version, Romeo & Juliet, On Motifs of Shakespeare? We’ve all read it, seen it, heard the operas, watched the movies, enjoyed (or not) West Side Story. And then, of course, there are all the dance versions: Lavrovsky, MacMillan, Cranko and, if we’re lucky enough to have seen them, Ashton and Tudor. It’s embedded in our minds—and in ballet. The two roles almost all young ballerinas most eagerly hope to dance are Giselle and … Juliet.

Why? The scintillating verse of the young Shakespeare doesn’t explain this story’s grip on the world’s—or the dancer’s—imagination.  read more »

The climactic moment—the defining moment—of City Ballet’s exhausting spring season came two nights before it official- ly ended. The occasion was a gala performance staged for the benefit of the Dancers’ Emergency Fund, a worthy project dreamed up years ago by Jerome Robbins and now revived by Peter Martins. The program was the usual gala effort—a little of this, a touch of that, here a solo, there a pas de deux, now something for the whole gang.

But there were two big deviations from the norm. The first, highly publicized, was that the evening, called “Dancers’ Choice,” was programmed and cast by a young principal, Jonathan Stafford, with the help of colleagues.  read more »

This season’s version of ABT’s The Sleeping Beauty is 14 minutes shorter than last year’s version, when it was new. Which means that it’s 14 minutes better, since most of what’s been cut was both gratuitous and disfiguring. No more imposed story line about the Queen weeping a river of tears, or Prince Désiré flinging himself down beside it so that we can have a pointless (and endless) dream sequence. No extended combat scene, up on a rickety platform in the trees, between the Prince and the Lilac Fairy on the one hand and that wicked spider Carabosse on the other. (We still have a web, but it’s down below and barely has time to register.  read more »

A bomb went off in the middle of ABT’s sleepy season of same old, same old classics—the Swans and Giselles and Corsairs; the Beautys and the Bayadères. The bomb was detonated by Twyla Tharp—what a surprise!—and it woke the Met up. Yes, it goes on too long and, yes, it has unconvincing moments, but for most of its 45 minutes, it’s a wild ride of kinetic energy. Tharp is often at her best when she’s kicking ass, and that’s what’s she’s doing here: in one or two places, literally.

Rabbit and Rogue is about confrontation, aggression, competition—basic Tharp territory. “Rogue” is the strutting, punching, swaggering Ethan Stiefel. He’s galvanizing—there are moments when he’s like a guy in the electric chair just after the juice has been turned on. “Rabbit” is Herman Cornejo, small, compact, a technically transcendent dynamo. He’s perpetually in Rogue’s face, daring him, defying him to duke it out—and then ducking out of trouble. Whole lotta macho going on. And waiting in the wings is the blond, elegant danseur noble David Hallberg. But Tharp has him down and dirty, toughing it out with Gillian Murphy. They’re the “Rag Couple,” and they’re no slouches, either, when it comes to aggression.

Stiefel, Cornejo, Hallberg: This is casting from beyond strength. And to top things off, Tharp has the magnificent Marcelo Gomes for her second-cast Rogue, a big, dangerous panther in contrast to Stiefel’s prancing peacock; Clark Gable in place of Mickey Rooney. No wonder she likes working with ABT.

The music is by the successful Hollywood composer Danny Elfman, and it’s aggressive, too, and more than a touch generic, but it serves Tharp’s purposes—it drives things along. Its very first moments faintly echo the Philip Glass score for that Tharp masterpiece In the Upper Room, and the resemblance doesn’t stop there. The mostly black costumes are again by Norma Kamali, and at one point, as in the earlier piece, the boys’ shirts come off; the dancers often explode onto the scene from black curtains upstage; and once again they hurl themselves back and forth in a kind of perpetuum mobile—how can they possibly keep it up? And how can we follow what they’re up to?

We can because Tharp, unlike so many choreographers who are most secure with a pas de deux or a solo, is a master (mistress?) of group dynamics: Everything’s a rush, a melee, a jumble, except that everything’s crystal clear. She’s not a mere traffic manager, though; things not only work out, they go somewhere.

Where they go in this instance is toward a kind of harmony and reconciliation (even Rogue and Rabbit make up). There’s a transition from “modern” to more conventional ballet. Now the “Gamelan Couple” take over, Paloma Herrera and Gennadi Saveliev, in classical silver white (she looks like an outtake from Ashton’s Sylvia) doing classical arabesques and lifts. This section seems more dutiful than organic—harmony isn’t exactly the essential Tharp quality. The “Gamelans” make the most of what they’ve been given to do, but let’s face it: It’s Rogue who is the quintessential Tharp persona, and Stiefel, that dynamic all-American bad boy, is her current avatar. It takes one to know one.

AGAINST THE LENGTHIEST of odds, another major piece premiered in New York less than a week before the Tharp. (When, in these post-Balanchine years, have we seen two important new ballets in the course of a year, let alone a week?) At City Ballet, Alexei Ratmansky offered up yet another work to justify his reputation as the most interesting and accomplished young choreographer on the scene. The Bolshoi’s Bright Stream (2005), set on a Soviet collective farm (!), was enchanting; Russian Seasons, at City Ballet a year later, was a moving contemplation of life and death. Now he’s made a new piece for the company—to Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2—that’s totally commendable: a highly dancey, utterly fluent work that does honor to the cheerful score and provides abundant opportunity to a big bunch of the company’s dancers.

As in Russian Seasons, Ratmansky places Wendy Whelan front and center. She’s a fortunate ballerina: First, Christopher Wheeldon revealed her to us in Polyphonia and Morphoses as astringent, angular—and mesmerizing. Now, the equally perceptive Ratmansky, in his two ballets, reveals her lyrical side. She’s the serene feminine focus of the new ballet’s second-movement duet (to one of Shostakovich’s most tender melodies).

The ballet has an awkward title—Concerto DSCH—which, according to the program, “refers to a musical motif used by Shostakovich to represent himself; the motif consists of four notes that, when written in German notation, stand in for his initials in the German spelling.” But the title is the only awkward thing about it. Ratmansky has the crucial ingredient for first-rate choreography: Everything flows naturally, inevitably. He understands how to maneuver big groups, how to bring dancers on and off the stage without strain, how to take nurture from his music without being slavish to it—he plays with it lovingly.

The ballet sweeps along from the very start (Ashley Bouder breaking out of a tight circle of dancers), through the ravishing second-act pas de deux to the jaunty third movement, filled with nonstop quirky invention that’s full of surprises yet, somehow, inevitable. There are no “concepts,” there’s no agenda; there’s just dancing that feels exactly right.

In Concerto DSCH, Ratmansky hands City Ballet’s dancers a bouquet of rewarding roles. All Bouder’s virtuosity is unleashed without her ever looking as if she’s pushing or being pushed. The men, particularly Benjamin Millepied in the duet and Joaquin de Luz in the pyrotechnical finale, are helped to look their best. Clearly, Ratmansky knows and loves dancers, and is endlessly generous to them. The 19 members of the cast all looked happy and refreshed, and why not? After the countless sterile and/or portentous new works they’ve been drafted into over the years, here’s something alive, exciting, joyous.

