Looking Behind, and a Little Bit Ahead
<First published online in the New York Times on October 25, 2007>
American Ballet Theater leads a divided existence. For most of the year it plays it safe as the least adventurous of the world’s prestigious ballet companies, with a repertory of conventional full-length story ballets — some good, some ghastly — none of which would have embarrassed Stalinist Russia at its most artistically stagnant.
Then — though only during three weeks of the time it spends in the United States each year — it acknowledges that some of ballet’s most important breakthroughs of the last 70 years have actually happened (some at Ballet Theater itself). It even hints that it might like to dip a toe into the waters of the 21st century.
Two of those weeks have just begun: The company is ensconced at City Center until Nov. 4 with a repertory of ballets all created since 1940, most in the last 30 years, and two of them world premieres. (The third week occurs during its annual spring season at the Metropolitan Opera House.) Within the United States, only New York and Berkeley, Calif., currently see this “modern” face of Ballet Theater at all.
This polarity reflects problems addressed now by most ballet companies across the world: Mr. and Ms. General Public, increasingly wary of the new, would rather see “Swan Lake” when going out for a good time. But it is sad that Ballet Theater, more than most companies, has let these problems steer it into this Jekyll-and-Hyde existence. In its opening decades the company (founded in 1940) very quickly became world-class because of new ballets by Antony Tudor, Agnes de Mille, Jerome Robbins, George Balanchine and others.
Tuesday’s opening-night gala paid its respects to the company’s own history with three works created for it: an excellent account of Robbins’s “Fancy Free” (1944), a pas de deux from Tudor’s “Leaves Are Fading” (1975) and two excerpts from Stanton Welch’s “Clear” (2001). There will be chances to see these three ballets complete, with cast changes, during the season.
To remind us of the company’s alter ego, the evening also included an account of the famous “Don Quixote” pas de deux, with its balances, jumps and turns; its Spanish swagger and its coquetry; and the only tutu to be seen all night. And it opened with its first-ever performance of Balanchine’s “Ballo Della Regina,” taught by Merrill Ashley (who originated its ballerina role with New York City Ballet almost 30 years ago) with scintillating musical and technical detail.
Where, however, is the theater in Ballet Theater, especially when it comes to presenting galas? The members of Tuesday’s audience, who had spent large sums on tickets, arrived by 6:30 p.m. (well, most of them), listened to a gracious speech by the company’s artistic director, Kevin McKenzie, giving thanks to important benefactors, and then watched four different dances before the intermission.
You may be sure that most of the audience had little clue which ballet or which dancer was which, or in what way each ballet mattered. Couldn’t the company give gala audiences a master of ceremonies — some beloved past star or ballet-knowledgeable celebrity, maybe more than one — to serve as a guide?
A further dichotomy arises. Ballet Theater has several of the world’s most technically assured principal dancers, but whereas its men emerge as attractive personalities regardless of whether they dance a step, its women (with the exception of Julie Kent, an appealing actress) emerge as inhibited theater artists.
In “Ballo Della Regina,” a ballerina vehicle in which Balanchine took female allegro technique to a peak never surpassed even to this day, Gillian Murphy doesn’t seem to know how good she is or that the audience wants to admire her as a person of glamour. On Tuesday she let her mouth hang open, seldom opened her eyes wide enough to acknowledge the auditorium and blurred the ballet’s most gasp-inducing stroke, an upraised leg descending in brisk stop-motion, a display that should embody the heroine’s witty mastery.
Underneath this unappealing facade is a beautiful cascade of polished dancing: Ms. Murphy just doesn’t yet know how to present it.
Something similar applies to Paloma Herrera in the “Don Q” pas de deux: I have seen this war horse delivered with far more theatrical panache and enchanting flirtation by ballerinas with half of Ms. Herrera’s technical accomplishment. Michele Wiles captured the lyrical spontaneity and dynamic contrasts of the “Leaves Are Fading” excerpt, but seemed unsure of how to let the audience in on her privacy.
To turn from them to David Hallberg (“Ballo”), Herman Cornejo (“Clear”), José Manuel Carreño (“Quixote”), and Marcelo Gomes, Sasha Radetsky and, again, Mr. Cornejo (as the sailors in “Fancy Free”) is at once to recognize how assured these men are as theater animals. In Mr. Cornejo’s case, his mastery and astounding technical ease are handled with a beautiful modesty: he is always absorbed in his role, and yet he knows, heart-catchingly, how to bring the audience into his world.
Mr. Hallberg, with his unusually pale coloring and angular features, is the least theatrically mature of these men, but his focus, timing and elegance are impeccable. Likewise his lightness, speed and line. Has this role ever been danced better?
Ormsby Wilkins’s conducting of Verdi’s delectable music for “Ballo” was foursquare, without lift to the phrases, and the violin cadenza was delivered like rote work. Yet this piece should soon prove a major addition to the Ballet Theater repertory. Below ballerina level, the “Ballo” women looked tingling with delight. The marvelously unalike Misty Copeland, Maria Riccetto, Hee Seo and Jacquelyn Reyes educated you in just how variously Balanchine could point up the rhythm of a waltz phrase: lusciously bright, each one.
@New York Times, 2007