Nina Ananiashvili in Alexei Ratmansky’s Waltz Masquerade. Photo by Rosalie O’Connor.
Always an exceedingly star-conscious company, American Ballet Theatre opened its annual spring season (May 18-July 11, at the Metropolitan Opera House) with a pair that would be hard to beat: Caroline Kennedy and America's new First Lady, Michelle Obama, two of the gala event's Honorary Chairmen. Both made carefully prepared, mercifully brief, but urgently timely speeches emphasizing the fact the arts are not merely commercially important to America but absolutely essential to its culture. They said it like they meant it.
For the record, Mrs. Obama wore a stunning, intricately folded dress in gunmetal gray that was a metaphor for strength and tenderness combined, and—trust me on this—those arms, seen live, are even better than in the glossies.
The dancing part of the program, arranged to let every leading member of the company appear, was the usual smorgasbord of items, nearly all of them ruthlessly excerpted from a richer and far more complex context. This practice exhausts the aficionado who can't help resurrecting the whole ballet from the few minutes ostensibly representing it. As for newcomers to the art, I can't imagine what they think they are seeing. I suppose you could consider such a program a tasting menu, but these work better in multi-star restaurants.
The corps de ballet—at any rate its female contingent—had more to do than it usually has on such occasions, but it seemed the same just about everywhere: a bunch of lovely-to-look-at young women, in gauzy pastels or virginal white, going tepidly through routines that emphasize symmetry and unison. Yet when we meet them in context (as in the complete Swan Lake, La Sylphide, or Sylvia), they form a composite character as meaningful and often as forceful as that of the stars.
For me, the best thing on the program was Gillian Murphy's performance in Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux (a short work, given complete). Murphy's dazzling technique is further enriched each season by subtleties of musical timing and, most important, by subtleties of feeling, though she never appears to be to forcing herself to imitate behavior she doesn't genuinely feel. Like many a thoughtful artist, she works from the inside out.
Glamour reached its height in a bagatelle, Waltz Masquerade, by Alexei Ratmansky, to pulse-raising Khachaturian music. It had the ever-lovely Nina Ananiashvili swirling randomly around the stage in a lavish red gown, tossing off a few floating jetés as if to concede that ballet is usually about steps. Typical of the choreographer's impulse to inject humor into dully generic situations, Ratmansky set a dinner-jacketed menial, bearing a candelabra that concealed his face, in each of the four corners of the space. When the men finally lowered their disguise and rushed across the stage, they could be recognized as a quartet of the company's top guys frantically vying for the lady's attentions. She moved even more freely—adding a few real steps—when they stopped bothering her.
God makes so many top-notch classical dancers, I assume, so that everyone susceptible to the art can choose his subset of favorites. At American Ballet Theatre, the gala was followed by eight performances of a "Balanchine-Tchaikovsky Spectacular." The same challenging program—Allegro Brillante, Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, Mozartiana, and Theme and Variations—was danced at each showing, with shifting casts in the major roles.
I'm writing here about the dancers who fascinated me most. Other ABT fans will have other favorites; these are simply mine, ladies first, in alphabetical order.
Nina Ananiashvili, a beauty and a beauty of a dancer, will retire from ABT at the end of the season (prepare your bravas and tears for June 27). Pace all the marvelous Odette-Odiles, Giselles, Auroras, and Juliets she has given the public over the years, her interpretation of the opening Preghiera (Prayer) section of Mozartiana is one of her most memorable achievements.
She's center stage as the curtain rises, a figure in a black dress tastefully trimmed with jet velvet and a bit of white ruffled lace—elegance and sober contemplation combined. She's attended gravely by four prepubescent girls in similar costumes, except for their soft ballet slippers in place of the gleaming pointe shoes their model wears. They are her acolytes or, if you will, icons of her innocent beginnings. She includes these children tenderly in her experience, while they accord her the utmost, formal respect, but she does not befriend them. It is not yet time for them to know what she knows now as a mature adult. She is absorbed in a reverent recognition of death as the inevitable conclusion of life.
In the balance of the ballet, this mood alternates with a response of sparkling vitality to her lover. Life is still worth living, whatever its inevitable ending. Ananiashvili doesn't play the prayer section—or indeed any of the ballet—as if it were a dramatic role, but as if she simply was the woman, or, more abstractly, the embodiment of the emotions the choreography proposes. No one has danced this strange, piercing work with the subtlety and transparency she gives it since its originator, Suzanne Farrell.
Physically you'd never mistake either Kristi Boone or Misty Copeland, both soloists, for the sylphlike type that dominates classical dance today. Their robust quality is part of what makes them wonderful: the energy, the speed, the reminder that ballet is, among other things, an athletic adventure. To this quality, Copeland adds a vein of poetry that I hope she'll expand. What a combination that would make!
