Michael Popkin

Classics at City Ballet

Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty
New York City Ballet
David H. Koch Theater
New York, New York
January 27 - February 14, 2010

By Michael Popkin (copyright 2010 Michael Popkin)

With Swan Lake following Sleeping Beauty at New York City Ballet these past three weeks (both in the company's streamlined Peter Martins' versions) the two great Tschaikovsky ballets have made an interesting contrast.  Swan Lake on the one hand is a quintessentially romantic ballet; as in Giselle or La Sylphide, the hero - yearning for love - enters a forest glade in the moonlight, pursues a supernatural heroine and is either destroyed or at least ends the ballet bereft and alone. Sleeping Beauty on the other hand is classical ballet par excellence:  the prince gets the girl; malign forces are overcome, order is established in the realms, and all ends in a suite of sparkling dances.  The striking thing about the two works, however - and the essence of their contrast - is the way each of them actually contains within itself a mini-version of the other. The Vision scene in Beauty is essentially a little Swan Lake in miniature:  the prince meets his vision of Aurora in the moonlight in very much the same way that Siegfried will later meet Odette in the othe work; it's the happy ending and wedding at the end that makes the difference. The middle act of Swan Lake on the other hand (concluding with the Black Swan pas de deux) gives us exactly the kind of divertissement of classical and national dances as does the wedding that Beauty ends with - except that in Swan Lake the celebration and betrothal go terribly wrong.  The two ballets are in a way distorted images of each other turned inside out.

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Despite this contrast, the current winter season at City Ballet, subtitled "Classics," poses the question of whether and why the company should be programming these works in such concentration.  Along with Martins' Romeo + Juliet, half of the eight week season has been taken up with them and the effect, as I see it, is to emphasize a negative trend towards reducing the ballet repertory at the major American companies to a few standard and familiar works.  Virgil Thomson, writing about the repertory of so called "classical" music in the 1960's, used to make the point (in my paraphrase) that "classical music" had become in his time the same fifty works played over and over again by every symphony orchestra in the country, if not the world.  If anything, ballet is in even worse shape in this connection:  with The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, Beauty, Giselle, increasingly Coppelia (in the Balanchine version - which, rumour has it, is being acquired by a couple of American companies at the moment) and five or six others, we are talking about the same dozen ballets being programmed by every single company.

And NYCB in particular posseses a priceless repertory of its own, and one that completely breaks this mold; so why neglect it to program in this way?  Balanchine's idea of a ballet company was precisely one that rejected this paradigm and I thus can't view with indifference a season that represents a total retreat from, if not surrender of, this point.  The contrary arguments are that the "classics" sell tickets (but so does the circus); that the audience loves to see favorite dancers tackle the iconic roles in these ballets (and so why not give them what they want); that performing these ballets develops the dancers (and so why not give them too what they want); and finally that they are good vehicles to introduce a young (in this case a very young, even infantile) audience to the art form.  These points are not in the case of NYCB persuasive to me.  Every other company does these ballets and most do them better.  The clinching argument is that these are not works, in the last analysis, that City Ballet even does particularly well.

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Ensconced in a newly renovated theater, the company has indeed sold tickets, though not until last week's Swan Lake in palpably greater quantity than in prior Winter seasons.  Meanwhile the company seems to be struggling to adjust to the technical aspects of its renovated house.  The expanded and relocated orchestra pit (it has been moved forward) has in particular proved a problem to adjust to,  with the dancers at times looking like they either have trouble hearing the music on the stage, or seeing the conductor, particularly when variations start in the far upstage corners.  The sound of the music in the auditorium - noticably more sonorous at some moments - has been inconsistent at others and one noticed last week that the stands of French horns had been moved, for the first time in memory, to an opposite side of the orchestra than that of the other brass.

