City Ballet in Bloom, and New Works at A.B.T.

Lauren Lovette in Wheeldon's "Polyphonia." Photo by Paul Kolnik.

People have been abuzz about the quality of the dancing at New York City Ballet this season (which ends on June 12), especially in the Balanchine repertoire. It’s true: the company is in great form; there have been noticeably fewer tired performances, and each night offers a compelling reason to see this or that program, this or that cast. So far, the only real disappointment (for me) has been “Divertimento No. 15,” which still does not have a cast of ballerinas who can fully tease out the charm, wit, and subtle shifts in the music and choreography. It’s a delicately-wrought piece, a confection of many layers that easily loses its pouf.

The showy première, “Seven Deadly Sins,” came and went without much fanfare, quickly forgotten. But ballets like “Le Tombeau de Couperin,” danced only a few times in the first week of the season, were sheer joy. And there are promising débuts—Teresa Reichlen’s first performances in “Vienna Waltzes” and “Episodes” and Chase Finlay’s first foray into “Apollo” come to mind—that indicate an encouraging depth of talent and care in preparation. Daniel Applebaum, Anthony Huxley, Lauren Lovette, and Ashley Laracey, (all in the corps) are growing visibly from one performance to the next; and the presence of Tiler Peck, Sara Mearns, Gonzalo García, Teresa Reichlen, or Janie Taylor in a cast is reason enough to rush to the theatre.

Personally, I think that the addition of a third season, in the fall—and the consequent shortening of the winter and spring seasons—has done the company a world of good. By spreading their performances out, the breaks are shortened, and the interpretations can breathe and build. And there’s more space on the schedule to rehearse each ballet, and less end-of-season raggedness. Now if the company would just perform “Episodes” and “Le Tombeau de Couperin” more often…

I caught an all-Broadway evening last week (on May 25^th), even though none of the ballets (“Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,” “For the Love of Duke,” and “West Side Story Suite”) are favorites of mine. There was a “See the Music” segment before “West Side Story”: the orchestra rose up from the pit and the conductor Fayçal Karoui, a natural ham but no fool, discussed the music for “West Side Story,” by Leonard Bernstein (or “Bernshteen,” as he pronounced it in his French accent). What I love about these little talks is that they don’t patronize the audience. Karoui illustrated the origins of a two-note figure in West Side Story—stolen from Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet”—and traced its presence in everything from “Maria” to “Something’s Coming” and “America.” My experience of West Side Story, a piece I’ve seen at least a dozen times, was the richer for it.

The other two highlights of the evening were Chase Finlay’s début in the role of Tony (replacing Benjamin Millepied, who is busy with other things), and a surprise solo by Lauren Lovette in Susan Stroman’s otherwise objectionable “Frankie and Johnny…and Rose” (the first section of “For the Love of Duke”), which I last reviewed here. Stroman has added two new solos since last season, one for the guy (Amar Ramasar) and another for the mysterious girl in red (Lovette) who pops up at the end. It makes no sense dramatically, but any reason to see Lovette dance is a good one. Stroman at least has an eye; she has taken note of Lovette’s enigmatic quality.  Chase, coming off his début in “Apollo,” is perhaps too noble and not quite nonchalant enough in his interpretation of Tony, but the innocence is there, as well as a commendable attention to detail. The moment when he and Maria (Lovette, she of the shining eyes) locked gazes at the “Dance at the Gym” had just the right hormonal surge.

Daniil Simkin in "Shadowplay." Photo by Rosalie O'Connor.

Speaking of hormones, over at the Met, this week American Ballet theatre put on a revival of Anthony Tudor’s strange coming-of-age ballet “Shadowplay” (1967) as part of its “Classics to Premieres” program (May 24-26), which also included new works by Alexei Ratmansky, Benjamin Millepied, and Christopher Wheeldon. It is certainly one of the weirdest ballets I’ve seen. Many people found it risible, others were quite touched; I fell somewhere in between. Daniil Simkin, one of two dancers who performed the central role of “The Boy With Matted Hair,” wrote on Twitter that after finishing his run he felt “emotionally like a squeezed lemon…and not in a funny way.” I can see why. Vaguely inspired by Kipling’s “The Jungle Book” and by Buddhist notions about which I know nothing (Tudor was a committed Buddhist), the ballet is essentially the story of a boy’s sexual initiation and his struggle for spiritual equilibrium.