It was heartening that Wheeldon’s Rococo Variations, on the same program with the Ratmansky, looked considerably more relaxed and full than it did last season when it was new and somewhat stiff. It’s not a major work, but it’s constantly interesting in its sometimes playful, sometimes grave riffs on classical partnering. Let’s hope that Wheeldon and Ratmansky, both of them so talented, continue to grow—and that New York gets to watch them do it.

rgottlieb@observer.com

You may have noticed that Jerome Robbins is being celebrated all over the place. And why not? He’s worth celebrating. But why now? Because it’s about to be his 90th birthday? We usually organize these things (as we did for Balanchine) for the centenary. Why this case of premature celebration? Could it be that City Ballet, to pump up box office for the spring season, took to heart Stephen Sondheim’s words from what was arguably Robbins’ greatest musical: “You gotta have a gimmick!” (There’s synchronicity for you: Gypsy is in the midst of a successful revival just down Broadway from the State Theater.) And 10 years from now we can do it all over again.

Thirty-three Robbins ballets are being shoehorned into the nine weeks just begun. First on view, after the opening-night gala, was Fancy Free—definitely the appropriate choice. It was his first ballet, and probably his greatest; it’s simply irresistible. The time was 1944—wartime. The fleet was in. Sailors were all over town. And Robbins had the genius to soak up the atmosphere, the feel, of New York just then: the way these horny boys away from home moved and fooled around and swaggered, and wanted not just the sex girls could provide but the comfort. Yes, they’re raunchy, but they’re also dreamy. And part of the fun was that there in the old Met—in between the Swan Lakes and Petrouchkas—was a dead-on representation of the life that was happening around the corner in Times Square.

I was taken to see Fancy Free back then, with its first cast (including Robbins himself as the rumba boy), because Ballet Theater had come up with a matinee special “for boys”—Rodeo, Billy the Kid, this new piece—and my mother thought the program might hook me on ballet in a way that her first try, Giselle, hadn’t. As it happened, I didn’t get the cowboys any more than I got the Wilis, and I wasn’t hooked until Balanchine hooked me four years later. But I never forgot the sailors and the girls of Fancy Free.

Today, 64 years later, the ballet still works its wonders. It’s classical, yet American; it’s funny, yet touching; its perfect structure and apparent easy-come fluency hold up. But in some ways, it’s a different ballet, just as the ’40s were different from whatever we call this first decade of the new millennium. Janet Reed and Muriel Bentley are nice young working girls—secretaries, shop assistants. On their way home, they run into these nice young boys in uniform on a street corner. They’re wary, but what’s wrong with a bit of fun? (Besides, you have to help keep up the morale of the U.S Navy.) They flirt a little, but they’re not worldly. Today’s girls (Amanda Hankes and Tiler Peck) are far more knowing, more suggestive; they’re reflecting our own moment, not the original moment of Fancy Free.

And today’s guys aren’t innocent, either—not as sailors but as dancers. Of course, with the three gobs danced by Damian Woetzel, Joaquin De Luz and Ethan Stiefel (on loan from ABT), you’ve got nothing to complain about. But they tend to nail down the jokey things; they’re not as simple and natural as Robbins wanted them to be. They’re on the road to shtick. So the whole thing becomes more a comment on the ’40s than an expression of them.

THE RETURN OF Dybbuk to the repertory last season was an ill omen. This is one of Robbins’s High Serious pieces. Talk about lugubrious! (And that goes for the Leonard Bernstein music as well, in unfortunate contrast to his jubilant score for Fancy Free.) This Kaballah-inflected piece is like a penance for the Low Seriousness of Fiddler on the Roof. Sacred ritual, supernatural beings, possession, exorcism—you name it. But although Dybbuk is deadly sincere (and very long), it’s empty. This is typical of Robbins whenever he gets weighty. In his hands, the frightening dybbuk story conveys no feeling. It’s just how I remember his Mother Courage on Broadway (with Anne Bancroft): It was fine-tuned, clear—and sterile.

The best part of Dybbuk is the set of variations for the men, and they were very strongly performed. But the happiest thing about it was Janie Taylor as the heroine. With her combination of exquisite lyricism and powerful emotion, she’s not like anyone else in the company. (In this regard she’s a little reminiscent of Allegra Kent.) Taylor seems finally to have recovered from the illness that kept her off the stage for so long, and with luck she’ll be making more than sporadic appearances from now on.

The boy was danced by Benjamin Millepied. He’s a light dancer, more airy than earthy, and that quality suits Dybbuk. He kept reminding me of Helgi Tomasson, although he doesn’t have the ultimate polish of Tomasson’s technique; only later did I remember that it was Tomasson who originated the role in 1974.

Millepied is also back as the lead in the climactic “Fall” section of The Four Seasons, a role less suited to him: Here he lacks the necessary bravura presence, although Daniel Ulbricht as the faun makes up for it. Ulbricht can—and does—toss off every technical trick, and charmingly, but he needs refining. The crucial role in “Spring,” the Kyra Nichols role, is again being danced by Sara Mearns, and she’s come a long way. She’s shedding that sluggish quality that weighed her dancing down; she’s beginning to phrase; and she’s even beginning to look as if she’s having fun. What she needs is more coaching. I’d like to believe that she took the bus out to New Jersey and got some help from Nichols herself. If she didn’t, it’s not too late. The Robbins Trust—or the ghost of Jerry Robbins—should insist on it. The Four Seasons, one of his most pleasing works, deserves the best.

ON THE SAME program we had the return of Watermill, that stupefying slo-mo neo-Noh pastiche that Robbins concocted in 1972, in the wake of Robert Wilson. It was Edward Villella who had to strip to his dance belt on the Watermill beach and meditate on his past in the midst of Japanese-y effects and to the sound of Japanese-y modern music. A moon waxed and waned, rose and set. There were sowers and hoers and reapers. There were paper lanterns and reeds. The night passed … the seasons passed … the years passed. Eons passed. The only interesting thing about it was watching a dynamic, explosive dancer like Villella project such stillness and inward concentration.

In 1990, Robbins browbeat Villella (at 53) into doing it again. Off came the pounds, on came the dance belt, and nothing had changed, except that we were all 18 years older.

And now, after yet another 18 years, it’s with us again, with Nikolaj Hübbe emerging from last year’s retirement to don not a dance belt but jockey shorts. Nor is that the only difference between his performance and Villella’s. Hübbe, a wonderful dancer always, isn’t explosive. He’s more sculptural, more gracious, more sensitive; less charged with virility and charisma. So there’s less contrast between the dancer and the relentlessly passive role. And that leaves nothing interesting at all about Watermill except the phenomenon of those people who take it seriously.

The Kirov is a great ballet company because it has so many terrific dancers, but it doesn’t always know what to do with them. The dancers—here for a three-week season, just ended, at the City Center—were under a handicap: The stage is so much smaller than their own, in St. Petersburg, that the company’s classical works in particular looked cramped and unhappy. But this isn’t why these standard pieces—the heart of the old Kirov/Maryinsky repertory—were the least convincing of everything we were shown.

Forget the cramped stage, the greeting-card décor, the bizarre programming: The problem is that the old performance traditions of showoffy virtuosity looked barren and faintly ridiculous—though not to the heavily Russian audience, who bravoed, ovated, yipped, barked and screamed for every fouetté (the gals) and barrel turn (the guys). The whole thing was like an international ballet competition, or even worse, one of those gaudy gala nights at which every trick in the classical book is trotted out. That’s apparently what “ballet” means to this audience of fans with a Russian accent.