The development of the company's young ballerinas in the blockbuster roles of the Tschaikovsky ballets has also provided mixed results.  The strongest debut was that of young Tiler Peck in Beauty, where the ingenuous radiance of her person and effortless strength and grace of her dancing justified repeated visits to the theater; at the opposite end of the spectrum, Sterling Hyltin's Aurora (which she repeated from three years ago) represented a setback for a dancer who until that point had been having an absolute breakout star season by any standard; the major role made on her by Alexey Miroschnichenko in The Lady With The Little Dog having provided her with a vehicle that displayed every one of her many brilliant qualities:  a technique of steel combined with a touching openess and indeed vulnerability of personality on the stage; a slight Russian scent to her training that persists to this day and that Miroshnichenko emphasized by choreographing on her in nearly a Kirov style; and an extraordinary ability to pose and achieve finished positions in the air during lifts.

Ashley Bouder, as both Aurora and as Odette/Odile, reprised triumphant performances in these roles from prior seasons; but especially in Swan Lake it has to be noted that she is physically miscast. Bouder has a long back and not much extension; her proportions do not look particularly good in a classical tutu - and in particular the tutu and headdress in Swan Lake do not suit her.  She also has built into her smile and expression the irrepressible persona of the good old, American girl next door from Carlisle Pennsylvania - of the lead cheerleader from Carlisle high school so to speak.  Properly used, this Self is the source of her greatest strength as a dancer - her prodigious musicality, integrity and honesty in interpretation.  If she must act, she can do both tragic and heroic well and her Vision scene in Beauty, ballasted by her seemingly innate emotional understanding of tragedy, was lovely.  But in Swan Lake the jarring effect just of seeing her first entrance in the costume took time to overcome; overcome it she did, however, in a performance that was a tour de force both of her physical command of the ballet vocabulary and of musical interpretation; but it was a performance that needed to be prodigious in those qualities to compensate for its very existence.

Young Kathryn Morgan's debut in Beauty was pleasing and promising, but no more than that; she has all the talent in the world but is raw and unfinished at this point, needing in particular to sharpen her attack (and to be more centered) in turns.  She is so immensely gifted, all the same, that one readily agrees with the decision to cast her here. She needs above all to dance right now and has the strength and presence for such roles.

One ballerina who is not miscast in Swan Lake on the other hand is Maria Kowroski; she has danced Odette-Odile for more than a decade now both here and as a guest at the Kirov; and apart from Peck's Aurora, Kowroski's performance of Swan Lake, her second time out, at the matinee on February 13th, was the highlight of the winter season to this point.  Looking beautiful in the costume, she made superb use of her eyes, extended her technique successfully beyond her usual mastery of adagio to the grand allegro portions of the score, and delivered a performance (indeed keyed the entire company to a performance) that was satisfying as both drama and dance.

Photo by Paul Kolnik, Courtesy of NYCB:  top, Ashley Bouder in The Vision scene of Peter Martins' Sleeping Beauty; bottom Maria Kowroski and Charles Askegaard in Act II of Peter Martins' Swan Lake.

CLASS STRUGGLE ON BROADWAY

Ratmansky's On the Dnieper
American Ballet Theater
Metropolitan Opera House
New York, New York
June 1 - 6, 2009

Copyright 2009 by Michael Popkin

When ABT announced last year that it was adding Alexei Ratmansky to its masthead as resident choreographer (styled "artist in residence" in the current Playbill), many wondered what kind of fit this would be.  Ratmansky is known for serious artistry, while ABT makes its living presenting standard ballet hits in a circus-like atmosphere that features dancers over artistic content.  The premiere of Ratmansky's On the Dnieper last week answered the question in a most positive way:  the ballet is brilliant, the equal of any new work presented in New York in a decade.

Like Ratmansky's 2003 The Bright Stream (a Bolshoi production that toured here that or the following summer), On the Dnieper is a contemporary reworking of a Soviet-era ballet.  In The Bright Stream the plot was "love on a collective farm," but with a kind of late eighteenth century pastoral thematic touch - as in a ballet like Jean Dauberval's La Fille Mal Gardee, love triangles get sorted out and all ends happily.  On the Dnieper is a darker tale:  a young soldier named Sergei returns home, falls in love with the betrothed of another man, forsakes his own fiancee, and causes discord in the village.

