The Shock Of the Old Repertory

<First published online in the New York Times on October 26, 2012>

WHEN a season is being assessed, it’s customary to weigh ups against downs, hopes-fulfilled triumphs versus dispiriting weaknesses. The highs and lows of New York City Ballet’s four-week fall season, which ended recently at Lincoln Center, ranged from the widely hailed success of Justin Peck’s new ballet “Year of the Rabbit” to the persistent sorrow caused by the absence from the stage of ballerina Sara Mearns because of a back injury.

Its main feature, however, was the Balanchine-Stravinsky ballets, 13 of them. It was with these that City Ballet at last found a way of making this short fall season — introduced in 2010 — feel substantial. (Hitherto it’s felt merely like heated-up leftovers from the spring.) Most of these Balanchine-Stravinsky works are familiar fare with this troupe. As a rule, though, they blend into a larger landscape of mixed repertory. When you see them en bloc, however, new connections fall into place. The unequaled richness of City Ballet’s repertory becomes the envy of the world. No element in these Stravinsky ballets — not even the bracing rhythms and audaciously modernist structures — proves more striking than the dramatically mutual need of male and female. Everyone knows that Balanchine celebrated women; but it’s amazing to discover his male-female relationships are at their most loaded in his Stravinsky creations (which also contain several of his greatest male roles).

In “Apollo” (1928) the young god — probably the most coveted male role in 20th-century ballet — not only tutors and steers his three muses, they also in turn inspire, help, support him. One of the ballet’s most hauntingly simple images occurs when Apollo, briefly weary from his labors, rests his head in the palms of the dance muse Terpsichore; another occurs when he does so again, this time on the hands of all three muses.

The relationships in both “Orpheus” (1948) and “Divertimento From ‘Le Baiser de la Fée’ ” are tragic, with lovers sundered forever by destiny. I love the suggestion, made this season by a friend, that the hero of the “Divertimento” is a self-portrait of Balanchine, the most exceptional and poignant he ever made. (Stravinsky, composing his score for another choreographer, intended it as a portrait of Tchaikovsky.) Balanchine first choreographed the complete “Baiser” in 1937; he reworked and reworked it, then rejected his own work, making this version in 1972 and supplementing it with its heartbreaking ending in 1974, and — remarkably — letting it stand as his last word on the subject.

The hero’s solo variation has been called by City Ballet’s ballet master in chief Peter Martins (who never danced it) “the most beautiful solo ever.” It may well be also the most expressively ambiguous. The dancer often looks back precisely as he hurtles forward. Or he circuits the stage with a cumulative momentum that — by seeming to ignore the gathering tension in the music’s harmony — suggests he is charging unwittingly toward calamity. Even while he is alone, inner forces are preparing to tear him from fulfillment in love; his fate has other plans.

In Balanchine’s Stravinsky ballets the needs of male and female are often very different, nowhere more obviously than in “Firebird” (1949). The bird seeks liberty; the prince requires a piece of her. She gives him a piece, a magic feather, and the prince then finds his princess-bride. The implication is that both heroines are the opposite aspects of the same woman. While the bride may marry the man, the bird is the mighty power the man can never possess.

“Stravinsky Violin Concerto” (1972) has two male-female couples, so twinned in the ballet’s outer movements that they may represent opposing facets of the same married couple. Certainly they’re much the same in public — sociable, lively — but in private! The concerto’s slow movement has two parts, each an aria, choreographed for a different couple. The first couple may be the most unorthodox in Balanchine; the woman, standing on her flat feet, arches back till her hands reach the ground, and then, bizarrely, scuttle-turns along the floor through a weirdly fluent series of alternating convex and concave shapes on all fours.

In the second aria the woman keeps summoning the man with what seems musically and visually to be a cry of pain and need. As he turns to behold her, she gives at the knees, bending them inward while remaining on point. He arrives at her feet, supporting or shaping those turned-in knees. Is she using her fragility to summon his support? Is she under his domination, submitting always to his control? Both and more; Balanchine’s scene is a collage of fragments, showing not a narrative progression but separate aspects of the relationship in which the two are locked.

In “Danses Concertantes” (1972) the male-female relationship is jaunty, debonair, partly vaudevillian. The ballet’s witty twists include his leaving her hanging in a balance and her (most unusual in Balanchine) steadying him as he sinks into a grand plié. “Monumentum pro Gesualdo” (1960) shows male-female chivalry and Renaissance geometry, subtly subverted by modernist touches. The tension in “Agon” (1957) between past and present, and between courtesy and violence, is continual; the pas de deux gives us glimpses of the progress of a relationship.

What a repertory! These few notes only hint at the diversity and power of these Balanchine-Stravinsky ballets. Now how were these ballets looking? In the “Greek” trilogy of “Apollo, “Orpheus” and “Agon” it was always the oldest, “Apollo,” that looked freshest, especially with Robert Fairchild’s incisive performance of the title role. It was no surprise to find that “Orpheus” is more or less a dead work; it has excited little interest for decades. “Agon” still has its amazements, but the opening and closing ensembles, which can still vibrate with other companies, have lost rhythmic edge at City Ballet. Mark Stanley’s lighting has allowed too many of these ballets to grow less distinct over the years, but not so “Movements for Piano and Orchestra,” where limbs and shapes seemed to have a new glow. Teresa Reichlen’s cool, bold, firm account of its ballerina role is the finest I’ve seen with this company since its originator, Suzanne Farrell.

As led by Joaquin De Luz and Megan Fairchild, the revival of “Divertimento From ‘’Baiser’ ” proved the most piercing single revival of these four weeks. I was unable to see the new alternate cast, led by Gonzalo Garcia and Tiler Peck, and for their sakes eagerly anticipate the ballet’s return in January. But this was a season whose heart was in repertory, not dancers. Even for those of us who first saw these works in Balanchine’s lifetime there were new facets to discover.

@New York Times, 2012