Keeping Their Eyes on the Score

<First published online in the New York Times on January 13, 2014>

MIAMI — Miami City Ballet, widely known as one of the world’s leading exponents of choreography by George Balanchine, also has a record of new choreography. Its current quadruple bill, labeled “See the Music,” opens with Balanchine’s “Concerto Barocco” (1941) and has Nacho Duato’s “Jardí Tancat” (1983), a new company acquisition, as a centerpiece. But it also features two works recently made for the troupe, Justin Peck’s “Chutes and Ladders” (2013, to the first movement of Benjamin Britten’s String Quartet No. 1) and Alexei Ratmansky’s “Symphonic Dances” (2012, to Rachmaninoff’s 1940 work of that name).

The Ratmansky was commissioned by the company’s previous artistic director, Edward Villella; the Peck was commissioned by Lourdes Lopez, its new one. This speaks, as much else does, of artistic continuity within the Miami company. There has been no pronounced change of style or repertory since Mr. Villella’s departure in 2012: The Ratmansky and the Peck works were closely concerned with their music, a part of the Balanchine approach shared by both artistic directors. Injury kept several of the company’s finest principals (notably the sisters Jeanette and Patricia Delgado) offstage during the performances I watched on Saturday and Sunday, but their replacements flourished, and the audience had four very different genres of choreography to compare.

“Symphonic Dances,” an exciting piece lasting some 35 minutes, abounds in felicities of steps and construction. You watch it with both delight in its passing detail and suspense about what will happen next. It’s also mystifying. With the dancers passing through three sets of costumes (by Adeline André and Istvan Dohar), the work establishes dramas, characters and situations we still haven’t fully understood when the curtain falls.

This is intentional. A program note by Mr. Ratmansky says: “There is no real story. I want the audience to leave with the images and feelings that the movement gives them.” To a large degree, that works beautifully. “Symphonic Dances” takes us through three very different scenes, each a dream world laden with emotion and fatefulness. I loved the long, sleeveless frocks in pastel hues worn by the women in the first movement, and the much brighter colors (azure, lemon, scarlet and others) of the women’s diaphanous dresses in the second movement help to establish this scene as a marvelous dream ballroom.

Rachmaninoff’s music is a return to the Russia he had left behind. Mr. Ratmansky’s dramaturgy, established through movement alone, suggests various Russian-flavored situations and a wide range of characters. (Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot” kept coming to mind.)

The leading man (Shimon Ito), for example, seems a holy fool; he’s the innocent observer, often a passive participant caught up in events larger than himself. Two characters may be his parents. A second young man (Renato Penteado) may be his guide or dark angel.

With these two men, two women (Nathalia Arja and Tricia Albertson) form a complex quartet of romance and pain. The place of a third woman (Sara Esty) is stranger: She seems younger, more assertive, often involved in a separate drama.

Many images beam out. In a dawnlike scene, to birdlike woodwind music, eight women arrive, one by one, gesturing outward but also watching one another anxiously. As the ballroom waltz begins with an ensemble, one couple after another is briefly, eloquently individualized. Later, in the same scene, the two lead men carry in a heroine as if on a throne above their heads, set to a powerful musical phrase.

Another woman lies as if sleeping, while the dancers pass in pairs like dream figures across the stage, each pair with its own step and its own meter. In a thrillingly rhythmic step, four men at the side of the stage repeatedly jump one way and then collect themselves back where they began. My only disappointment is the ending, where Ms. Esty, hitherto isolated, jumps into the arms of a dancer who carries her offstage. Too trite.

The costumes added layers to puzzle over. Why does the dark angel wear a hood in the first movement? Why do all the men wear them in the third? Why does the holy fool wear a red star on his back in the first movement, and why does the third woman wear the same red star in the third movement? As in some other Ratmansky ballets, these costume effects imply an insider knowledge that leaves an audience looking for further information.

Mr. Peck’s “Chutes and Ladders” is an extended pas de deux, 10 minutes long, during which the string quartet is played on a platform onstage. The idiom, though covering a range of moods and tempos, is generally classical-playful. There are solos for both woman and man, sometimes simultaneously.

The duet sections are cooperative. (As he alights from one jump, she helps him to arrive safely.) One repeated phrase, matching a figure in the music, starts wittily with a lifted sideways jump (assemblé) across the stage before moving into a new formality and expansiveness.

I watched two casts (Ms. Esty with Renan Cerdeiro, Ms. Albertson with Mr. Penteado) and loved how the choreography allowed each dancer to color it in distinctive ways: Ms. Esty and Mr. Cerdeiro youthfully and humorously, Ms. Albertson and Mr. Penteado with a more expansive maturity.

In “Jardí Tancat,” done to Catalan folk songs, three men and three women play peasants being earnest, honest and suffering while experiencing a few of life’s fleeting joys. This kind of evocation of peasant life was stale when Mr. Duato made the work three decades ago; the choreographers Jiri Kylian and Christopher Bruce had already mined the idiom. I’m sorry to find “Jardí Tancat” wall-to-wall cliché.

The evening’s greatest pleasure was the most familiar. Dancing Balanchine’s “Concerto Barocco,” the Miami dancers showed the company’s exceptional way of revealing the three-dimensionality of dance, contrasting open and closed positions with marvelous boldness.

Both performances were led by Katia Carranza, making phrase upon phrase spontaneous and compelling. But it was the corps dancers whose ardor carried the ballet. At the Sunday performance, a lighting gel fell onto the stage during the third movement, but nothing perturbed these young women, dedicated and rapt.

@New York Times, 2014