Jennifer Kronenberg and Carlos Guerra of Miami City Ballet in Balanchine’s La Valse. Photo by Joe Gato.
At Miami City Ballet’s opening night at New York City Center—the company’s long-awaited Manhattan debut—the curtain rose on a bevy of gorgeous, long-limbed young women in rakish pony tails and plain white leotards, reaching into space in a diagonal line that stretched cross-stage. The line then undulated, wave-like, in perfect formation, as if an electric impulse were coursing through it. This striking image, from Balanchine’s Symphony in Three Movements made the choreography look born again.
The entire production sustained this promise, with ferocious but effortless-looking energy, immaculate precision, sculptural lushness, and ingenuous grace—the last due to a blessed lack of “attitude,” which undermines the performing style of world-class companies in dance hubs like New York, Russia, Paris, and England.
There are many to thank for this miracle—the stagers, Bart Cook and Maria Calegari; the dancers, who are modest and eager enough to absorb stylistic instruction; the supporters who have sustained the company for its 23 years—but most of all the troupe’s artistic director, Edward Villella, who became an American icon of male classical dancing as a principal with New York City Ballet.
The City Center engagement presented two programs made up of five Balanchine ballets and Twyla Tharp’s In the Upper Room (admittedly not quite equal to American Ballet Theatre’s death-defying rendition).
Miami City Ballet in Balanchine’s Symphony in C. Photo by Joe Gato.
Of the Balanchine works, central to the company’s repertory, Square Dance, performed with an irresistible blend of clarity and friendliness, and Symphony in C, that glorious tribute to the various moods of classicism, brought a new vitality to masterworks we often see presented carelessly today. Haiyan Wu lent an unusual interpretation to the celebrated adagio movement of the latter, making it look like an exquisitely delicate watercolor. Two other segments were led, respectively, by the remarkable Delgado sisters, Jeannette and Patricia, who come closest to ballerina power. Their ability to command the stage is allied with technical marvels, and the audience responds on the instant to their verve and joy in motion.
The lesser achievements are probably due to insufficient sophistication, which time and exposure should remedy. La Valse could be more doom-struck in depicting the heroine’s love affair with death. In “Rubies,” the jazzy section of Jewels, the principals lacked the required attack, brashness, and wit. This was odd, since the male role was made on Villella himself, partnering the inimitable Patricia McBride. By the thrilling closing performance, though, it looked as if Villella had had a revealing encounter with his protégés. Throughout the two programs, the corps de ballet moved, miraculously, as a single organism dedicated to the nature of the choreography they animated.
Miami City Ballet’s debut at City Center is a home-coming for Villella. A rambunctious kid from Queens, with energy to spare, he developed an unlikely passion for dancing that took him, despite serious roadblocks, all the way to stardom with New York City Ballet, based at City Center when he joined it in 1957. From the two City Ballet choreographers then reigning, George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, and the guidance of the revered Danish-bred teacher, Stanley Williams, he learned to mate the wildfire that made him so exciting with the calm exactitude of ballet’s classical principles. When he founded Miami City Ballet in 1986, this is the legacy he offered to the rising generation. Today, New York, having lost both the Joffrey Ballet and Dance Theatre of Harlem, should make certain that Miami City Ballet becomes a regular visitor.