The ballet's theme in a general sense thus turns on the tense relationship between individual happiness and desire on the one hand and the habits and culture of village peasant life on the other. The group - represented by the corps de ballet and the soloists who play the villagers and the friends and parents of the protagonists - is always present in this ballet, looking on as the love triangles unfold and taking part in the action by turns.

What must be understood, though, is how Ratmansky dramatizes this in the specific terms of Russian history and its communist era ideology and conflicts.  Sergei is not just a generic Russian soldier returning home after a war, but represents The New Soviet Man returning to a peasant village whose traditional social structure is intact; as such, he is far too sexy for the other village boys to compete with or for the village girls to resist.  He is also, socially speaking, the grain of social leaven that cannot help but work in the loaf.  In his opening scene solo, Sergei is happy and rhapsodic at his return, turning in attitude on high demi-pointe, his arms upraised, embracing the landscape and finally falling on his back on the earth of Mother Russia.  At first, the village boys admire him and he tries to fit into their phalanx in a labored, squatting group dance in which they lift him repeatedly above their heads.  But as time goes on and it becomes clear that the village beauty Olga, betrothed to a local peasant lout (danced in the two casts I saw by David Hallberg and Alexander Hammoudi) prefers Sergei to her fiancee, they turn on him and in the end beat him savagely.  The inevitable class struggle is underway; things cannot remain the same and it is only when Sergei and Olga leave the village behind them (perhaps even as a social stage and structure) that a new future becomes possible.

All this is staged and lit in the most beautiful fashion imaginable.  The designs by Simon Pastukh utilize a small group of Kabuki-like cherry trees and a number of picket fences of various heights, which are rearranged periodically by the corps to create scenes which evoke, successively, a village street, a square, an alley or (when the fences are placed on a diagonal to divide the stage) the edge of the village and the fields beyond.  The lighting, by Brad Fields, makes the blossoming spring a virtual reality; particularly the second half of the ballet where the tragedy and transcendent denouement (as Sergei's fiancee renounces him in favor of Olga and the couple leaves the village) take place in theatrical moonlight.  In forty-five years of watching both opera and ballet at the Met, I have never seen its sometimes awkwardly deep stage used more effectively. 

Meanwhile, amongst ABT's fans and critics, another kind of class struggle was going on.  Though ABT at a stroke regained its artistic credibility with the addition of Ratmansky, the reception of the ballet in the auditorium was tepid and the audience clearly didn't know what to make of it; watching the rush to the doors and hearing the lukewarm applause at the curtain, I had the impression they would have much preferred another chance to to see a bare-chested Ali turning multiple pirouettes.

More curious is the case of the critics, who have generally complained of the work's "thematic emptiness" but who should have known better. The ballet is anything but empty of theme.  Had it been brought here and danced by the Bolshoi, Ratmansky's Soviet era themes would have been recognized and appreciated.  Danced by ABT, the critical audience apparently couldn't absorb and contextualize it.  The great irony of this small masterpiece is that it was produced here in New York by an American company.

Copyright 2009 Michael Popkin
Photographs by Rosalie O'Connor, Courtesy of American Ballet Theater

Slaughter on 10th Avenue, and Some Notes on New Choreography at City Ballet

Lifecasting, January 22, 2009
A Simple Symphony, February 17, 2009
Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, February 27, 2009
The David H. Koch Theater
Lincoln Center
New York, New York