The second week of the season began with a hideous account of the “Jardin Animé” scene from Le Corsaire, a scene which only makes sense as a harmonious dream of classicism within the plot-crazy full-length ballet. In this version put together by God knows who (Petipa is credited, for what it’s worth), the scene is all on its own. And then, outlandishly, the ballet’s famous pas de deux (or, in this case, trois) is plumped down in the middle of it! Why not, it occurred to me, take things a step further and insert, say, The Dying Swan into the middle of the pas de deux in the middle of the “Jardin Animé”?

The Diana and Acteon pas de deux, which came next, had the virtue of showing us what a brilliant dancer Victoria Tereshkina can be—no wonder the company is pushing her. Given the clarity, the attack, the musicality she displayed, you could sense what an exceptional Balanchine dancer she would be. Here she was having fun pulling off the old tricks—and with a young partner, Mikhail Lobukhin, who seemed to come from a different world from the rest of the company’s men (their virtuosity is more or less tasteful). In his Tarzan off-the-shoulder outfit and his go-for-the-kill absence of restraint, he reminded me of those Bolshoi dancers from the ’50s when Soviet men were Soviet men hurling themselves across the stage like clowns being shot out of cannons, only there weren’t any cannons. Those were the days.

Don’t think we were spared the Don Quixote pas de deux, which, I was happy to learn from the program notes, is “based on the novel by Miguel de Cervantes.”

What all three of these “greatest hits” achieved was to display the spectacular dancing of the company’s ballerinas. Diana Vishneva, as we know from her ABT appearances, is a supremely talented dancer, and although she showed moments of atypical unsteadiness in these Petipa treasures, she remained nonpareil. Except for Uliana Lopatkina, the other nonpareil—more regal, more studied, but equally strong and even more commanding. Individual performances were generally on a very high level, but the Petipa repertory looked a little unloved—as if the dancers would rather have been doing something more up-to-date.

We can blame the audience for abandoning itself to the relentless hijinks, but we can’t blame it for the languors of the all-Fokine program. With the exception of his masterpiece, Chopiniana (Les Sylphides to you), Fokine has gone the way of all flesh.

As for Harold Lander’s Etudes, how can one describe its endlessness and emptiness? It’s a classroom ballet that was once very popular, and they tell us that the Danes still make something of it (it was created for their Royal Ballet in 1948), but I’m from the show-me state. Alas, we’ll have another chance to be shown when ABT features it later this spring. Beware the vulgarized orchestrations of Czerny’s delicate music.

IN THE FINAL week of the season, the company got down. First, an all-Forsythe program, which for Forsythe-lovers must have been a thrill. As The New York Times put it, “Mr. Forsythe, the American-born choreographer, is regarded by many in the dance world as the most important influence on ballet since Balanchine. (Others consider him as—in dance terms—the devil.)” I’m one of those others. Having seen this program in Russia, I was prepared for the enthusiasm the Kirovians brought to it. At last, you could sense them thinking, we’re doing Modern! And they work very hard. Indeed, who could be more impressive in Steptext, that tedious exercise in external effects (a Bach chaconne abruptly stopping and restarting; the lights suddenly off and then on again), than Vishneva, her amazingly sinuous body in blazing red wrapped around whichever of her three partners happened to be in the vicinity?

We’re all free to choose our most-loathed Forsythe piece, and mine is The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude, a pastiche and parody of classical ballet. Forsythe has almost no classical vocabulary, so his parody is generalized and dull: All it proves is that he’s inferior to everything he’s making fun of. Next Page >

The first time the Kirov ballet was seen in America was on Sept. 11, 1961. The ballet was Swan Lake. The ballerina was Inna Zubkovskaya. The place was the old Met, on what must have been one of the hottest nights of the year, and there was no air-conditioning. As I remember it, our secretary of state and the Russian ambassador were sitting in the center box with their dinner jackets off, trying to look dignified as they melted, and the curtain was extremely late—Zubkovskaya, we later heard, was fainting from the heat backstage.

When at last she appeared, she was dark, heavyish, deliberate—very old-fashioned-ballerina. (She was 38.) To get an idea of what so much Soviet ballet of the time was like, catch her on YouTube a few years later in the Grand Adagio from Spartacus. The role of Phrygia in that ghastly vehicle was created on her, and she manages to be both histrionic and matronly at the same time, a little like the silent film star Norma Talmadge. And that, I recall, is how she danced Odette-Odile. For me, the greatest thrill of the evening was encountering Martha Graham close up; she was wilting outside the theater after the performance, alone, waiting for her car.

So began New York’s on-again, off-again relationship with the Kirov. There were long stretches when the company stayed away; one had to go abroad to see them, as I did—to Paris—in 1982. Despite such occasional viewings, we knew the company best from its history—Petipa, Fokine, Balanchine; Pavlova, Karsavina, Nijinsky—and from its defectors: Nureyev, Makarova, Baryshnikov. But now the Iron Curtain is down, and the company pops up everywhere in different configurations, while its principals—Diana Vishneva is the current leading example—dance regularly in the West. It’s a new world.

But it’s the old world, too, and some of the traditional virtues survive. (They’re on view until April 20 at the City Center.) The corps can be impeccable—the girls with their heads held high, chests forward and feet pointed, and of course in unison. So even though there were a few wobblers, there was a sense of artistic cohesion during the great opening of the “Kingdom of the Shades” act from La Bayadère, when all those spirits in white come forward one at a time in an endless parade of arabesques (and this despite the accelerated tempo and the absence of the usual ramp).

Then there were the highly accomplished female soloists and demi-soloists in the Petipa ballets: real depth of execution through the ranks. But of the Kirov’s leading ballerinas, only Vishneva and Uliana Lopatkina are on hand. The others are back home with the other half of the company, performing in Petersburg. We never get the entire Kirov—it’s too big to tour. In fact, in recent years, both in Washington and Paris, I’ve definitely seen the B team.

THE COMPANY IS currently pushing an amazing creature named Alina Somova, whom you can think of as a radiant, atypical star, or as a vacant semi-freak: She’s very tall, very blond and very thin, and she flings herself into crazy extensions, her leg slamming up past her ear—she’s a combination of a gorgeous showgirl and Alice after she’s swallowed the “drink me” potion. When she relaxes her glazed look and a natural smile escapes her, you see she’s a nice girl with extraordinary facility who can actually dance. She wowed the audience in Paquita, but she was over-parted as the tragic, spiritual Nikiya in La Bayadère. I reported on her a couple of years ago, and she does seem slightly less bizarre though no less singular than she did then. (The company is also pushing Victoria Tereshkina, a totally different type. She’s all hard technique, confident, telling us at every moment what a star she is. She’s impressive, but I kept wanting to swat her.)

Alas, the level of the men is way below that of the women. They’re a peculiar assortment, from this year’s waiflike wunderkind, Leonid Sarafanov, to others built on the grand scale, all of them delivering the standard barrel jumps and double-air turns with sufficient dexterity, none of them very interesting.

