Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center's main concert venue, lacks an orchestra pit, wing space, and a floor suitable for dancing. Musicians performing there stay put once onstage, limiting their motion to decorous walks to and from their places. Not for them phenomenal steps requiring a floor that cushions sleights of foot or a safe landing spot for leaping exits at race-car speed. Nevertheless American Ballet Theatre was installed at Avery Fisher for a four-day engagement, October 7-10.
ABT had to settle for a theater ill-fit for dance because of a tangle of scheduling problems due to the upcoming renovation of the City Center, where, for the last 12 years, the company has given a two- or three-week fall season. The City Center house was just right for ballets you need to be close to—much of Tudor, for example—compared to the Metropolitan Opera House, where ABT holds forth for some two months every spring, offering mainly grand-scale productions.
Under the discouraging circumstances, ABT used its ingenuity, and commissioned a program of site-specific dances by Alexei Ratmansky (formerly the director of the Bolshoi Ballet, now ABT's Artist in Residence and already a favorite with American dance fans), and Benjamin Millepied and Aszure Barton, whose careers are conspicuously on the rise. All three new ballets were danced at each performance, supplemented by one of two inventive duets, Jerome Robbins's Other Dances or the late Clark Tippet's Some Assembly Required. On opening night, however, the nod-to-the-past number was Fokine's The Dying Swan, an inexplicable choice given a choked performance by Veronika Part, whom you'd expect to be a natural for conveying its pathos.
Ratmansky, the most gratifying choreographer on today's classical ballet scene, certainly added to his reputation with Seven Sonatas, to Scarlatti piano pieces. It's a lovely and deeply intelligent addition to the ballet blanc genre (think Fokine's Les Sylphides, Paul Taylor's Aureole)—pure dancing only brushed with narrative suggestion, usually costumed in white as if to indicate a kind of holy innocence in atmosphere and intent.
Xiomara Reyes, Herman Cornejo, and friends in Alexei Ratmansky's Seven Sonatas. Photo by Rosalie O'Connor.
The six dancers who will create the world of Ratmansky's piece spill onto the stage through one of the black-hole doorways that pierce the sides of the space, their walking invisibly mutating into dancing. The six might be a rural community of friends and lovers (like that of Robbins's Dances at a Gathering) from a time that is simpler than our own. The configurations Ratmansky has created for the group shift deftly—and seamlessly, as if they are simply an emanation of the the springtime joy and innate grace of the dancers. Their moves—light, fluid, and evanescent—use the classical vocabulary in unique ways. On an initial viewing, your brain can barely keep up with this choreographic magic; your eyes—and soul, perhaps—simply succumb to it.
Next comes a string of solos, as if to tell us more about the dancers as individuals. We see Herman Cornejo's extraordinary virtuosity as if it were a natural phenomenon; lyricism added to the petite Xiomara Reyes's light-footed quality until she seems to be a fairy out of an old picture book; David Hallberg twisting and turning restively as if the generic noble prince figure we're used to had acquired some doubt and discontent; and the beautiful Julie Kent, usually cast as a princesse lointaine, assigned a robust exercise for fleet feet.
Solos give way to duets and trios, evoking the multiple facets of love—the dark and confused moments as well as the idyllic ones—that can fluctuate in a single relationship. Finally the whole group assembles once more and finishes the ballet with the dancers calmly paired, on their knees, then sinking down into a contented coupled sleep or perhaps a good death after a full lifetime. It's a very Mark Morris moment, just as, earlier, there were references to Paul Taylor, Balanchine, and other greats. Ratmansky has been everywhere, it seems, absorbed what he has seen, and integrated it into his work in meaningful—never specious—ways.
When Seven Sonatas comes to a close, you feel replete with dancing, as if you couldn't take in another thing, and yet ABT used it here as a curtain raiser. Still, I think the company is aware of its immense good fortune in snatching Ratmansky away from the New York City Ballet the moment that company got cold feet.
Benjamin Millepied's contribution to the program, Everything Doesn't Happen at Once, to a David Lang score, only reinforced my conviction that while this choreographer, a principal dancer with City Ballet, has shown growing proficiency in his trade, his choreography remains as mechanical as ever. Rarely does it reveal a beating heart. The new ballet—employing too big a crowd for the Avery Fisher stage, but Millepied is obviously thinking ahead—makes much of maneuvering human phalanxes in linear geometric patterns.
Daniil Simkin caught in flight in Benjamin Millepied's Everything Doesn't Happen at Once
. Photo by Gene Schiavone.
Maria Riccetto is at the center of a trio in which two men manipulate her body with the attentive care usually reserved for fragile antique porcelain. A second threesome joins them, reinforcing a prevailing mood of cool alienation. The stars of the piece, Isabella Boylston (of the mysterious and beautiful self-containment) and Marcelo Gomes (Mr. Wonderful), circle the double trio until it tactfully vanishes, and the lighting takes on a golden glow for the central duet. Its message seems to be that these two blessed creatures are the only members of their tribe to recall what it is to touch someone—in both senses of the word.
Before you can breathe an appreciative sigh, the crowd returns for still more stubbornly geometric interlacing, now hotted up by accelerated speed. Much—too much—is made of intermittent virtuoso work for Daniil Simkin, sloppily executed and crassly dependent on gymnastics. Nevertheless, an applause meter would have declared that Everything Doesn't Happen at Once was the most thrilling item of the evening.
The program's weakest offering was surely Aszure Barton's One of Three, to Ravel's Violin Sonata in G. It offers three takes on the idea of intimacy being held at bay by a studied aloofness.
Gillian Murphy and admirers in Aszure Barton's One of Three
Photo by Gene Schiavone.
On a smoke-shrouded stage, a trio of gents in evening dress, eventually joined by three more look-alike fellows, buzz around Gillian Murphy, an untouchable goddess in a gleaming white sheath that might have been poured onto her body until it swirls out to brush the floor. With her auburn hair artfully arranged and her face looking more than ever like the young Bettie Davis, she's a gorgeous figure out of a forties movie or a photograph by Horst. Though one of the men is singled out to be the one, and she dances cautiously with him, the proposed relationship comes to nothing; he leaves, and, for a fleeting moment, she seems sorry.
Take Two gives us Misty Copeland, another, rather more lively, glamour-girl, with her short skirt flaring out like a saucy parasol over her bare, fabulously muscled legs and sensationally arched feet. Two men join her for a trio that's confined largely to the participants stalking one another. What a waste!
Last, we get Paloma Herrera in a slinky, trousered "at home" outfit worthy of a high-class prostitute. She attracts the full cast of guys who now number eight. A few dare to lift her but, predictably, nothing develops from that, as if commitment as well as full-fledged dancing were dead.
Like other works of Barton's that I've seen, One of Three is cold, tight, and merely handsome, adhering efficiently to its structural idea and remorselessly sleek, but dismayingly void of feeling, let alone passion. Is it a reflection of contemporary urban life?
All of the music on the program was expertly played, and enhanced by the hall's built-for-music acoustics. The costumes by Holly Hynes (the Ratmansky), Karen Young (the Millepied), and Yannik Larivée (the Barton)—sharing a white, gray, and black palette—were imaginative, occasionally foolishly so, occasionally downright stunning. The opening night audience, itself extravagantly dressed, seemed thrilled by the novelty of the whole project.
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