I think of Gillian Murphy, whose continuing progress I've described above, as the ideal American ballerina. She possesses the speed, strength, and will of a thoroughbred. Her dancing has no fuss, no affectation. It affirms Balanchine's conviction that the essence of dancing lies in action, not decoration or attitude.
Veronika Part's pluses and minuses are so extreme she is adored by one coterie of fans and scornfully dismissed by another. She is "divinely tall" (those legs alone deserve a prize) "and most divinely fair," with a gentle manner reminiscent of Diana Adams. By nature, she's a lyrical adagio dancer. But aside from physical problems that might be modified—her legs are hyper-extended and the arch of her long feet exaggerated, the combination guaranteeing insecurity of balance—she lacks confidence to a degree that all but paralyzes her on occasion. When it comes to a dancer so lovely and innately gifted, this is well-nigh tragic.
I'm of two minds about Diana Vishneva, who seems to excel—in terms of high-pitched drama and technique—in everything she does. Yet I don't always find her performances satisfying or emotionally convincing. It's as if she were more interested in succeeding as a ballerina who will go down in the history books than in dancing itself. When I think back on her career as a whole, I sense a vein of extravaganza in the performances and more than a touch of the simulacrum instead of the real thing—performances you remember for years after you've seen them. Understand that she is generally revered.
When Michele Wiles joined ABT in 1998, she was strikingly long and lanky and still had the appealing angularity of an adolescent. She looked as if she had grown up in a wide-open landscape with horses to ride. Her technique was gasp-inducing: strong as steel, flawless and fearless. Once she began to bloom and soften into womanhood, a problem slowly became apparent and gradually worsened—which may have been why the company bided its time in according her principal rank. Today, there's a disconcerting disconnect between what she's doing with her body (often something beautifully executed) and what she's doing with her head and the expression on her face. Onstage she frequently looks as if she doesn't quite know who or where she is. I keep hoping for an eventual happier outcome.
Then there are ABT's men, whose achievement and singular stage temperaments have taught the world to start clapping and shouting the moment a guy in any decent company does so much as a triple pirouette or the first of those long leaps that promise to send him cutting a huge circle through space:
Jose Manuel Carreño's once-fabulous technical powers have waned slightly—only slightly, mind you—but he remains the company's heartthrob. He partners his ballerina as if she ranked somewhere between Aphrodite and the girl next door whom he's adored for years. For him, her body (and perhaps her soul as well) is at once an object of easy affection and worship. He is the most human of the male stars; in the midst of his onstage feats, he still appears to be knowable as a person.
Angel Corella is a compact virtuoso who tosses off breathtaking steps—which he often modifies to make them even more striking—with the exuberance of a boy. No matter how often you vow to resist being conquered by his sunny charm, he remains irresistible. The personality he expresses onstage leaves you feeling he must be equally affable and gregarious offstage. This is rarer than one might think.
For my money, Herman Cornejo is the best male dancer—qua dancer—in the company. He has a spectacular technique and, better yet, he's convincing in a spectrum of styles without the least strain or affectation. At the gala, his rendition of James's solo from La Sylphide was perfect Bournonville—the relaxed carriage of the low curved arms over precisely rendered volatile footwork, the execution of double air turns in both directions with exactitude, plus the quality the great Danish choreographer so cherished—danseglæde (the joy of dancing). With all too typical irony, the gods cheated Cornejo on body type and looks, yet he's managed to make that not matter.
While Marcello Gomes is easily cast as a noble-prince type—he's got the technique, the handsomely proportioned body, and the smoldering good looks—he seems to relish a sideline of evil or quirky figures. His pleasure and wit in playing them is palpable. In heroic roles, his muscular, fleshy body, with its slow, honey-poured-from-the-jar way of moving makes him stand out against the inhabitants of the air prevalent among his peers. He seems more in league with gravity, more real, and, as in Theme and Variations, a pillar of secure strength that complemented the same steadfast quality in his partner, Gillian Murphy.
David Hallberg is as pure as they come in looks, long slender build, and immaculate technique. His angelic perfection is so prominent, it's startling, even after you've seen him a dozen times. The challenge he needs next, I think, is a multi-act ballet created for him in which he uses his singular gifts to play a convincing 21st-century hero.
Supporting these principals and soloists is a corps de ballet that, never less than marvelously competent, visibly harbors several of the present stars likely successors.
The balance of the season will offer a week each of the hyperactive but fun Le Corsaire; a Prokofiev evening that will include ABT’s new Artist in Residence Alexei Ratmansky’s first work for the company, On the Dnieper; two perennial Romantic classics: Giselle and La Sylphide; the wrongheaded version of Swan Lake concocted by Kevin McKenzie; Frederick Ashton’s enchanting Sylvia; and Kenneth MacMillan’s overly robust but blessedly ungimmicky Romeo and Juliet. I’ve taken the liberty of putting in boldface the programs I wouldn’t miss, but every viewer, aficionado or newcomer to the ballet, will have his or her own taste and may think me dead wrong.