Who would have thought that Sara Mearns and Robert Fairchild in Slaughter on Tenth Avenue would be the high point of the end of the season at NYCB?  Originally choreographed by Balanchine for the 1936 Broadway show On Your Toes, and rechoreographed and restaged by him in 1968 with Suzanne Farrell and Arthur Mitchell in the leading roles, the ballet has generally been regarded as slight, nor have I ever looked at a casting list before and thought this was something I had to see.  But live and learn, go to the theater with an open mind and you never know what may happen; and this past week Mearns in particular blew the figurative roof off of the old New York State Theater with a raw, beautiful, and amazingly exhibitionistic performance that made the ballet appear in an entirely different light.  A perfect pastiche of a roaring-twenties gangster melodrama (actually it's a play within a play, but we will limit outselves to the barest scenario), Slaughter has plum roles for a strip tease girl (Mearns) and her hoofer boyfriend (Fairchild) whose love conquers all, while they foil the plots of a villainous gangster to murder them both (actually she gets shot, but comes back to life to dance at the end), and of a jealous fellow dancer who has hired a hit man to shoot the hoofer at the climactic moment of the play within the play.  There's a Richard Rogers score and plenty of infectious dancing, including a romantic pas de deux in dance hall style for the leading couple, with the stipper high kicking into huge extensions as her partner supports her on a diagonal across the stage; a tap dance for the hoofer with numerous repeats to keep things going until the police can capture the hit man; and a final jazz dance in quadruple meter (with a big stress on every fourth beat) for the entire cast, but especially for the stripper, who criss-crosses the stage shaking a tail feather with the best of them.  Sounds camp; but animated by the magnetic star quality of Mearns, who has never looked better in a costume, it came to life not only as a captivating physical exhibition, but even an amazingly correct display of academic dance.  No woman dancing today carries her arabesque from her arms, through her back, and into her working leg better than she does; or has a deeper, more perfectly cambered back bend; or more personal beauty either, for that matter - the perfect qualities for the role, along with a total abandon of one's self that no one would have predicted from her.  Not even the publicity folks at NYCB who don't have a photo of her in the role, in which she was second cast, an afterthought evidently for the last week of the season.  This is one to see, though, next time we have the chance in the spring.

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City Ballet is a company built around new choreography.  The idea was implicit in the original George Balanchine/Lincoln Kirstein conception and the effort to carry on the tradition, with sometimes more, but often less success, is a continuing theme in the post-Balanchine era.  Besides regular festivals of new works (institutionalized recently as The Diamond Project, though it's unclear what will become of this in the current era of strained finances), every season includes a few new pieces. This winter there were two new offerings, each in its way emblematic of two distinct strands in contemporary ballet.  Lifecasting, a ballet by British born choreographer Douglas Lee, currently a principal dancer with the Stuttgart Ballet, set to music by Ryoki Ikeda and Steve Reich, premiered on January 22d and appeared to be a ballet of the Wheeldonesque, push-me, pull-you variety.  With the dancers dressed in sleek gold spandex leotards, the stage, surmounted by an industrial lighting battery, looked like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise of Star Trek fame; the music was haunting and for the most part meditative; the tall women were often stretched and posed, in contrasting and complex groups by their partners.  The atmosphere was theatrical, the lighting dim, and in this vein the ballet was rather successful, particularly in the riveting role it created for Ashley Bouder who, beautifully costumed and coiffed to set off her gamine figure (she alone of all the women was dressed in blue rather than gold and had her hair dressed in bangs), made a memorably calm entrance to the side of the rest of the writhing motion after rising from a sunken channel at the rear of the stage.  (A Star Trek Athena rising from the soil of her Athens).  Withal, though, the weakness of the ballet, one might say the weakness of the genre, was the absence of rhythmically intelligible dance.  You could in fact define this genre of contemporary choreography as body movement theater in contradistinction to dance in the common sense of the word.

