Four Distinct Dream Worlds, Sharing the Same Language of Classical Ballet

<First published online in the New York Times on January 19, 2008>

“Are you a ‘Tombeau’ freak too?” a leading New York dance critic asked me at our first meeting in 1979 at the New York State Theater. We had just been watching Balanchine’s ballet “Le Tombeau de Couperin,” which was then less than four years old.

Actually, until that moment I had found this ensemble work, danced by eight junior male-female couples to Ravel’s music, underwhelming. It has no principal roles; it is, by Balanchine’s high-octane standards, low-energy and without any steps or stylistic features that look singular; and I, then younger than most of its dancers, was new to New York City Ballet and most Balanchine works. But I was so taken by the critic’s enthusiasm that I went to the next performance with heightened curiosity. And yes, soon I was a “Tombeau” freak too, and was wondering how its wealth of incident could have eluded me.

Decades have passed without my being able to see this 1975 ballet again, and so for me the main incentive to watch City Ballet’s new program “Balanchine’s World,” which opened on Thursday night at the State Theater, was to reacquaint myself with it. “Tombeau” is itself a world: its 16 dancers are less a corps de ballet than a community, and each time a man or a woman so much as changes partners, it is an interesting social event.

Though each section of Ravel’s music honors the memory of a friend who died in World War I, and though each is also a Neo-Classical study in a different Baroque dance form (forlane, rigaudon, minuet and others), what’s striking about the music is its freshness and fragrance. And that’s how Balanchine sets it in dance: although history may run through the different dance forms here, these dancers are young, spontaneous, very much in the moment.

Each dance employs new patterns, meters, speeds and scales of step. The orchestral version of Ravel’s music - just strings and woodwinds - sounds wonderfully sweet, and the image of these dancers, dew-bright on Thursday, moving in happy concert against a twilight-blue backdrop, becomes such an image of young-adult innocence that it pierces the heart.

Anybody viewing - or listening to - this “Balanchine’s World” quadruple bill, conducted with vitality by Maurice Kaplow, might find it easier to put its title into the plural: not one world but four. “Le Tombeau de Couperin” is a far voyage from the rushing virtuoso entertainment of “Tarantella,” which immediately follows it, or from the Japanese-ritual-erotic “Bugaku,” or from the Gothic narrative of “La Sonnambula” with which the evening ends.

But the miracle is that Balanchine made them all. He knew the composers - Ravel, Hershy Kay (who arranged and orchestrated the Gottschalk “Tarantella”), Toshiro Mayuzumi (the composer of “Bugaku”) and Vittorio Rieti (whose arrangement of pieces from four Bellini operas proves more enthralling at each performance) - and he entered each score as if inhabiting the same dream world as the composer.

And all four of these pieces use the language of classical ballet as Balanchine had developed it. It was good to see “Tarantella” again on Thursday night. Daniel Ulbricht can be too slick and cute a performer, and his dancing at times can be as thwacky as the way he handled his tambourine here (causing some of its spangles to fall). But on this occasion there was plenty of juice in his dancing; the audience rightly rejoiced in his long-sailing jumps. Megan Fairchild glowed beside him, warmly reveling in every eccentricity in the accentuation of her steps.

If you know Balanchine’s work but are new to “Bugaku,” then its overall japonaiserie and the overt sexuality of its pas de deux will extend your knowledge of what he could present. On Thursday the mixture of hugeness and delicacy with which Maria Kowroski danced was admirable. But it was dramatically nullified by the underpowered performing of Albert Evans as her partner. And anyway, “Bugaku,” which was in repertory last year, rewards multiple viewings less than most Balanchine ballets: I want to see it again, but not for a long while.

By contrast, “La Sonnambula,” a ballet I know better, continues to enthrall. I follow it heart in mouth, like a thriller. And I will be sorry to miss any of the few remaining performances given by Nikolaj Hübbe as the Poet. I would send any dancer in the world, and any lover of dance theater, just to watch his entrance. He comes on quietly and stands absolutely still for perhaps a minute, looking steadily along the stage diagonal at the Coquette (Sara Mearns), while everyone else onstage reacts to his presence, and this alone becomes tremendous because of the calm focus of his gaze and the riveting relaxation with which he stands so still.

Everything about Mr. Hübbe - his good looks, his stillness, the blend of sunny vitality and poetic rapture -!is right for this role. He is set apart from the decadent world of the Coquette and other characters, and we know at once what gap in his life the Sleepwalker can fill. He is heart-catching in the transitional passage when he is left without the Coquette and wonders who is about to arrive, and then more so as he tries so ardently to follow, block, contain the elusive title heroine.

Darci Kistler, very limited in dance power these days, has no better role than the Sleepwalker, and Ms. Mearns brought allure and edge to her debut account of the Coquette. This, however, gave the audience only a clue of the creaminess and glamour Ms. Mearns brought to the ballerina role in Balanchine’s “Diamonds” on Jan. 11.

At that performance (another debut) she responded to the partnering of Jonathan Stafford not with the fabulous independence Suzanne Farrell, the role’s original dancer, made legendary but with a partly vulnerable responsiveness, bringing out new aspects of the choreography’s “Swan Lake” echoes.

Yet the plush of Ms. Mearns’s dancing is not unlike Farrell’s, and she went on to shape the solo passages with real authority. When she made her debut last spring in “Walpurgisnacht” (another Farrell role), I thought she was not up to its technical challenges, but now I am impatient to see her in that and other roles.

@New York Times, 2008