“Interesting” is not the chief virtue of the ladies, either. They’re generally proficient, they’re occasionally impressive, but except for Vishneva, they don’t convey a profound musical impulse and they don’t convey much feeling. It’s all display, although Lopatkina has become less steely over the years, and her imperious chin has dropped by a few degrees. (An exception was Ekaterina Osmolkina, phrasing delicately in the Pavlova sections of Chopiniana.)

Lopatkina and Vishneva are listed above the other female principals, and they’re treated equally, though Lopatkina, being somewhat senior, is a little more equal than Vishneva: She was given three Dying Swans to Vishneva’s one. That was unfortunate, because Vishneva was infinitely finer. In the tradition of Ulanova—surely the greatest exemplar of this iconic role since Pavlova—her performance, exquisitely modulated, actually suggested approaching death. Lopatkina was more focused on strong and accurate dancing and her commanding look. Next Page >

Every year at this time Paul Taylor arrives at the City Center to make us happy. There are the new pieces (two this season, as usual). There are the recent works being given a second or third exposure. There are the classics: Aureole, Arden Court and of course Esplanade. There aren’t the great dances that are on temporary leave of absence: Sunset, Big Bertha, Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rehearsal), Last Look, Company B, Syzygy. And—perhaps most satisfying of all to Taylor lovers—there are the half-forgotten plums that Taylor’s thumb has chosen to pull out of the repertory, pieces we’d lost hope of ever seeing again

This year, the first revelation was Equinox, from 1983 and not seen here since 1988. J’accuse! And j’accuse encore when I contemplate the decision to present it only twice in a three-week season. This is a ravishingly lyrical piece, dressed in summery white, for four couples who appear to be in harmony with each other and their community. And yet there are strains of longing, of disappointment. We need to see Equinox more frequently before we can firmly place it in the Taylor canon, but it’s clear just from this glimpse that it’s a pleaser and a keeper.

Since I’ve been accusing, let me also plead. The music of Equinox is Brahms’ beautiful first quintet for strings. The Taylor company can afford live music only for Occasions such as gala night, and much of the time we can live with that. But not here. The taped recording isn’t very good, but more important, this ballet cries out for the intimacy of live chamber music. My hunch is that it would cost somewhere between $20,000 and $30,000 to present Brahms properly if and when Equinox is re-resurrected. Surely someone on the Taylor board with a particular love of music could come up with the necessary funds?

Another major work that came back to life was the 1984 …Byzantium, absent for 22 years. (Why?) The program quotes Yeats: “Of what is past, passing or to come,” and the ballet’s three section are labeled “Passing,” “Or Past” and “Or to come.” The music is three cacophonous sketches by Varèse. …Byzantium is one of Taylor’s most obscure and tantalizing pieces, its meanings deeply buried. Who are these men and women of our day, crouching, groping, suffering? What do they have to do with the four priests in richly dyed and jewel-studded ecclesiastical garments, clearly Byzantine, who populate the Past? Even Taylor may be unsure of his intentions: Back in the 80’s, I believe, he shifted the order of the three sections. But meanings don’t matter; beauty is what counts. …Byzantium is an important return to the repertory.

It was wonderful to have Diggity back after 14 years. Who could forget the demented look of Alex Katz’s little dogs scattered about the stage, around and between which the dancers have to flow with such nonchalance? But one might forget how engaging the actual choreography is, and how apt the Donald York score.

It was even more wonderful to see Cloven Kingdom again and again, not that it has been in retirement. Those ravishing dresses with their long skirts in Necco-wafer pastels—when the girls cartwheel, you’re dizzy with pleasure. And the extended sequence for the four boys in dinner jackets is unquestionably the greatest such passage in dance. The inventiveness! The excitement! How paltry Jerome Robbins’ cutenesses for boy quartets appear in comparison.

THE NEW PIECES? For once, Taylor hasn’t given us contrasting visions. Or if there is a contrast, it’s not between the two premieres but within each piece. De Sueños (of dreams) and De Sueños que se Repiten (of recurring dreams), although performed separately, are essentially one work, the second a kind of sequel to the first. Dreams, yes, with epigraphs from Jung to underline the point. The dreams are of Mexico, fractured dance images from its dark past—human sacrifice, mountains of skulls—and its touristy present: swirling skirts, sombreros, et al. All held together by the Kronos Quartet’s pastiche recording of musical Mexicana, Nuevo.

The Sueños ballets constantly refer to Mexican popular and folk dance; I don’t know enough to gauge their authenticity—if authenticity is what Taylor’s after. There are amazing effects: Michael Trusnovec, bare to the waist, the antlers of a stag attached to his head, his feet somehow transformed into perfectly pointed, dainty hooves; the hieratic goddess figure, all in gold, of the commanding Laura Halzack, whose ballet training reveals itself in a heart-stopping sequence of balances and arabesques; the Death figure of Richard Chen See, which—even if it’s something of a cliché—is so grippingly performed that it carries conviction.

I’m not by temperament a Mexico enthusiast—skulls and sombreros leave me emotionally distanced. But on repeated viewing, Taylor’s dreams began to invade my own Jungian unconscious. I may have to sit them out next year.

As for the company itself, it’s reached a peak of energy and commitment. The great Lisa Viola, who Taylor has proved to us can do anything, is retiring this season, still a formidable dancer and presence. Powerful, lyrical, dynamic, goofy, she’s an entire Taylor repertory in herself. How is he going to do without her? I imagine he himself doesn’t yet know.

But he never lacks for new talent. Yesterday’s debutant sensations—Trusnovec, Annmaria Mazzini, Amy Young, Orion Duckstein, Robert Kleinendorst, Julie Tice—become senior stalwarts (though hardly senior citizens). Parisa Khobdeh, Michelle Fleet and James Samson are moving on up. Halzack is a major find. Diggity showed us what Eran Bugge’s place will be—a welcome lyric ingénue. The nonpareil Taylor machine marches on. Next Page >

One of the givens about Mark Morris is that he’s especially musical. And certainly he’s shown an unusually broad and knowledgeable appreciation of music in his choice of scores. Just as important, he’s trained his dancers to inhabit the music fully and sensitively. (He himself was deeply musical as a dancer.) So what to make of his version of Henry Purcell’s semi-opera, semi-masque King Arthur, now at the New York City Opera? According to the program notes, Morris has fashioned “a colorful, frothy, and engaging vaudeville-style entertainment” and, in a way, that’s exactly what he’s done, although it’s nowhere near so engaging as he clearly thinks it is. The problem is that all this froth doesn’t reflect the virile, capacious quality of either the music or John Dryden’s superb poetry.

This is one of those productions that deliberately calls attention to its staginess—we begin with seven chairs in a semicircle waiting for the singers, who stroll in through a dressing-room door. They’re in mufti—one guy has bare legs and shorts, another bare knees. It’s Today, and we’re in the State Theater. Everyone’s in friendly rehearsal mode—lots of handshakes and manly pats on shoulders: choreographed casualness. Jerome Robbins was doing this kind of thing half a century ago.

The story of King Arthur is hopeless, and Morris has been right to ditch it and all the dialogue with it. (No blind Emmeline, Arthur’s abducted betrothed.) That leaves a series of infinitely various and lovely scenes, as in an oratorio. If our theaters had the opulent scenic and mechanical devices available to royal courts in the 17th century, it would make sense to deploy them, but they don’t, and Morris doesn’t. Instead, he brings on his dancers as background to the singers, and occasionally foreground. But this isn’t a danced opera; it’s a sung semi-opera with dancing as embroidery. And in his attempt to liven things up, to give us the old oom-pah-pah, Morris is playing jokes, making cute, updating. It doesn’t work.

