Master Builders of Ballet’s Future
<First published online in the New York Times in February 17, 2008>
BY the end of the last century ballet was looking more like a museum art than it had in more than 400 years. With the deaths of George Balanchine, Antony Tudor, Frederick Ashton, Kenneth MacMillan and Jerome Robbins, the ranks of world-class choreographers specializing in ballet looked thin or just empty. The three biggest names creating new ballets were Twyla Tharp, William Forsythe and Mark Morris: each, by ballet standards, in some way controversial and offbeat.
But the new millennium has brought to the fore two young men who are full-time exponents of ballet as an art both traditional and new: Christopher Wheeldon, the Anglo-American who has been resident choreographer at New York City Ballet since 2001 but is giving up the post this month, and Alexei Ratmansky, the Russian who announced just weeks ago that he was leaving the artistic directorship of the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow to focus on choreography.
New York has been the best place to watch them. Mr. Wheeldon created “Polyphonia,” the ballet that pushed him into the big time, for City Ballet in 2001. Mr. Ratmansky made his breakthrough with “The Bright Stream” at the Bolshoi in 2003 but produced his next major work, “Russian Seasons,” for City Ballet’s Diamond Project in 2006. All of which suggests that City Ballet, so inseparable from the artistic legacies of Balanchine and Robbins, is again becoming the world’s liveliest fulcrum of new ballet choreography.
Now Mr. Wheeldon, 34, is leaving City Ballet to run his own company, Morphoses. For a time it seemed that Mr. Ratmansky, 39, would succeed him. But now, it turns out, he is coming here just to make two ballets over the next three years. Why does it matter who takes these positions? What exactly does a resident choreographer do? How does the job differ from that of artistic director?
The matter is especially ambiguous at City Ballet, which, unlike most companies today, employs not an artistic director but a ballet master in chief, Peter Martins. And there is a built-in risk at City Ballet: What if the resident choreographer or ballet master guides the company into a new style at odds with its inheritance?
Artistic directors are often not choreographers at all; they deal with fund-raising, casting, daily classroom teaching, commissions, repertory and (not least) the board of directors. If a company wishes ballet to remain, at least in part, an art of the new, it will try to employ a resident choreographer (assuming any is suitable, available and affordable). The person in that role will produce at least one new ballet a year, draw new qualities out of the company’s dancers, shape new roles to which other dancers aspire and develop some style that becomes part of the company’s identity.
At City Ballet, Balanchine filled all those roles and more. He took the title of ballet master because the foundation of his work was his classroom teaching, in which he developed aspects of academic ballet to new intensity. His teaching began at the student level, as the basis of what was and is taught at the School of American Ballet.
Ballet master, or maître de ballet, had been the standard title of teacher-choreographers from the 17th to the 19th century, and it applied to the makers of the greatest surviving 19th-century ballets: August Bournonville in Denmark and Marius Petipa in Russia. The ballet master, now as then, takes the academic language of this impersonal and traditional art, with its turnout of the legs and its five positions of the feet, and develops in the classroom a style that is vitally connected to the idiom of the new ballets he choreographs for the company to dance onstage. He trains dancers to his specifications and then gives them new vehicles in which they may reveal themselves.
City Ballet had other resident choreographers in Balanchine’s lifetime, notably Robbins, who was named a company ballet master though he was not a teacher. (To make matters more confusing, he had at one time been artistic director of his own company, Ballets U.S.A.) But it was Mr. Martins who eventually succeeded Balanchine as ballet master, and later assumed the title of ballet master in chief. He led and leads the classroom teaching through the school and the company, and he has continued to choreograph.
The task of running a ballet company is far more onerous today than it used to be. There are now a number of such leaders whose initial talent for choreography (which helped to get them the jobs) has lost its inspiration. Mr. Martins is one; David Bintley at Birmingham Royal Ballet and Helgi Tomasson at San Francisco Ballet are two more; there are others. They deliver premieres, but not works of art the audience can inhabit.
Perhaps Mr. Martins admitted as much when he appointed Mr. Wheeldon resident choreographer in 2001. Or perhaps not: this job, though new as a position at City Ballet, was effectively the same one Robbins had done for decades.
Neither Mr. Wheeldon nor Mr. Ratmansky is known as a teacher, but each looks more like a true ballet master than anybody else currently on the scene. That is, they build ballets that find accents and life within the traditional vocabulary of ballet. This is why both “Polyphonia” and “The Bright Stream” caused such stirs. Both men have since been in demand to create ballets for the world’s foremost companies.
Mr. Ratmansky is also the most promising Russian-born choreographer since Balanchine. Perhaps others in the intervening years began with as much talent, but the aesthetic constraints of the Communist era either nipped several choreographic blooms in the bud or perverted them into agitprop apparatchiks.
Unlike any other Russian post-Balanchine dancemaker I know of, Mr. Ratmansky choreographs from a broad and unclouded command of the classical-ballet lexicon. And despite his work in the West, he seems, so far, very much a Russian artist.
He has choreographed to Shostakovich music that was composed during the Soviet era and then fell out of favor (“The Bright Stream”); to a Prokofiev score that succeeded in Stalinist Russia and has won international success ever since (“Cinderella,” for the Kirov); to a score by the émigré Stravinsky (“Jeu de Cartes,” choreographed for the Bolshoi as “Go for Broke”); and to music by two composers of the post-Communist era, Yuri Khanon (“Middle Duet,” choreographed for the Kirov and danced by City Ballet since 2006) and Leonid Desyatnikov (“Russian Seasons,” for City Ballet).
It’s quite possible that, as Mr. Ratmansky matures, he may develop a style that would clash with the Balanchine precepts still pursued at City Ballet: tight closed positions contrasted with stretched open ones; weight placed over the front of the foot; simple delivery; complex musicality. At the Bolshoi he has taken steps to revive ballets by the Moscow-born Léonide Massine, whose symphonic ballets in the late 1930s and ’40s were seen by New York dancegoers as the antithesis of Balanchine.
Today, nonetheless, the Ratmansky and Balanchine styles look congenial. And I can’t help speculating what connections would arise between Balanchine’s émigré-Russian classicism and Mr. Ratmansky’s new-Russian idiom if he eventually were to take the City Ballet post.
In the years that Mr. Wheeldon has been the resident choreographer there have certainly been links between his oeuvre and Balanchine’s. Although I don’t see that his work has shown anyone how to dance Balanchine better, he has often spotted those who are dancing Balanchine with distinction and given them a new bloom in his own choreography.
Perhaps Mr. Ratmansky could do as much, or more. His 2008 and 2010 premieres for City Ballet will be keenly watched. Could he yet become resident choreographer?
While Balanchine was alive, modernity took precedence over tradition in City Ballet’s repertory; his choreography was the living epitome of New York Modern. Now Balanchine is tradition, and it has been hard for anybody to know how to be modern in his (still radical) wake. Yet Mr. Ratmansky has not, to date, looked inhibited by his great precursor, and his ballets have more sheer authority than Mr. Wheeldon’s.
Like Balanchine, Mr. Ratmansky draws on his complex sense of Russia like a great well. New York, where Russian émigrés are as influential a part of dance as they were in Balanchine’s era, would be an exciting place to watch him at work. Roll out the next Ratmansky premiere at City Ballet: May 29.
@New York Times, 2008