Creating Radiant Space and Polishing New Facets of a Dance Gem

<first published online in the New York Times on October 17, 2008>

MIAMI, Oct. 15 — At a fundamental level, Balanchine choreography is physics rendered as drama. Space and time become newly charged: not just the zone defined by the body of each dancer, but the entire encompassing box of stage space, too, as the human body, like a multifocal laser show, lights up new geometries with each movement, and the awaiting space of the auditorium is correspondingly galvanized. The geometries become brilliantly rhythmic, and the microcosm onstage looks macro.

This is a primary layer of the Balanchine experience, but often it has been the first to go missing, either during his lifetime, when his ballets were tackled by ill-prepared companies far from his own influence, or since his death in 1983, as even his own former company, New York City Ballet, and others less directly linked to him have lost that quality of vital, physical blaze. When Miami City Ballet, visiting Edinburgh in 1994, danced his “Jewels” triple bill, the company included some imperfect feet and turnout, and yet you could feel the whole breadths, depths and heights of stage space powerfully animated by the radiance of the dancing.

Last weekend the company opened its 2007-8 season with a revival of “Jewels.” Here that spatial excitement was again, 13 years later. This style must come from Edward Villella, the Miami company’s artistic director, who was the original male lead in the Stravinsky “Rubies,” the centerpiece of “Jewels,” but the marvel was that it worked in “Emeralds” (Fauré) and “Diamonds” (Tchaikovsky) too.

Though “Jewels” has been famous since its 1967 premiere as an evening-length pure-dance display of three highly differentiated genres of ballet, all parts show Balanchine, whose New York City Ballet had moved to the large New York State Theater only in 1964, addressing stage space on a new scale.

After that Edinburgh season, Mr. Villella conscientiously brought in the three ballerinas forever associated with the 1967 premiere — Violette Verdy in “Emeralds,” Patricia McBride in “Rubies,” Suzanne Farrell in “Diamonds” — to coach it, conferring on the Miami “Jewels” a singular status as the post-Balanchine production best supported by primary-source wisdom. Remarkably, the benefits of their work may still be seen more than 10 years later with a new generation of principal dancers.

On Sunday afternoon at the Ziff Ballet Opera House in the Carnival Center here, “Emeralds,” the opening ballet, had no sooner started than there was that extraordinary sensation again: space being cleaved, illuminated, redefined, rendered rhythmic.

Those of us who have seen, for example, the Kirov Ballet in “Emeralds” can see that the Miami company doesn’t have the pedagogical pedigree, the rich physical texture, the Russian’s supreme elegance of bearing, and yet its version is more alive and significantly more focused.

If there is a past dancer the Miami company reminds me of in matters of style, it is Ms. McBride, Mr. Villella’s long-term stage partner. She had neither textbook feet (though hers were so eloquent that they left indelible memories) nor perfect turnout of the legs, but she opened herself out glowingly, as if hungering for the most exposed positions and most incisive rhythms. Her warmth as a performer, her precision, her bravery and her delicacy all came to mind in Miami.

The Miami “Jewels” shows a conscientious attention to detail, far surpassing that of New York City Ballet and the Kirov and suggesting that Mr. Villella and his colleagues truly treasure the lessons that Ms. Verdy, Ms. McBride and Ms. Farrell passed on in the 1990s.

In the “Bracelet” solo created in “Emeralds” for Ms. Verdy, Mary Carmen Catoya recaptures original features of gesture, focus and phrasing, all scintillating and charming. In “Rubies,” Jennifer Carlynn Kronenberg stretches out ardently in certain supported, off-balance positions as if over the edge of a cliff. (You could hear audience gasps.) And during a circuit of turns in “Diamonds,” Deanna Seay points up a raccourci emphasis with an attentiveness that makes the ballet look newly minted.

Watching, you wish that the “Jewels” dancers from City Ballet and the Kirov could go to Miami for coaching (although Diana Vishneva and the rest of the Kirov “Rubies” cast seen in 2000-2 would need amazingly little). This is not to say that Miami City Ballet is a world-class company, or that its “Jewels” could not be better yet.

In “Diamonds” Ms. Seay was poetic, and far brighter in musical timing than her Kirov counterparts, but neither elusive nor unpredictable; Rolando Sarabia (the company’s new Cuban principal) is chivalrous, but somewhat stiff even when pleasing the audience in jumps and turns. In “Rubies” Renato Penteado was occasionally tense, but fascinatingly pointed amid the male role’s athletic merriment.

The company’s through-the-body concentration, exciting from curtain rise in each ballet, only accumulates. The collective energy of “Rubies” and “Diamonds” mounted until, at the climax, the corps dancers seemed to be elegantly tearing themselves in several directions at once, and the slow, concluding septet of “Emeralds,” where Balanchine’s physics turn elegiac, had a riveting luster.

If I lived in Florida, I would attend every performance just to catch how Jeanette Delgado, Patricia Delgado and Didier Bramaz pick out the ineffable meters of the “Emeralds” pas de trois. And I would feast on the wryly self-fragmenting intricacy with which Ms. Kronenberg makes the “Rubies” heroine so bold and so funny.

Best of all, Juan Francisco La Manna, conducting, has the orchestra deliver excellent accounts of the Fauré, Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky scores, with “Rubies” played with terrific zip. The Ziff Opera Ballet House, just a year old, is an excellent frame for “Jewels,” its four-tier, 2,400-seat auditorium nowhere too deep or wide.

John Hall’s lighting does several things I had never seen in “Jewels.” I believe he is in error to place so much shadow around the leading couple in the middle of “Diamonds,” but he heightens some tableaus in “Emeralds” and “Rubies” with side lighting that makes the bodies gleam sensationally. Jewels indeed.

@New York Times, 2008