Take the famous “freezing” number: “What power art thou, who from below / Hast made me rise unwillingly and slow / From beds of everlasting snow?” So stutters the Cold Genius (the whole world is frozen over by magic) when awakened by Cupid. Powerful, grand, almost tragic. Morris has him cowering in a refrigerator—the stuttering made into a big joke. If you’ve really responded to this music, you don’t sacrifice its beauty for a quick laugh. This is the result of not trusting the work of art you’re presumably honoring.

There are numerous felicitous touches, but they’re no substitute for a serious attempt to reveal the glory of Purcell’s score and Dryden’s words. The dancing lacks invention—most of it looks like vamping. The dancers run around and around in circles. They somersault. They galumph. They have no individual personality. The drama of the music is constantly sacrificed to effects. When shepherds and their lasses gambol, it’s pastorale reduced to pastiche.

How to present so strange an art form to a modern audience? Not through endless restless motion without content, or through imposed jokiness. Morris himself gives us a clue of how it might be done. In his second act, we reach the score’s most famous aria, “Fairest Isle,” one of the most ravishing of all melodies. The singer is Venus, and here is the essential message of King Arthur: It’s Britain that is the fairest isle, “all isles excelling / Seat of pleasure and of love.” Morris stages it simply and movingly—Venus seated quietly, her handmaidens framing her, employing only the barest of formal gestures. We see what King Arthur might be today: a series of animated tableaux adjusting to the nature of each piece of music. And in fact, Morris pulls it off again in the very different next number. Then we’re back to what he describes as “a pageant—a sort of vaudeville.”

But the late-17th-century art of Dryden and Purcell isn’t vaudeville-like. It’s noble, reverberant. It moves you rather than tickles you. Treating it the way Mark Morris has done here isn’t being “musical,” it’s exploiting the music. How strange from the choreographer whose finest achievement, arguably, is his version of Purcell’s great Dido and Aeneas. Dido, of course, is a perfect work of art; Arthur is a jumble. But it’s a glorious jumble, not a romp.

If you care about Purcell, get hold of the William Christie recording of King Arthur, based on a production he mounted in 1995. I don’t know what it looked like, but I know from this recorded performance what King Arthur really is. Next Page >

Roads paved with good intentions don’t always lead to Hell—often they go straight to BAM. So it is with the recently refurbished State Ballet of Georgia, now under the leadership of the internationally famous ballerina Nina Ananiashvili, originally from the Bolshoi and a favorite here in New York from her 15 years as an occasional principal at ABT.

In her four years in charge, Ananiashvili has mounted more than 20 ballets, including nine by Balanchine (in 1988 she danced several Balanchine ballets at New York City Ballet), and she has bravely brought two of her Balanchine works to Brooklyn—talk about good intentions! The results, though, were mixed.

Chaconne, with which she opened her season, is not one of Balanchine’s greatest works, although the music, by Gluck, is sublime. The ballet’s success depends on a projected aura of Elysian calm—and on two grand performers, two divinities. Back in 1976 they were Suzanne Farrell and Peter Martins, at the height of their divine powers. Ananiashvili is a lovely dancer—small, lyrical, classical, musical; she was at her best in the first, human-scale duet. In the second duet—formal, imposing—both she and her partner, Vasil Akhmeteli, remained human-scale. No sweep, no real expansiveness—no grandeur. So the ballet melted away. The fussy costumes didn’t help, and the company as a whole, trying hard, looked nervous and wan.

Duo Concertant, the other Balanchine venture, was far more satisfying, with Nino Gogua demonstrating a true aptitude for Balanchine style: She’s quick, defined, musical; her beautifully arched feet and supple back add to her dance glamour; she moves. Alas, her performance was marred—at times, almost deformed—by the smiles, coy glances, moues, and haughty stares that chased each other across her face. This grimacing would have been horrible under any circumstances; in this pure yet playful piece, all about the two dancers’ unaffected response to the Stravinsky score that is being performed onstage by a violinist and pianist, it went beyond sacrilege. Gogua was selling—already a crime in most Balanchine—and she wasn’t even selling the ballet or the music: She was selling herself. Her partner, Lasha Khozashvili, is a less remarkable dancer but was far more relaxed and appropriate. And yet … I can’t wait to see Gogua in more Balanchine. Let’s hope it’s not too late to break her of her affectations, and that Ananiashvili has the will to do it.

Gogua was also effective in something called Sagalobeli, newly choreographed by Yuri Possokhov, the resident choreographer at San Francisco Ballet. (He’s another old Bolshoi hand.) What I’ve previously seen of his work was pretentious and dreary. Sagalobeli is harmless, unless you’re allergic to what I think of as ethnic-on-pointe. Seven men and seven women tear through an extended series of more or less unrelated episodes—all of them generic and none as interesting or rousing as the traditional Georgian folk music provided by the Sagalobeli Ensemble. When the musicians trooped onto the stage for a curtain call, the audience’s enthusiasm rose to a deserved high pitch. Of course, the audience, largely made up of local Russian/Georgian enthusiasts, was never at a pitch much lower than high. …

Ananiashvili’s other canny and worthy tactic was importing two works by Alexei Ratmansky, who has replaced Christopher Wheeldon as ballet’s Great New Hope. In the past weeks we’ve had his Russian Seasons at City Ballet and his Pierrot Lunaire for Vishneva, and there’s a new work for City Ballet promised for the spring.

Ratmansky’s Dreams about Japan was created for Ananiashvili and other luminaries at the Bolshoi 10 years ago. It’s very Japanese indeed—reconfiguring in dance terms a group of Kabuki-like stories, and performed to a heavily percussion-inflected score. Bang, bang, bang go the percussionists of the Tbilisi Theatre of Opera and Ballet; thump, thump, thump go the feet of the dancers—or at least some of them. Ananiashvili herself is less assertive and more sinuous and sinister in “Musume Dojoji” (“Maiden of the Dojoji Temple”) when, scorned by her lover, a temple monk, she becomes a Fire Snake and takes vengeance.

The stories are all like that: abandonment, suicide, frenzy. The costumes are hectic, the energy likewise. You can see the nascent talent in what Ratmansky has done—and the young man’s impulse to throw everything into the pot. His flamboyant Dreams about Japan may not be a keeper, but it serves as an example of how classical ballerinas love going dramatic.

The most interesting thing about Ratmansky’s new piece is the music, Bizet’s “Chromatic Variations.” (That’s why the ballet is called Bizet Variations.) I haven’t come across anyone who was aware of this challenging, exciting work for piano, although it turns out there’s a Glenn Gould recording available. Ratmansky has made a plausible and pretty ballet for three couples, but it’s tame compared to the music. This is both an ensemble piece and an Ananiashvili vehicle—she’s a first among equals: The other couple are in blue; she and her partner, Nino Ochiauri, are more purplish. Also, she has an Entrance, and a solo spot toward the end, before she’s swept away with the others. The role isn’t very demanding, and her piquant romanticism is just right for what Ratmansky has handed her. That’s what an expert choreographer does for his star (and, in this case, his boss).