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Former City Ballet dancer Melissa Barak's new ballet, A Simple Symphony, set to the Benjamin Britten score, debuted on February 17th and was of a more traditional variety.  It was as if Barak were making the point on this program entitled 21st Century Movement that the tradition was still alive. The women wore cream colored romantic tutus, with the palest yellow stripes, of Barak's own design; the men were dressed in grey vests and tights, with flowing blouson collars somewhat in the manner of the first act of Giselle; the cast was divided into a corps de ballet of six women, two pairs of soloists, and a principal couple (Mearns and Jared Angle); and the musical structure of the symphony was similarly observed.  An opening movement introduced us to each contingent in the hierarchy: corps, soloists and principals.  To a Scotch inflected second movement of plucked and strummed strings, Barak set a memorable dance for the corps and then another for the soloists.  The center of the ballet was then a traditional pas de deux, before all concluded with an ensemble dance.  The strength of the work is the way the choreography coheres to the music and amalgamates itself with it organically; I can still see the second movement dances of the corps and the soloists to the plucked strings, and hear the accompanying music, in my minds' eye and ear, and that's something that rarely happens with a contemporary ballet.  The weakness of the work is the generic nature of the central pas de deux, which appeared formulaic:  there was much promenading of Mearns in arabesque by Angle, ending in swoons over his arm, but nothing happened emotionally.  Edwin Denby once likened Balanchine's pas de deux to "whispered conversations in the night," thereby indicating how important emotional values, or some kind of resonant content of meaning, was to their success.  By all accounts a calm personality on the surface, Balanchine was surely a passionate individual and each of his great pas de deux bears the stamp of a human drama.  Barak, schooled in the Balanchine style, left an emotional vacuum at the center of her pas de deux.  Although it is the best new work in a traditional style I have seen at NYCB in nearly a decade, a larger measure of heart and soul were needed to make it complete.

Copyright 2009 by Michael Popkin.
Photos by Paul Kolnik, courtesy of New York City Ballet.  Top: Lifecasting ensemble with Ashley Bouder; Bottom:  Sara Mearns and Jared Angle in A Simple Symphony.    

The Changing Look of Divertimento No. 15

Divertimento No. 15
New York City Ballet
New York State Theater
New York, New York
January 30 and February 5, 2009

Copyright 2009 by Michael Popkin

"Times change and we change with them" runs an old saying and nothing danced at NYCB this season has shown this more than the look of Divertimento No. 15.  One of Balanchine's tutu and tiara ballets, the opening night cast in 1956 included Diana Adams, Melissa Hayden, Allegra Kent, Tanaquil Le Clercq and Patricia Wilde.  It depends on ballerinas with a capital "B" and over the years City Ballet has cast it with tall and leggy women who also have perfume.  Each woman dances a challenging allegro and a lyrical andante pas de deux. The Dance in America video of parts of the ballet (the variations and pas) made in 1977 features Merrill Ashley, Maria Calegari, Susan Pilarre, Stephanie Saland and Marjorie Spohn.  A decade ago, Jennie Somogyi, Pascale Van Kipnis, Wendy Whelan, Margaret Tracey and Rachel Rutherford danced it; and, more recent casts included Miranda Weese and Carla Korbes.  The three men in the  cast partner and each dance variations but they appear somewhat anonymous: you have the impression that they are there to support the women and are present more as a social group than as individuals.

In the two performances I saw over the past week Megan Fairchild, Sterling Hyltin, Tiler Peck, and Ana Sophia Scheller danced the ballet along with Rutherford. As all except Hyltin and Rutherford are smaller dancers, cut from a different physical mold than prior casts, the look of the ballet changed accordingly.  Each individually danced with facility; the ballet was presented clearly and much of the dancing was well finished. Fairchild's impossibly fast sixth variation was memorable, as was Scheller's buoyantly classical allegro followed by a rich and dreamy adagio; Rutherford, returning to the stage after the recent death of her mother (Gage Bush Englund) appeared vulnerable and more beautiful than ever. The casting as a whole, however, made the ballet appear bright and zippy and emphasized the allegro passages over the adagio.  The grown up, womanly sophistication the ballet once breathed was gone; with Fairchild's dark coloring and Scheller's slightly Latin exotic looks set against the blond all-American features of Hyltin and Peck, you could have been at a costume party for cheerleaders at U.C.L.A. The different way the dancers responded (or at times didn't respond) to the music than in the past was also striking: they did the steps but didn't appear to be hearing the music; the rhythm was carefully observed but there was little sense of the musical phrase.  Altogether the poetry was taken out of the work; it was as if you were watching a different ballet.

