From Realm of Pure Dance to Enchanted Fairyland

<First published online in the New York Times on May 28, 2007>

What conjunction of the stars determined that Bach and Handel were both born in 1685, Verdi and Wagner in 1813, and George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton in 1904? Impossible to imagine Western classical music without the first pair, Romantic opera without the second, modern classical ballet without the third. Balanchine, working principally in New York from 1934, and Ashton, working mainly in London from 1926, achieved their finest works when moving in separate orbits, but their paths often crossed over the decades.

Since their deaths their paths have continued to cross, even in New York City Ballet’s production of “The Sleeping Beauty,” which includes both Balanchine’s 1981 Garland Waltz (credited) and Ashton’s 1952 Vision Scene solo for Aurora (uncredited). American Ballet Theater, which has shown Balanchine and Ashton choreography over the years, is now presenting a double bill of their ballets, short in duration (just under two hours), rich in substance.

Balanchine’s “Symphonie Concertante” (1947), extraordinarily pure, has the effect of cleansing the palate. It’s a primer in ballet: You see basic steps built into constructions first simple, then complex, and all in close conjunction with Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante (K. 364), with two ballerinas often closely matching the solo violin and viola. There are moments when Balanchine wittily cuts a phrase into staccato segments — when the corps dancers in one passage lower their arms and then bend in freeze-frame stages, they momentarily look like mechanical dolls — and others when he releases the grammar of classicism in lyrical jubilance. The more the dancers marry themselves to the music (on Saturday afternoon one could see Michele Wiles growing closer to the violin, while Veronika Part stayed indifferent to the viola), the better it works, and the corps in particular seem to delight in its brightness.

“The Dream” (1964) is, with “Monotones” (1965-66), one of two ballets in which Ashton took his refinement of classical ballet style furthest; whereas “Monotones” is about extreme adagio, “The Dream” is full of speed, intricacy, filigree detail, luxurious ornamentation. No wonder: It’s set in fairyland, retelling Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” keeping the story in the wood by omitting the opening and closing Athenian acts, and — following Tyrone Guthrie’s famous 1937 Old Vic production — setting it in the early Victorian era of Mendelssohn’s music.

Again and again we see the dancers’ feet tracing rings, now on the ground, now in the air; it’s all part of the magic, never more hauntingly than in the Nocturne pas de deux for Oberon and Titania. Here she slowly revolves while marking a ring on the floor with one extended point, just as Mendelssohn’s strings suddenly sing a single high note.

Period though the ballet looks, it’s also a clear expression of the new 1960s view of the sexes. It is the first important choreography anywhere where the male dancer (Oberon) raises his extended back leg until it becomes the highest point of his body (arabesque penchée) — he does other steps usually reserved for ballerinas too — and often, in unisex style, while supporting his ballerina (Titania) in the same extended line.

Of the casts I have seen so far, the miracle performance has been Herman Cornejo’s as Puck: a prodigy of lightness and alacrity combined with effortless charm and absorption in the world onstage. At every point this ballet is alive; the footwork for the fairy corps alone trounces the notion, sometimes heard, that Ashton placed more emphasis on women’s upper bodies than their lower halves. And the role of Bottom is played (whether by Julio Bragado-Young or Alexei Agoudine) with an appealingly high energy that transforms it.

I can rush to find fault with exaggerated acting here and there, and no Oberon quite commands those penchée extensions. But I was happily held, especially in the Saturday matinee’s pairing of Gillian Murphy (who reveled in Titania’s lissome bendings and frissons), with the glowingly heroic Oberon of David Hallberg.

“The Dream” is the glory of Ballet Theater’s three Shakespeare ballets this season. The way its music opens and closes with four successive woodwind chords of sleep and magic also reminds me of Shakespeare’s Prospero: “Our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

@New York Times 2007