It’s hard to be critical of an ambitious, reinvigorated company taking such risks and meaning so well. But the Georgians aren’t yet big-time. It might have been wiser of them to wait a few years before taking that road to BAM. Next Page >

Why would the world’s foremost classical ballerina choose to turn up in New York leading a small company performing three works newly choreographed on and for her? Idealism? Vanity? Artistic ambition? Chutzpah? Her program was called “Beauty in Motion,” a real misnomer. How about “Vishneva Goes Contempo”? Or “A Long Night at the City Center”?

We know that Diana Vishneva is a phenomenon of strength and style, and she certainly has earned the right to stretch her talents as best she can. But what she proved with this program is that although she’s a nonpareil Odette-Odile and Giselle, she isn’t equally at home in Alexei Ratmansky, Moses Pendleton and Dwight Rhoden.

Most interesting by far was the Ratmansky—a noble but futile effort to choreograph to Schoenberg’s unyielding song cycle Pierrot Lunaire. Its four dancers—Vishneva and three superb men from the Kirov, Igor Kolb, Mikhail Lobukhin and Alexander Sergeev—gave their all in an attempt to vivify this exercise in Expressionist commedia dell’arte, but it doesn’t (because it couldn’t) work. All that white-face, all that angst! Ratmansky shows again how accomplished he is—how fluent and sincere, nothing tricksy—and Vishneva’s supple dancing streams onward without hesitation or doubt: She’s a master. But although she’s generously placed herself at the service of her musical and imaginative choreographer, one can’t help wishing Ratmansky had created for her something less thorny and more grateful.

The Pendleton effort—F.L.O.W. (For Love of Women)—is what you would expect from one of the founders of Pilobolus and the leader of MOMIX: ingenuity piled on ingenuity. In part one we never see the three dancers, only their feet and hands in luminescent blue against black, making recognizable shapes—a face, a heart, birds in flight and nesting. It’s fun, or would have been at half its length. Think updated Alwin Nikolais. Parts two and three were solos for Madame. In part two, she’s prone, acting out her appetites on a tilted mirror, so that everything doubles up horizontally: four legs, four arms, two heads. It’s narcissism squared. Again, it’s clever, and again it quickly wears out its welcome. In part three, she’s inside a huge construction of strings of beads, which she whirls and twirls around and around to marginally amusing effect. Any one of a score of talented dancers could have done it just as well.

The Rhoden, called Three Point Turn, was the worst of it, its movement, according to Rhoden, “meant to represent the machinations of the mind, body, and spirit when falling in love.” In other words, it’s the usual slam-bang, bang-bang gang-bang. It spotlights three couples, the central one Vishneva and Desmond Richardson, whose massive glamour looks more and more studied as the years and decades roll on. Rhoden springs from Alvin Ailey, Richardson springs from Alvin Ailey, but Vishneva and friends spring from Russia. She—unflatteringly costumed and sporting a misguided hairstyle that accomplished the impossible by making her look homely—tried to Get Down. It was a sad mismatch. The poor boys looked like escapees from Spartacus and the girls looked stunned by culture-warp.

When Vishneva stretches to Balanchine neo-classicism in “Rubies,” she’s magnificent. The “Beauty in Motion” program wasn’t stretching, it was sagging.

CITY BALLET ENDED its 14-week winter marathon with the usual bewildering roller-coaster ride of triumphs, disasters and bewilderments. Most of the bewilderments were avoidable—they’re a direct result of the company’s recent policy of theme-organized programming.

It’s because they’ve concocted an “American Songs and Dances” program that we get a parade of songs by Rodgers and Hart (abominably sung, in Peter Martins’ sub-pastiche Thou Swell), immediately followed by another parade of songs in Ives, Songs, that Tudoresque exercise in nostalgia by Jerome Robbins.

It’s because they’ve dreamed up a concept inexplicably called “Passages” that we get two very long and frequently lugubrious works in a row, Ratmansky’s Russian Seasons directly following Mauro Bigonzetti’s Oltremare (Beyond the Sea)—and this at a Saturday matinee presumably in hope of a family audience. (The third Passage was Christopher Wheeldon’s An American in Paris, that comic-strip version of the Gershwin score and Gene Kelly movie, in which Damian Woetzel proves yet again that Dorian Gray has no monopoly on the secret of eternal youth.) Next Page >

I’ve been seeing Balanchine’s Jewels for more than 40 years, and that’s a lot of jewelry. In the beginning it seemed to many of us unique in its ambitions and its splendor; to others it seemed gaudy—paste. But no one thought it would ever travel. Too expensive, too many styles to absorb and what company other than New York City Ballet could produce a Verdy, a McBride and Villella, a Farrell?

If we ask that question today, the answer would still be none: The original cast has never been equaled. But Jewels has certainly traveled. Talk about legs! First came Miami City Ballet, years after the New York premiere; then other American companies, then the Kirov, the Paris Opera and now the Royal. And wherever it turns up, it’s a hit. Last month in London it was a total smash—cheering audiences at Covent Garden, where years ago, when City Ballet brought it, a lot of noses were turned up. “Ingenious and colorful, yes, but, my dear, look at their port de bras!”

The Royal has been renewed under the relatively new leadership of Monica Mason, always a Balanchine admirer, and its Jewels dancers forgot about their port de bras and moved. Even so, with both the casts I saw, “Emeralds” was no more than respectable; “Rubies” less so. Alexandra Ansanelli, ex-City Ballet, gave her usual ingratiating performance in the McBride role (I don’t like it, but at least it looks like Balanchine). Another American dancer, Sarah Lamb, was more spontaneous, more genuine. But the men were just wrong, particularly the company’s male star, Carlos Acosta, who was disastrously miscast. He’s big and heroic and completely uncomfortable in this role created for the explosively virile and scintillating firecracker that was Villella. Acosta wasn’t a ruby; he wasn’t even a garnet.

As for “Diamonds,” there seemed to be a misunderstanding about what kind of ballet it is. Balanchine and Farrell used Tchaikovsky’s third symphony to give us the ultimate distillation of 19th-century Russian classicism—grandeur to the max. The music tells you just how grand it has to be. In London, both the orchestra and the dancers brought it to a cheerful climax rather than a thrilling one. During the sumptuous and majestic concluding polonaise, everyone was smiling (in relief that they’d made it through to the end?). Try to imagine Farrell or Kyra Nichols or any of the current crop of City Ballet Diamonds grinning at this juncture. Balanchine’s Diamond is a ballerina assoluta, not a soubrette. Alina Cojocaru, the Royal’s finest dancer, is an exquisite lyricist, but she’s no Diamond. The problem isn’t that she’s so small, it’s that she enchants rather than commands: More miscasting, no doubt in response to some counterproductive star system. So this big hit of a Jewels, despite the gallant effort and hard work that clearly went into it, was only a qualified success. And I’ve restrained myself on the subject of Jean-Marc Puissant’s hideous art deco sets. …

MEANWHILE BACK AT the ranch (a.k.a. the State Theater), City Ballet opened its post-Nutcracker winter season with—surprise!—Jewels. The contrast with the Royal was all too immediately clear. The Royal’s corps worked hard and did a creditable job. City Ballet’s corps, flooded with talented young dancers, looked as though Balanchine was second nature to them—and why not? They were all trained at his school. And they’re in terrific shape, raring to go, having just sprung from the endless weeks of Nutcracker.

