Off to London, but Not Packing Their Best

<First published online in the New York Times on March 9, 2008>

ON Wednesday New York City Ballet will open a season in London, its first there in more than 24 years and its first ever at the London Coliseum (a good theater for ballet: its dance history, which includes recent seasons by the Kirov and the Bolshoi, goes back to Diaghilev). The opening piece will be George Balanchine’s “Serenade” (1934).

This same ballet opened the final all-Balanchine, all-Tchaikovsky triple bill of City Ballet’s three-month winter season at the New York State Theater, a season dominated by Balanchine ballets. Has “Serenade” ever looked sketchier or more sentimental at City Ballet than in this season’s performances? The sweetened-up, danced-down meagerness - with Darci Kistler as the heroine and Yvonne Borree leading the Russian Dance - ran through some of the company’s other Balanchine repertory as well.

That repertory remains City Ballet’s bedrock. Performances like these of “Serenade,” however, are not what it should be taking to London. Even so, one image from the opening sequence of this inexhaustible ballet has stuck in my head since the closing matinee. Sixteen women of the all-female corps de ballet all rise on point at the same moment, legs parallel, feet together. As they rise, their bodies arch like bows stretched in archery, or sails filled by the wind.

This is a perfect demonstration of the accentuation, jazzily modernist and romantically windblown, that Balanchine brought to ballet. The moment still happens at City Ballet, but it no longer proves a gateway, as it once did, to Advanced Balanchine.

Another such moment comes in a brief introductory solo for the ballet’s third female role, unofficially known as the Dark Angel. On point she extends a leg to the side, then transfers her weight sideways, so that we see her starting to fall onto that leg before she has even begun to lower it - a kind of physicality unthinkable in European ballet in 1934 and for many subsequent decades. Though Kaitlyn Gilliland’s refined debut in this role was the best thing in these recent performances, this moment once had more impact.

Balanchine developed this off-balance dramatization of the basic transfer of weight throughout his long American career. Another off-balance image used to occur in “Mozartiana” (1981), which followed “Serenade” on that recent all-Tchaikovsky program. (The music is Tchaikovsky’s arrangement of four pieces by Mozart.) In its final section, Theme and Variations, the ballerina, originally Suzanne Farrell, and her male partner dance a series of extraordinary solos; I can never forget how, in the third of these, Ms. Farrell would arch her body while moving on point. Yes, here it was again: the body as a bow stretched ready to shoot.

There is no sense in saying all ballerinas should dance this piece as Ms. Farrell did. But the heroic off-balance quality in which Ms. Farrell specialized, and which was the culmination of the impetus Balanchine had been developing since “Serenade,” is now missing from all City Ballet accounts of the roles he created for her. This loss cuts a major dimension out of the whole repertory. Today’s performances of such works render them safe, undisturbing, unchallenging.

Such adjectives are virtually anti-Balanchine. I need only recall City Ballet’s performances in London in 1979 and 1983. Dancegoers there, used to a more restrained kind of classicism, were challenged, rattled and shocked, but also possessed, by Balanchine’s radical reconception of ballet style. Arguments broke out, sleep was lost, but people could not stop talking about what they had seen, with an intensity that London’s own dancers had never inspired among the aficionados I knew there.

Will any such controversies occur in London this month? I doubt it. These days City Ballet is a politer troupe. The very transfer of weight - from one foot to another, or from two feet to one - is less audacious. It often used to feel as if the dancers were stepping fearlessly out over a brink, and it was thrilling to behold. In parts of the body - especially wrists and pelvises - style has become neater, more seemly. There’s little point in blaming individual dancers (though there is a distressing amount of dead wood among the company’s principals); the larger pattern is altogether paler than it used to be. Ballets suffer in consequence. I can still enjoy City Ballet’s final movement of Balanchine’s “Western Symphony,” but the first two are nearly threadbare. And I now sit out “Bugaku.”

Within these diminished circumstances the company still often does excellent work. In some ways it is in better shape than it was in the 1990s, thanks above all to its music director, Fayçal Karoui, and principal conductor, Maurice Kaplow. (The level - both as playing and as accompaniment - can still slip alarmingly on nights when neither is conducting.)

