The Art Gallery as Spinning Montage
<First published online on October 3, 2014, in the New York Times>
The knockout central ingredient of Alexei Ratmansky’s fresh, complex, many-chambered new ballet, “Pictures at an Exhibition,” is its Mussorgsky score as played onstage. In this 1874 score, the Russian composer gave himself the challenge of asking music to depict paintings; the result is intensely theatrical. New York City Ballet performed the world premiere of Mr. Ratmansky’s “Pictures” on Thursday at the David H. Koch Theater, and Cameron Grant, company pianist, rose superbly to the challenge. The music — and his playing — propelled, underpinned and gave atmosphere to the ballet.
At first viewing, everything about Mr. Ratmansky’s conception proved unexpected. Mr. Ratmansky is, with Mark Morris, one of the two most historically conscious choreographers working today. Mussorgsky’s score was about a posthumous exhibition of artworks by his friend Viktor Hartmann, including an 1871 sketch for “The Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks in Their Shells,” which takes its subject from a lost St. Petersburg ballet by the choreographer Marius Petipa, “Trilby.”I therefore expected a dense tapestry of Russian 19th-century references.
But no. Instead, the music’s proto-modernism prompted Mr. Ratmansky and his projection designer, Wendall K. Harrington, to give us “Color Study: Squares With Concentric Circles,” a 1913 painting by Kandinsky, that Russian pioneer of abstraction. On a screen behind the dancers, we saw successive details of Kandinsky’s juxtapositions of shapes and colors. The dancers wore loose beige costumes — the women’s were short smocks over tights — decorated with single large shapes, each of them differently colored.
Yet Mr. Ratmansky’s choreography kept changing idiom, often in ways that referred neither to Kandinsky’s formalism nor to Hartmann’s pictures. The 10 dancers — five women, five men — started out in informal home-theater mood, almost as if they were playing charades. Some dances, including the first solo (by Sara Mearns), had a wild, improvisatory, part-stumbling, part-inspired quality. (The tailor-made nature of the ballet’s solos reflects one of Mr. Ratmansky’s greatest gifts: Dancers are vividly, individually, intimately revealed.) In certain numbers the dancers — here on all fours, there gesturing — seemed to enact or refer to private stories. In one image, Wendy Whelan, watched by others, fleetingly put one hand on the floor in a way that evokes the climactic incident in Jerome Robbins’s “Dances at a Gathering.”
@New York Times, 2014