As the ballet begins, he balances in attitude, one hand outstretched, in a kind of vaguely Asian runner’s pose (the whole ballet has an Asian feel). Slowly, he raises one leg to the side, then the other, like a slow pendulum. He rushes over to a large tree (tree of life?) that dominates the stage—we’re in a jungle, filled with vine-like trapezes. There, he squats in a regal meditation pose, legs open wide, hands resting on his thighs.  The stage is flooded by monkey creatures, called “Arboreals,” wearing strange hats that look like Hershey’s Kisses. After them come the bird-like “Aerials” wearing headpieces like Cambodian dancers. The monkeys’ movements are grotesque—squats and low bouncy jumps, dangling arms, upside-down poses on the trapeze—while the birds flutter their hands like Cambodian dancers and balance in arabesque. They mock and torment the boy, knock him down, push him around.

But this is nothing compared to his treatment at the hands the “Terrestrial,” a hyper-masculine, guru-like figure (danced at alternate performances by Cory Stearns and corps-member Roddy Doble). They engage in a battle of wills, with the Terrestrial gripping the boy’s arm aggressively and standing directly over him, his groin at the boy’s face-level. The humiliated boy is forced to crawl between his legs. Their battle ends with the roles reversed; the guru kneels in front of the boy, at crotch-level, after which the boy “mounts” him—stands on his back as the guru kneels on all fours, legs apart, in a position of total sexual submission. It’s certainly cringe-inducing—one doesn’t expect to see this at the ballet—but for this very reason, quite powerful in its own weird way.

Next, comes a “Celestial” creature  (Xiomara Reyes / Sarah Lane) carried aloft by two attendants. She is like the Siren in “Prodigal Son,” but more powerful since she is able to attack not only from the ground, but also from the air. Their combat ends with the ballerina held aloft in plié, legs open at the head of a dragon built from the bodies of all the forest creatures, with the “Terrestrial” as its tail. I found this to be a very powerful, almost magical, image. One can’t chide Tudor for a lack of imagination. The boy, strengthened by his newfound sexual knowledge, stands his ground, and finishes the ballet squatting majestically under his tree. But then, in an odd twist, he scratches himself like a monkey. Knowledge and power have their price, Tudor is telling us. They turn us into animals.

Of the two boys, Craig Salstein and Daniil Simkin, Salstein was the more poetic, Simkin the more fierce and instinctual, and perhaps the more exciting. It will do Simkin good to have such a dramatic role under his belt. This ballet’s time may have passed, but I was glad to see it. I’m only sorry that we were not able to see the dancer for whom I assume the ballet was revived, Herman Cornejo, who is suffering from an injury. We can only hope that he will recover in time to dance “Sleeping Beauty” with Alina Cojocaru on July 8.

Sascha Radetsky, Alexandre Hammoudi, and Daniil Simkin in Millepied's "Troika." Photo by Mikhail Logvinov.

Then there were the premières. Millepied’s “Troika” had been performed during the company’s appearance in Moscow in March, but never in NY. It’s the least substantial of the three new works, essentially a playful romp for three male friends set to excerpts from two Bach suites for solo cello. It returns to the jocular, laid-back mood of his last ballet for N.Y.C.B., “Plainspoken.” One could easily pick out Millepied’s sources: the three sailors in Jerome Robbins’ “Fancy Free”; the improvisational doodling for a solo male dancer in “A Suite of Dances,” which is also by Robbins and also set to Bach suites; the self-consciously casual, “cool” American style of Twyla Tharp in “In the Upper Room” and other works; the stomping, vaguely folksy dances Millepied recently created for a production of Smetana’s “Bartered Bride” at Juilliard. It’s an enjoyable piece, but it feels ingratiating and haphazardly constructed. About halfway through, it loses steam, but I will say that it nicely delineates the personalities of the three dancers. The guy in the middle  (Simkin in one cast, Jared Matthews in the other) is the trio’s mascot, the goof who gets swung around and teased by the other two. Sasha Radetsky (and Blaine Hoven in the other cast) is the show-off, the one with the big jumps; and Alexandre Hammoudi (Thomas Forster) is the sensitive soul. He stops to listen to the music and does a pensive solo that begins with a curious horizontal walk in “plank” pose, low to the ground. Both Hammoudi and Forster were wonderfully open-hearted and “plain” in this section, and both casts danced with great naturalness and sense of camaraderie.