As was to be expected, Ashley Bouder was beautiful in “Emeralds” and Maria Kowroski ravishing in “Diamonds.” Megan Fairchild (at her best this season in Tarentella) has greatly improved in “Rubies”—she’s beginning to take pleasure in it—but she wasn’t helped by being partnered with Benjamin Millepied, who in a different way from Acosta is all wrong for this ballet. He’s just not a powerful, bravura guy, whereas in Ballo della Regina he looked better than I’ve seen him in a long time—light, airy, elegant; in other words, right for the role. Even his feet looked stronger than they usually do. (In another piece of miscasting, Rachel Rutherford, always a lovely lyrical dancer, was promoted—if that’s the word—from the second to the first ballerina role in “Emeralds,” and she isn’t right for it—she lacks sharp definition and wit.)

A lot of the season’s programming is hard to figure out. “Four by Four”—one of those fatuous names the various programs have been stuck with—had almost no one onstage: Ballo, with its two principals, four demis (of whom Ashley Laracey stood out, as she does in everything she dances), and a mini-corps of 12 girls; Liturgy for two (one of them Wendy Whelan in a glorious performance); Les Gentilhommes—nine boys; Fancy Free—six dancers and a bartender. Then there’s “Balanchine’s World” (that means four ballets by Balanchine), which paired Bugaku with La Sonnambula, two dramatic works that don’t mix. (Upcoming programs: “Inspirations,” “Spirit of Discovery,” “Matters of the Heart,” and perhaps my favorite, “Passages.” Whoever it is whose job it is to dream up these nonsenses deserves an extra week of paid vacation.)

Bugaku was a mixed blessing. Kowroski has relaxed into it, and her wonderful body and legs are fabulous to behold. Yet she hasn’t yet grasped the essence of the role, which was created on the equally beautiful Allegra Kent. Kowroski almost flaunts her sexiness; Kent kept hers a fascinating secret. (Oh, the mysterious East—and the mysterious Kent.) As for Albert Evans, he not only looked terrible but he lacks all the intensity and latent force this Villella role demands. I understand that senior dancers have to be utilized, but please—not at Balanchine’s expense. Bugaku depends on the sexual and psychic power of its principals; without dancers who communicate that power fully, it’s just samurai pastiche. Next Page >

The story at Alvin Ailey is always the same: the dancers. But having been away during the opening weeks of the company’s annual City Center lovefest, just ended, I have a new take on them. Seeing a number of second- and third-cast performances, I was more exposed than critics usually are to the company’s depth of talent. (Dance groups inevitably lead with their established stars, for reasons of both hierarchy and box office.)

And so the performance I caught of Revelations—Ailey’s gigantic hit, seen almost nightly—was filled with young dancers, a number of them new to their roles. It was—sorry!—a revelation. Not because they were better than their seniors, but because they were fresher, at least to these eyes. Pony-tailed old-timer Guillermo Asca gave us his strong “I Wanna Be Ready,” but we’ve seen it countless times, and it doesn’t evolve. Everyone else in the performance I caught was relatively new, and it was as if a layer of veneer had been stripped from the canvas. No single performance was sensational or even exceptional, but the ballet seemed renewed—less a series of star turns than a real ensemble piece.

Though I may regret the flattening out of the climactic “Rocka My Soul” without major presences like Renee Robinson, Linda Celeste Sims, Matthew Rushing and the wildly exciting Dwana Adiaha Smallwood (who, regrettably, has gone from the company)—only Rosalyn Deshauteurs among the women reached the heights of sass and ecstasy we love “Rocka My Soul” for—I was happy to be able to appreciate its sureness of structure and tone without the seductive distraction of powerful personalities. Among the rest of the young cast, Tina Monica Williams and Jamar Roberts were simple and moving in “Fix Me, Jesus,” and Willy Laury, Khilea Douglass and Olivia Bowman were modest yet persuasive in “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel.”

THE BIG EVENT of the season was Maurice Béjart’s Firebird to Stravinsky’s own abbreviated version of his great score. This, apparently, is the first extended Béjart work ever to be performed by an American company, although he churned out more than 200 of them over a 50-year career to the hysterical adulation of European audiences—a Béjart concert in the vast Palais des Congrès in Paris is like a cup final, and on just about the same aesthetic level (though less exciting). The main virtue of Ailey’s bringing us Firebird (1970) is that it reminds us of what we’ve been spared all these years.

A troop of eight unisex partisans in gray camouflage huddle and convulse around the stage until the Firebird (a male one; Béjart was never very interested in females) emerges in flame-colored Spandex to the ankle, though with peek-a-boo glimpses of bare chest. Apparently he’s there to rally the troops, and he rallies them with endless repetitions of derivative and unconvincing gesticulations until his batteries run down and he’s replaced by a new Firebird. Or Phoenix. Or whatever. I saw tall, sinuous, unmacho Antonio Douthit as Bird No. 1, and he wasn’t very birdy, but his intensity and stamina were impressive. Bird No. 2 was Clifton Brown, who is always impressive, and in fact was the first-cast No. 1. Luckily for us, Stravinsky pulled the plug before there could be a Bird No. 3. The Ailey company will have a lot to answer for if this is the beginning of a Béjart invasion of America. (The choreographer died a few months ago, at the age of 80.)

There was another “major” revival: Alvin Ailey’s own Flowers, from 1971, a predictable drama of the self-destruction of a rock star, presumably Janis Joplin. She’s hooked on dope, you see. First, she’s tormented by paparazzi (flashbulbs popping while she acts out); then her connection turns up and she can’t resist—and so follows a druggy fantasy sequence of increasing anguish. Then she’s back in real life, a broken … flower.

Flowers is more structurally coherent than most Ailey ballets because it has something of a story to hold it together—usually he just keeps going until he peters out. The vocabulary is his usual mix of ballet, modern and Broadway—effective if you like a smorgasbord. I saw second-cast Gwynenn Taylor Jones, a tall, pale blonde who’s just this season coming to the fore, and she gave it all she had and all it needed: a strong, touching performance in a role that demands more presence than dance quality.

New works? Of course.

(a) A harmless exercise in urban pop dance choreographed by Camille A. Brown to the sounds of Ray Charles. It’s set in the subway. A bunch of passengers first wait for the train, then are in it. There’s the brilliant Matthew Rushing full of happy bounce; there’s Renee Robinson in a bright red top, making it clear that she can still cut it (much play with her purse, à la Fancy Free); there’s the relentlessly smooching couple, and the sneezer with his handkerchief, and the uptight guy in a gray suit trying to read the paper. As a 10-minute skit in a revue, it would be lots of fun. As it is, the most interesting thing about it is its title: The Groove to Nobody’s Business. Your guess is as good as mine.

(b) Saddle Up! Yet another bit of Westerniana featuring cowboys, horses (hobbyhorses, actually), saloon complete with saloon gals—the usual. Is there a word that goes beyond “pastiche” or “derivative”? Or is this effort by Fredrick Earl Mosley meant as a tribute to its betters—Balanchine’s Western Symphony, de Mille’s Rodeo, Loring’s Billy the Kid? Whatever its intentions, it’s value free. Poor Alicia J. Graf, poor Linda Celeste Sims, poor Hope Boykin—poor all of them, having to pretend they’re having a good time. Or maybe they are! Cavorting around in Western drag has to be more fun than rising up as a camouflaged partisan.

