Watching as Venerable Choreographers Stretch

<First published online in the New York Times on October 30, 2007>

Since I fell for ballet during the 1970s, I find it gratifying once in a while to see what the master choreographers of that era were making by way of new ballets. Antony Tudor’s “Leaves Are Fading” (1975) and George Balanchine’s “Ballo Della Regina” (1977), both in American Ballet Theater’s repertory in its current City Center season, were part of the brave new world I was starting to discover.

No, neither is the very greatest work its choreographer ever made (Tudor’s career as a choreographer had begun 40 years previously, Balanchine’s more than 50), but each extended the known range of what he could do. In “The Leaves Are Fading,” Tudor, better known for the psychological-expressionist wing of his talent, seems to have been deliberately trying his hand at the genre that Jerome Robbins had helped invent a few years before in “Dances at a Gathering”: the nonnarrative but anecdotal ballet about a group of individuals who break into hints of Eastern European folk dance (where Robbins had Chopin piano music, Tudor used Dvorak string music) and whose several male-female couples readily turn to amorous lyricism.

Among the many challenges Tudor was setting himself here, one was certainly this task of creating several successive pas de deux. At a lesser performance, like last Friday’s, Tudor doesn’t emerge as one of the supreme masters of this genre. You feel instead that he was dealing, however impeccably and intelligently, in a genre that was already turning into choreographic cliché and expressive stalemate.

In a good performance, however, as with the current first cast on Wednesday, “The Leaves Are Fading” becomes a special elegy, an autumnal remembrance of multiple facets of young love when it is dewy but not intoxicated. This revival is coached by Amanda McKerrow and John Gardner, who themselves used to dance this and other Tudor ballets with true distinction.

In the longest and most memorable pas de deux, Julie Kent and Marcelo Gomes, dancing like grown-ups in a situation that can become trite if danced with unvaryingly adolescent rapture, did real honor to Tudor’s intelligence. So did Michele Wiles and Alexandre Hammoudi in a shorter duet, precisely showing sudden shifts of direction and changes from flowing motion into quietly annunciatory poses. If Ballet Theater can build on this, it may yet do adequate justice to Tudor in 2008, his centennial year.

In Ballet Theater’s new production of “Ballo Della Regina,” everyone is dancing jubilantly except the ballerina. The upper- and lower-body detail that Balanchine gives to the all-female corps de ballet becomes marvelously vivid in the relatively intimacy of City Center (whose stage is clearly too narrow for most aspects of this ballet). Often in pairs, now they’re rolling their hands to little flourishes in Verdi’s music, now prancing on point or trotting off it, and here two of them are powerfully switching angles of the shoulders on the beat.

More fragrant yet are the four soloists. In the first of their solos, Misty Copeland is especially juicy in the way she ticks off the second and third beats of a waltz bar by closing a fifth position on point first in front, then behind; in the third solo the downbeat finds Hee Seo up high and cresting the air in one leap after another. In all four solos (in both casts) you feel Balanchine’s detailed delight in brilliant femininity.

You feel it, although less surely in these first Ballet Theater performances, in the coloratura steps he gave the ballerina. On Friday it was good to see the first-cast Gillian Murphy both more brilliant and more relaxed than she had been at the premiere on Tuesday, while at other performances Ms. Wiles, dancing with a lovely kind of quiet blitheness, is milder in dance tone than the role needs. Ms. Wiles, whose upper body and head positions are immature but full of promising nuance, is wittiest in the outward-bouncing double jumps onto point, like a Queen of the Night tossing off her high staccatos.

The second-cast Maxim Beloserkovsky gave the male role a bright delivery that was obviously forced; since his actual dancing in no way outshined Ms. Wiles’s, the proportions of the ballet felt more or less right. But when first-cast David Hallberg performs the male role (he also stepped in to partner Ms. Wiles at one performance when Mr. Beloserkovsky was injured), despite the attentive partnering he bestows on his consort, this divertissement starts to become a vehicle primarily for the male, not the female, lead. Watching the handsome stretch and line throughout Mr. Hallberg’s body gives one kind of delight; his rhythmic acuity gives another; and then there is his astonishing lightness, with sailing jumps and rapid air turns that land without a sound.

Younger than Tudor or Balanchine, and still very much active in the 1970s, was Jerome Robbins, another of the choreographers who made that era golden. Ballet Theater’s current Robbins offering, however, is the masterpiece with which he came to instant fame in the 1940s: “Fancy Free.” This wartime tale of sailors on leave starts as a winningly robust strip cartoon — it is astonishing how many of the phrase endings look like something out of “Popeye” — and keeps up the fresh ebullience of classic cartoon art. The character dances are full of original rhythmic vitality too. Each cast rises to it with color and affection; it’s always the most flawlessly performed work on the program.

It would be unwise to contend that Ballet Theater’s living choreographers — among them Lar Lubovitch (“Meadow”) and Stanton Welch (“Clear”) — are in the league of past masters like these. But that isn’t this company’s fault. Nobody in the world today, alas, thinks that this is a classic era for ballet creativity.

But Mr. Lubovitch’s ill-titled ballet, with its decidedly aqueous flood imagery, has absolutely nothing that will stimulate a second look. Mr. Welch’s, however, has bright little dance nuggets that immediately stay in the head and partly cohere on later viewings. The marvelous Herman Cornejo (first cast) and the admirable Jose Manuel Carreño (second) each lead teams among whom Alexandre Hammoudi, Blaine Hoven and Sascha Radetsky shine memorably.

That Ballet Theater is a haven for glorious male dancing has been common international knowledge for years now. “Clear,” though no masterpiece, is among the best demonstrations of how these men can shine.

@New York Times, 2007