Riding the Emotions of a Ratmansky Ballet

<First published online in the New York Times on May 31, 2008>

As “Concerto DSCH,” the new ballet by Alexei Ratmansky for New York City Ballet, unfolded at its premiere on Thursday night, you could feel wave upon wave of emotion sweeping across the audience. Wonder, excitement, admiration, affection, hilarity, surprise, exhilaration.

“Concerto DSCH” is an endlessly suspenseful choreographic construction, with passages of breathtaking dance brilliance. Again and again, you find yourself thinking, “I didn’t realize this was going to happen after that,” and “What exactly were those steps that flashed by just now?” Better yet, it’s marked by tender pure-dance poetry.

From the first it creates a world onstage, a world that keeps changing, enthrallingly, before our eyes. Its proceedings abound in classical pattern, design and formal structure, yet at the same time they’re full of very informal human touches (as when three virtuosos, taking a break at the back of the stage, sit and watch the action with happy inelegance). The dancers’ relationships keep starting to suggest stories, though the dance then sweeps unstoppably on.

What’s hard, at just one viewing, is to tell just how and why all this seems so miraculously right for the multiple layers of its music, the second piano concerto of Dmitri Shostakovich. The ballet’s title refers to a musical motif that the composer used to represent himself: “D.Sch,” both an abbreviation of his name as spelled in German and a four-note pattern.

Some dancegoers will know this concerto as the accompaniment to a long-popular 1966 ballet by Kenneth MacMillan, “Concerto.” Mr. Ratmansky has followed MacMillan’s lead in setting the beautiful slow movement as a male-female pas de deux backed by three other couples. His dance’s construction, however, is entirely different.

Mr. Ratmansky, who is leaving his post as artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, is unmistakably recreating here the perky Soviet optimism that Shostakovich’s score so determinedly suggests and occasionally undercuts. Holly Hynes’s costumes and the women’s hairstyles also evoke a bright Soviet ideal: cheerful, un-fancy.

Mr. Ratmansky’s structure may also derive from another Russian precedent: Balanchine’s “Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2” (or “Ballet Imperial,” 1941). Like that ballet, “Concerto DSCH” has two ballerinas and three leading men, all of whom we meet in the successive episodes of the first movement. One ballerina, Wendy Whelan, has her own partner, Benjamin Millepied, and dances the slow movement with him. The other, Ashley Bouder, is seen only in the outer movements, and, like her Balanchine predecessor, is seen both on her own and with the other two men (Joaquin De Luz and Gonzalo Garcia).

If Mr. Ratmansky knows these precursors, however, he is also so much his own master that he is, refreshingly, free to disregard them. He shows us the pure forms of academic ballet, but he also shows us aspects of acting characterization.

“Concerto DSCH” starts with two men dancing brightly in front of a revolving, inward-facing circle of dancers, a circle that is soon shown to reveal a crouching woman (Ms. Bouder), who soon bursts the circle apart and becomes a tornado of turns (and then a gale of jumps). So far, so classical. But other passages of “Concerto DSCH” have strong elements of what ballet folk define as both demicharacter and character dance.

In Mr. Ratmansky’s work, all these ingredients add up to a multidimensional humanity, sometimes in the same phrase, as when Ms. Whelan alternates between a flat-foot stance and dancing on point, or when Ms. Bouder, amid her second ebullient entry in the first movement, seems to be falling helplessly over her own feet. (It’s just the role Ms. Bouder needs right now: it shows off her phenomenal technique while making her look naïve.)

The finest beauties of the second-movement pas de deux for Ms. Whelan and Mr. Millepied lie in modest details: some lifts that touchingly hover only at nonspectacular heights, some skimming lifts where Ms. Whelan - never more touchingly intimate with her music - softly beats her legs in time to some rippling triplets in the piano part.

The society of “Concerto DSCH” is truly communal. Men and women are remarkably equal. Part of the comedy of Ms. Bouder’s romps with Mr. Garcia and Mr. De Luz lie in who will partner with whom. And who will end up with whom? As the work approaches its conclusion, it’s a matter of last-second suspense - wittily timed - as to just how Mr. De Luz (whose role keeps growing more individual and brilliant in the third movement) will fit in. The corps de ballet dancers aren’t backing groups or multiple refractions of the soloists; they’re companions.

Brief shadows occur. At one point a line of men who have lain lifeless get up, one by one - except that the last does not. But the work’s emphasis is positive, outward, and its dances pour forth in a continuous stream of galvanizing excitement and affectionate intimacy.

“Concerto DSCH” is the conclusion of “Here and Now”, a quadruple bill of ballets by four living choreographers, and two of the others - Mauro Bigonzetti’s “Oltremare” and Christopher Wheeldon’s “Rococo Variations” - are also new this year. The sole distinction of Peter Martins’s coldly schematic “River of Light” (1998) is Charles Wuorinen’s score, which the composer himself (celebrating his 70th birthday) returned to conduct: the sonorities for strings, percussion and piano were riveting. The fine dancing by Sterling Hyltin, Savannah Lowery, Teresa Reichlen, Jared Angle, Robert Fairchild, and Ask la Cour was nullified by the plodding calculation of the choreography.

Fayçal Karoui conducted the rest of the program with distinction. In “Oltremare” it was good to see Maria Kowroski onstage again after a three-month absence; she, Tyler Angle and Andrew Veyette (in a brief but impressive solo) are just the most striking members of an entirely excellent cast.

This work, however, doesn’t reward multiple viewings. The opposite is true of “Rococo Variations,” which Ms. Hyltin and Giovanni Villalobos, Sara Mearns and Adrian Danchig-Waring now dance with riveting color and authority.

One can grumble that the middle two ballets here (“Oltremare” and “River of Light”) let down this program, but the fact that it contains two other distinguished made-in-2008 ballets is something the rest of the world should envy. “Concerto DSCH,” in particular, seems simply the most captivating classical ballet premiere I have seen in years.

@New York Times, 2008