Looking at the group of young soloists on the stage together with Fairchild (a principal dancer), it struck me that many of the dancers promoted in the company these past few years nearly conform to a type from the Royal Danish Ballet (the company Peter Martins was trained and bred in) and you could say this of principal dancers Abi Stafford and Ashley Bouder as well:  neat, sunny women; the waist nearly bisecting the body so that the figure is neither long legged nor long armed; physically capable, well centered dancers who would look perfectly at home cast in the pas de six in Act III of Bournonville's Napoli.  By physical talent they are jumpers and turners, allegro dancers who have to push themselves to get lyricism in adagios.  Each of the young dancers in Divertimento transcended this generality as an individual:  Fairchild stretches her lines in pas de deux; Scheller has an epaulement and aplomb that make her a beautiful adagio dancer; Hyltin isn't the type at all but is rather wild and spontaneous - but the type nonetheless holds as a growing phenomenon in the company as a whole and the fact that NYCB cast the ballet this way speaks for itself.

What happened to the musicality in the piece is another question and harder to answer.  In a weekend that saw superbly musical performances of Concerto Barocco, Stravinsky Violin Concerto and La Valse in the Balanchine repertory, Divertimento was a lone casualty from this point of view; in general the company danced in top form this week.  The breakneck tempi set by conductor Faycal Karoui in Divertimento may have been partly to blame - Fairchild's sixth variation was set so fast that it's hard to imagine anyone being able to listen to the music while dancing to it.  But I tend to think that the casting was responsible for the musical deadness of the ballet as well as the lack of sophistication. These are all dancers who are musically sensitive in other contexts; it may well be that in addition to everything else, choreography made on taller and more lyrical women looks different from the rhythmic and melodic point of view when performed by a smaller genre of dancer: steps and phrases that would have projected  and read more clearly as phrases on a taller and longer body get lost in translation when danced small.  

2009 by Michael Popkin
Photos:  Top - Ana Sophia Scheller and Adrian Danchig-Waring; Bottom - Tiler Peck and Amar Ramasar in Divertimento No. 15: both by Paul Kolnik, courtesy of New York City Ballet.      

Megan Fairchild in Coppelia

New York City Ballet
New York State Theater
New York, NY
January 7 and 13, 2009

Copyright 2009 By Michael Popkin

Megan Fairchild danced the role of Swanilda in Coppelia twice during the first ten days of City Ballet's winter season and set a new standard for perfection in a role that has more or less eluded an entire generation of dancers at the company.  Since Patricia McBride, who orginated the role, retired in 1989, it's been danced here by Margaret Tracey, Yvonne Borree, Jenifer Ringer and Alexandra Ansanelli and perhaps one or two others; none, however, approached the level we saw from Fairchild these two weeks as she gave not only a definitive reading of the part, but signaled her achievement of maturity as an artist.

It is to begin with a perfect role for Fairchild; we knew at the outset that she's the type for it physically and temperamentally. That said, nothing prepared me for how perfectly she would present herself in it and how surely she would both dance and interpret her character.  With her make up subdued to harmonize her expression (particularly the lipstick, which she has often overdone) and a traditional coiffure, gathered low at the back, that also flattered the fine proportions of her neck and face, she's never looked better on stage, or for that matter had a costume that better suited her figure:  a body slightly longer below the waist than above it and with relatively long arms and eloquent hands that enable her to dance taller and with more extended lines than her petite size would lead you to expect.