THE IMPORTANT QUESTION, as usual, is whether all these terrific dancers are being well served by the repertory. Most Ailey dancers have emerged from the company’s school, and appear completely at home in, and content with, what they’re given to dance, whether it’s faux-spiritual, faux-ethnic or faux-ballet. But an elegant dancer like Alicia J. Graf (won’t she consider abandoning that “J” to Mary J. Blige?) should be seen in vrai-ballet, where she came from. She’s a beautiful ornament to this repertory, but Dolly should be back where she belongs.

And Clifton Brown, rapidly becoming the company’s male star, needs to have his dance instincts refined, not exploited. He’s a thoughtful artist as well as a big talent, and dance artists need real art to grow on. (His beautifully restrained phrasing and plastique in Ailey’s finely crafted, subdued solo Reflections in D suggest just how good he can be.) Perhaps he doesn’t yet command the style he would need for Apollo, but wouldn’t you like to see him try—and with Alicia J. as his Terpsichore? Next Page >

Count your blessings, all ye New Yorkers who every Christmas can rejoice in George Balanchine’s masterpiece The Nutcracker. Never have I appreciated it more than in Paris this year, when the Opéra Ballet gave us Rudolf Nureyev’s 1985 version. (For unfathomable reasons, it’s seen frequently in Paris and for years it held the stage in London as well.)

Not even Nureyev’s greatest admirers acclaim him as a great choreographer. He could stage an effective spectacle, he could discover and promote talented dancers, he could inspire a company and he could—and relentlessly did—find occasions in ballet after ballet to create male solos, however inappropriate, for Guess Who to inhabit. What he could not do was choreograph.

His Nutcracker is just one more proof of this crucial defect. There isn’t a dance moment in it that’s anything but fussy and empty. (And this to Tchaikovsky’s sacred score!) It doesn’t matter that he failed with Raymonda—everyone fails with Raymonda; and Don Quixote, that charming and decidedly un-sacred mishmash, provided him with a brilliant role and an opportunity for a big, splashy, charming production. Steps were more or less irrelevant.

We, of course, are used to a Nutcracker centered on children and the magic of Christmas. Nureyev made the leading roles for adults masquerading as children. The Clara I saw—Myriam Ould-Braham—is a Premier Danseur; likewise Emmanuel Thibault as the naughty Fritz. Jérémie Bélingard, an Etoile, doubles as Drosselmeyer and “Le Prince,” and there’s the point of the whole thing: inventing a dream-romance for the sake of establishing a central male role—yes, with solos.

There’s no through-line to the story, although we do get a party scene (the grown-ups dance, not the children, and in the case of the grandparents, they dance far too long and far too cutely); a mouse scene, though with no heroics from Clara (and at one point one of the boy soldiers actually looks dead; and a divertissement, with many of the usual attractions. It’s the best part of the ballet. (Not even Nureyev could spoil a “Danse Espagnole” or a “Danse Arabe.”)

There’s no resonance, no charm. Even the music has been capriciously shifted around. This is a Nutcracker for Nureyev fans, not Tchaikovsky lovers, although the orchestra was considerably more fluent and dancey than the company itself, which went through the motions with dignity—hardly the quality we look for in the ballet known in France as Casse-Noisette.

THINGS AT THE Opéra took an upturn with the revival of Pierre Lacotte’s version of Paquita. Lacotte is the well-known piecer-together of important 19th-century ballets: We last encountered him in New York when the Bolshoi brought us his ghastly reconstruction of Petipa’s once famous, now infamous Daughter of the Pharaoh.

Paquita has a patchy history, beginning in 1846, and a patchy plot. It’s Spain under Napoleonic rule. A young Gypsy girl, Paquita herself, turns out not to be a Gypsy at all: She’s an aristocrat who—surprise!—was abducted when an infant. (The great critic Gautier, reviewing the premiere, remarked, “You know how Gypsies are great kidnappers of children, particularly in the theater.”) One passionate look between her and the handsome young officer Lucien d’Hervilly and the die is cast—to the fury of the Gypsy villain who hopes to make Paquita his own. There’s a conspiracy to murder Lucien, but plucky Paquita saves the day, and later, at the d’Hervilly ball, she happens to notice the extraordinary resemblance between the portrait of Lucien’s assassinated uncle that’s hanging on a convenient wall and the portrait in the locket that she carries with her everywhere. It’s true! She’s Lucien’s long-lost cousin, and soon-to-be bride.

Paquita was a hit, and soon afterward, Petipa staged it in Russia, adding some new passages to music he commissioned from Minkus to fill out the original score by a workmanlike composer named Edouard-Marie-Ernest Deldevez. The Petipa-Minkus additions—a first-act pas de trois, a mazurka and the grand pas de deux—are all we have left of the original production(s), and they’re wonderful. The rest is up for grabs, and Lacotte has done a perfectly serviceable job of dishing up yards of classical pastiche, particularly in his bursts of dance for groups of 6, 8, 12 dancers. These energized generic passages give us a sense of what things must have been like on French and Russian stages back in the days when Gypsy abductions were commonplace.

Silly as it all sounds (and was), Paquita was held together by the committed orchestra and the ravishing costumes of Luisa Spinatelli, the real heroine of the evening. The dancers were led by a young Etoile, Dorothée Gilbert—lanky, angular and not very fetching. More fetching was the young Lucien, danced by Manuel Legris, an Etoile for more than 20 years now, who bears a slight resemblance to Charles Trenet. He twirls a pretty cape (pale blue), and he’s always a star, but his dancing today is less exciting than it once was. As is Paquita itself. It’s fun, though. Lacotte’s additions, subtractions and inventions do no harm and keep things going, and when we arrive at what’s left of Petipa, we’re in classical ballet heaven.

THE REAL FASCINATION of the season was the annual demonstration of the Opéra’s ballet school on the great stage of the Palais Garnier. This is not an actual performance, like those staged by the School of American Ballet every year (though the Opéra school does those, too) but a two-and-a-half-hour series of classroom exercises under the supervision of each group’s teachers. I was struck less by the brilliance of the kids—although one or two are clearly marked for stardom—than by the high seriousness about their work manifested by both teachers and students, and by the tender regard and respect they clearly have for each other. (At the school itself, this respect is symbolized by the way the boys and girls have been trained to stop and bob or curtsey whenever they pass an adult; in Paris, the good manners that classical ballet demands are instilled young.)

“Souplesse! Légèreté!” the teachers call out, and you can see the students striving for—and achieving—the extra suppleness and lightness expected of them. Given this superb pedagogy, the essential mystery of the Ballet de l’Opéra grows even more mysterious: Why do so many of these excellently trained young dancers end up so inexpressive once they become company members? Why aren’t they helped to understand that execution should be the beginning, not the end, of a dancer’s art? Next Page >

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The artistic director of the company, Kevin Mc-Kenzie, and Gelsey Kirkland, that one-time superb dancer and tragic self-destructor, have collaborated to give us a perverse and self-defeating reading of the ballet.  read more » Next Page >