That “Serenade”-“Mozartiana” program ended with “Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2.” Even though I carry golden-age memories of this ballet in my head from 25 years ago, and even though the Kirov will soon dance it at City Center (under its old title, “Ballet Imperial”), these performances were cause for excitement. Ashley Bouder built upon the extraordinarily accomplished and multifaceted account of the taxing lead role that she first danced last spring, while Teresa Reichlen, graduating to the same lead role, seemed to breeze through it with radiantly cool sureness, never interpreting it, just being it, allowing the ballet to shine without any editorial comment of her own.

How can the same company dance Tchaikovsky-Balanchine classics in such contrasting ways on the same program? I wish London could see performances like these in “Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2”; the company’s dance sails were again full.

For Ms. Reichlen this winter season brought excellent debuts in other plum roles, like the ballerina role of “Stars and Stripes” and the Siren in “The Prodigal Son.” In the latter her inscrutability, her height, her aplomb all worked wonders. I have seen no account of it as fine as this.

A soloist who lapped up even more debuts was Sara Mearns: the ballerina role in “Diamonds” (a Farrell role), the Coquette in “La Sonnambula,” the “Clara as wife” role in “Robert Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze,” Spring in Jerome Robbins’s “Four Seasons” and a lead in Christopher Wheeldon’s new “Rococo Variations.” With each new role Ms. Mearns’s luxurious texture and personal glamour came into sharper focus. This winter season has made her a stage artist of greater refinement, authority and precision. (Casting like this shows dancers improving before our very eyes.)

City Ballet could probably cast all four ballerina roles of Balanchine’s “Liebeslieder Waltzer” to good effect from dancers below principal level; Ms. Reichlen, Ms. Mearns, Tiler Peck (another soloist) and Kathryn Morgan (still in the corps) are the four most likely just now. Junior male dancers, including Tyler Angle, Robert Fairchild, Adrian Danchig-Waring, David Prottas and Giovanni Villalobos, all became more distinct and more mature this winter. One longs to see them in bigger and more demanding roles.

The company’s principals, however, are a truly motley crew. Ms. Borree, Ms. Kistler, Albert Evans and Nilas Martins each do well by no more than just one role apiece (“Duo Concertant,” “La Sonnambula,” “Russian Seasons” and “Union Jack”); their dimness across the rest of their repertory is an embarrassment. Abi Stafford, less dim, is not more interesting.

The central story at City Ballet, though, has always been the choreography, above all the vast supply by Balanchine. In all its previous visits to London (1950, 1952, 1965, 1979, 1983) City Ballet showed Balanchine works never seen there before. Perhaps few people today can understand how incendiary many of them were; I remember fighting on the barricades to defend the leotards-and-tights ballets, “Union Jack” (“the worst ballet I have ever seen,” one friend said, literally shaking with rage) and the dancing of Ms. Farrell and others.

I wish London could see Balanchine’s “Raymonda Variations” or “Divertimento From ‘Le Baiser de la Fée.’ ” They have never been danced there; this winter they were looking bright here. On such occasions I’m aware that hundreds of relatively new dancegoers in New York are still discovering how enthralling the Balanchine repertory can be.

But there are greater Balanchine ballets than those. Like other New Yorkers I’ll go on rewatching “Serenade” and “Mozartiana,” but must such central Balanchine masterpieces be given such gray accounts? “Concerto Barocco,” another classic, was no better last June, and parts of “Davidsbündlertänze” are being trashed by Ms. Kistler’s choreographic additions and subtractions. How will “Apollo” look now that Nikolaj Hübbe is gone?

Nonetheless when I recall what I saw of the doldrums this company hit from 1990 to 2000, I suspect that it is on an upward curve. At one ordinary Saturday matinee when, as a dance wag once put it, “there was nobody there but the audience,” Ms. Bouder, amazingly, found time in her rapid solo in the “Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux,” while on one point, to bring her raised leg down with a slowness that came out of the blue: an old-style coloratura effect of leisure within speed. On such occasions, as when Ms. Reichlen dances the Siren, even those with memories have to wonder if things were much better 25 or more years ago. But the evidence of too many other City Ballet performances and too many City Ballet principal dancers keeps suggesting that my theory about the company’s improvement may just be false hope.

@New York Times, 2008