Michele Wiles and Thomas Forster in Ratmansky's "Dumbarton." Photo by Rosalie O'Connor.

“Dumbarton,” Ratmansky’s ballet for ten dancers, is set to Stravinsky’s “Dumbarton Oaks” violin concerto, one of the composer’s neo-Baroque works, with clear references to the Brandenburg Concertos. I had to see it twice to begin to get a sense of all its moving parts. Much as I admire Ratmansky’s work in general, this was not one of my favorites, in part because it seemed unresolved, as if it were still in the process of finding its focus. There is an awful lot to look at. I especially liked how Ratmansky constantly subdivided the cast into shifting sub-groups. The layering created a satisfyingly complex texture, but also made it easy to lose focus. In the second movement, for example, while a couple danced a lyrical pas de deux (in a kind of tango embrace),  another woman entered and exited the stage, playing around to a little melody, blithely ignoring them. She wasn’t the only third wheel in the ballet; earlier, a man had imposed his presence upon a dancing couple. Friend? Foe? Competitor? It wasn’t clear. The dancing was big, free, relaxed, classical in its vocabulary but not in its execution. Like the costumes—workmanlike outfits in grayish hues—it had an everyman feel.

There were high points. Toward the end of the second movement, the tension began to build: a couple which had seemed very friendly early on began to show signs of strain; the woman pulled and pulled, as the other dancers watched with increasing concern, until finally she fell to the ground, dead, and was carried away. But then there she was again, in the third movement, as if nothing had happened. This movement had a more playful feel; there was a kind of square dance moment, after which the men lifted the women up high, and the women flapped their arms showily, as if to say, “look, no arms!” And then the ballet was over, somewhat abruptly. Though it’s full of ideas that will reward repeated viewings, “Dumbarton” has neither the clarity nor the coherence of such works as “Seven Sonatas” and “Russian Seasons.” But the dancers looked alive and engaged, particularly Isabella Boylston and Misty Copeland in the first cast, and Gemma Bond, Leann Underwood, Julio Bragado-Young and Luciana Paris in the second

David Hallberg and Gillian Murphy in Wheeldon's "Thirteen Diversions." Photo by Rosalie O'Connor.

Wheeldon’s piece, “Thirteen Diversions,” had no such loose ends. It was the most formal, most polished, and most fully realized work of the evening, with nifty colored lighting demarcating each of the sections and tailored costumes with jacket-like tops and the slightest hint of coat-tails. When all the men lined up in a row, I had the thought that they looked very much like footmen; perhaps a left-over idea from “Alice in Wonderland,” which Wheeldon recently choreographed for the Royal Ballet? The large cast was divided into dancers dressed in white (soloists) and black (corps), and the groupings were elegant and extremely pleasing to the eye. The first tableau contained one of Wheeldon’s very skillful static sculptural shapes, with a dancer on the ground connected to another one lunging forward and then to another, and yet another, and ending with a dancer held aloft, head down, as if flying in to join the dance.

The whole ballet, which is set to Benjamin Britten’s episodic “Diversions for Piano and Orchestra,” felt very Ashtonian: pliant, expressive torsos, lots of épaulement, decorous, floating port de bras, pretty, constantly shifting hand gestures. Gemma Bond, who trained at the Royal Ballet School, was especially eye-catching in these phrases for the arms and hands. Some sections were more interesting than others, but the climax came, as always with Wheeldon, in two central pas de deux, especially the second, by far the most theatrical moment in the ballet. There were the convoluted lifts, a Wheeldon signature, and moments in which the man dragged his partner with her legs open in a diagonal split. Their pas de deux had a desperate tinge: the ballerina moved her feet forward laboriously with her hands, as if suffering from some sort of paralysis, and the man handled her legs and pulled them into one shape and another. It made me thing at times of the bedroom pas de deux in Kenneth MacMillan’s “Manon,” minus the hysterics. I saw two casts: Marcelo Gomes and Isabella Boylston in one, and Hee Seo and Cory Stearns in the other. Seo is the more theatrical of the two, but Boylston had a more hopeless pall. Stearns was more quietly intense, Gomes more urgent. The ballet ended with an image of this couple mid-struggle, as if suddenly Wheeldon had decided that he wanted the ballet to be about more than just the music, but I wasn’t completely convinced.

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