From her first entrance to her last, you knew at every moment who the principal dancer was and also exactly where she was on the stage; in a ballet where she's the leader of a pack of friends, she led implicitly by her very presence and authority.  She danced with outstanding finish and musicality; and above all a clear and charming grasp of her character, conveying this in effortless and natural mime that incorporated gestures, steps and facial expressions.  Swanilda is not a realistic character in the method acting sense of the word and Fairchild seemed to know this; it's a role that derives from "Harlequin and Columbine drama" and what you want isn't a real character so much as a beautifully stylized traditional one and in this she triumphed.  Five or six facial expressions are needed (wide eyed innocence, petulance, peevishness, naughty maliciousness, sorrow, etc.) as well as a good neutral expression out of which and into which the other expressions appear and vanish; if the expressions are too many or too natural, the mime appears busy; if they're too few, it appears impoverished:  Fairchild's mastery of the happy mean on this point was unsurpassed in my memory of dancers in this part.  Her Swanilda charmed but, paradox of paradoxes, was also touching at times, examples being the moment at the end of the ear of wheat dance when she rushed offstage, burying her face in her hands in sorrow at her failure to hear wedding bells in the grain; or again, her infectious delight in skipping about Coppelius's workshop with her friends (which seemed as spontaneous as the laughter of someone sitting next to you in the theater); or finally the moment in the second act when Coppelius attempts to transfer Frantz's heartbeat to what he thinks is his doll but is really Swanilda.  At this point, when the orchestra begins to reprise a Wagnerian theme in the strings and horns, Swanilda starts to breathe and loosen in her upper body, something Fairchild acted so clearly and naturally that the feeling conveyed was lyrical; we in the audience were moved and elevated despite the burlesque of the doll coming to life and the broad comedy involved in Swanilda's situation.  Her dancing the third act grand pas de deux was then serene, elevated and technically commanding, a text book example of how natural and joyous dancing will convey a sense of happiness to the viewer; her adagio characterized by easy and fluent extensions that stretched her lines surprisingly; and her allegro variations by large and easy technical effects:  pas de chats and sautes de Basques with beautiful shape and flow; interlaced turns accomplished very fast and fluidly, with perfectly coordinated and closed fifth positions in between revolutions; a diagonal of beautiful quick leaps into brise positions; and all ending in poses shaped to perfection and surely held.

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Joaquin de Luz was a strong partner for her throughout both performances and Robert La Fosse a persuasive and at times even moving Coppelius, particularly in the first performance opposite Fairchild on January 7th, when he had not yet begun to oveact as he did progressively as the run of performances (which also included debuts by Sterling Hyltin and Tiler Peck as Swanilda over the weekend) proceeded. De Luz remains, however, too small a partner for Fairchild; he forces her to dance short to adapt to him when ideally you would like to see her partnered by someone who made her dance taller.  But De Luz is perhaps the most accomplished man at City Ballet at the moment and Fairchild will probably continue to dance with him because she is the only principal woman in the company who is remotely his size.

All of the performances I saw this week (the two by Fairchild as well as Hyltin's debut on Saturday afternoon) were well performed from the dramatic point of view, with the plot elements particularly well conveyed.  It must nonetheless be said for the record that the company beyond the principal dancers looked ragged at times, as is often the case at the start of the winter season when five weeks of Nutcrackers have taken their mental and physical toll on everyone; and particularly that the children in the third act waltz looked frantic and awkward in instances.  The large round of applause they garnered appeared to be more a function of "cute little kids can do this stuff" than of their doing it well.  Likewise the national dances in the first act lacked rhythmic punch, though it's never been the practice at City Ballet to emphasize the accents in these dances.  I except from this general criticism the third act variations on January 7th, which were nicely performed by Teresa Reichlen (Dawn), Rebecca Krohn (Prayer), and Faye Arthurs (Spinner); and the dancing at every show by the four youngest women in the corps de ballet - Lydia Wellington, Megan Johnson, Callie Bachman, and Kristin Segin - as the Four Jesterettes. The newcomers consistently danced with more energy, focus, committment, pleasure and finish than their sisters in the senior corps.

Copyright 2009 by Michael Popkin

Both Photos, Megan Fairchild and Joaquin De Luz in the first act of Coppelia, by Paul Kolnik courtesy of New York City Ballet.

MICHELE WILES IN LA BAYADERE

La Bayadere
American Ballet Theater
The Metropolitan Opera House
New York, New York
June 24, 2008

By Michael Popkin
copyright 2008 Michael Popkin

ABT is rather thin on the ground ballerina-wise right now, but a saving grace appeared Tuesday night in the person of Michele Wiles, who showed a facility, polish and command dancing the role of Gamzatti in the second Bayadere of the season I'd never associated with her before. It was better dancing than I've seen from any ballerina in this role at ABT over the years - at a level even with what you can see in the video of Elisabeth Platel in the role at the Paris Opera.  And indeed it was as fine dancing as I've seen from any woman in this company in a principal role in several years, no matter what the ballet, equalled only by several of Diana Vishneva's performances over that period.  On this particular night Wiles was a more fluent and finished dancer than Gillian Murphy (who danced Nikiya) and a better actress too; though Murphy did look sexy with a bare midriff and had the big extension audiences love today.  She was also a better match with David Hallberg (their Solor).  She and Hallberg have been paired together for years.

A NEW THARP BALLET at ABT and NOTES FROM THE ROBBINS' CELEBRATION

Rabbit and Rogue
American Ballet Theater
The Metropolitan Opera House
New York, New York
June 4, 2008

All American Fare (Interplay, Ives Songs and I'm Old Fashioned)
Definitive Chopin (Dances at a Gathering, Other Dances and The Concert)
New York City Ballet
New York State Theater
New York, New York
June 1 and 4, 2008

By Michael Popkin
copyright 2008 Michael Popkin

Towards the end of ABT's new Rabbit and Rogue last week, my mind, shocked and awed by nearly forty minutes of non-stop sensory overload, tried to make sense of it all:  the smoky black theatrical space punctuated by descending and horizontal cones of spot light; the music, a pulsing wall of sound louder than that in any movie theater (is it possible for live music to sound more recorded?); the masses of dancers emerging from and vanishing into a gloomy upstage area, all dressed (and often undressed) in a variety of sexy Norma Kamali costumes; Sascha Radetsky and Marcelo Gomes performing nearly a Three Stooges routine in the midst of it all; Sarah Lane in a silver bikini (not bad); Jose Manuel Carreno, stripped to the waist and dressed below in a cross between silver harem and capri pants, performing classical lifts and promenades with Maria Riccetto.

THE NEW YORK STATE THEATER IS ONE BLOCK FROM BROADWAY

Double Feature
New York City Ballet
New York State Theater
New York, New York
May 17 and 18, 2008

By Michael Popkin
copyright 2008 Michael Popkin

NYCB is dancing Susan Stroman's Double Feature again this week; they danced it last winter too, along with Peter Martins' Thou Swell and both Christopher Wheeldon's Carousel and An American in Paris.  All of these ballets belong together; their mutual orientation towards Broadway unites them.  It's a City Ballet tradition the company tells us:  Balanchine and Robbins worked there; and anyway it's a natural place to look for venacular material in New York.

THE KIROV DANCES BALANCHINE -- Meanwhile SESAME STREET ZEN at CITY BALLET

Serenade, Rubies, and Ballet Imperial
The Kirov Ballet
New York City Center
New York, New York
April 18 - 20, 2008

Watermill
New York City Ballet
New York State Theater
New York, New York
May 2, 2008

If the Kirov's reduction of its Petipa ballets to one act offerings during the opening week of its New York season showed how such cut-down Petipa could look like Balanchine; the all Balanchine program on the Kirov's final weekend (Serenade, Rubies, and Ballet Imperial) showed something else:  that between the two kinds of work there's a revolution in the way ballets are structured.  The organizing principle for Petipa is the structure of the classical pas de deux - entrance for the couple, variation for each, then recapitulation.  Serenade and Ballet Imperial abandon that principle.

Bringing Back Petipa -- The Kirov Takes A Page From Balanchine's Book, Or Maybe It's the Other Way Around

The Kirov Ballet
New York City Center
New York, New York
April 1 - 10, 2008

Copyright 2008 by Michael Popkin

New York City Center may not be the "house that Balanchine built" (the Shriners enjoy that distinction) but it's certainly a house deeply associated with his work; and seeing the Kirov's Petipa programs on that stage thus has been extraordinarily interesting.  It's an intimate theater, with the orchestra only nineteen rows deep, the stage shallow, and little room in the wings.  The Kirov's core repertory, great Nineteenth Century ballets like Raymonda, Le Corsaire, Don Quixote and La Bayadere, won't fit very well into that space and so for the New York season the company pared it down to present only portions of each ballet:  Act 3 from Raymonda; the Grand Pas de Deux from both Paquita and Don Q; The Kingdom of the Shades from La Bayadere; and the pas de deux from Diana and Acteon.