Ballet in New York

In a kind of battle of the bands spanning Lincoln Center Plaza, the New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre both had their spring seasons running at nearly the same time during the past few weeks. I attended four of these performances—two at NYCB, two at ABT—and while ballet still seems to be a functioning art form in this city, none of the four programs was classifiable as a complete success.

I think the most pertinent thing I can say about the first NYCB program is that I’ve already forgotten three out of the four ballets. Hallelujah Junction, choreographed by Peter Martins to music by John Adams, was predictably tedious; I figured the live piano music (played by Cameron Grant and Alan Moverman) would be the best part of it, and I was right. Gianna Reisen’s Judah, also to Adams, was marginally better, as was Matthew Neenan’s The Exchange (to music by Dvorak), but I will be just as happy if I never see either again.

My real reason for attending that May 1 show was to see Alexei Ratmansky’s Concerto DSCH again, and it indeed justified the whole expedition. This piece, to Shostakovich’s Second Piano Concerto, is one of the first things Ratmansky ever choreographed for an American company (it premiered in 2008), and it remains one of his best. The mood of the piece—with its gestural references to Soviet athletics, its charming solo, duo and particularly group compositions, its brief allusions to Russian folk dance and other forms outside ballet, and most of all its unusual combination of irony, wit, and risk—is so finely balanced between pure pleasure and something more complicated that I would have to watch it a hundred times to pin it down. And the collaboration between living choreographer and dead composer is so intense, so visceral, that one feels, upon coming out of it, not only that Ratmansky understood Shostakovich completely, but that Shostakovich, in a fit of uncanny prescience, also understood Ratmansky completely.

That, for me, was the high point of the four programs, and indeed I was mainly interested, in the other three, in seeing what else Ratmansky could do. This meant that the second NYCB program, though far better otherwise than the first, had no high points, since it had no Ratmansky. It did include an interesting if minor Jerome Robbins work, A Suite of Dances, which I found gripping mainly for how this solo has changed since it first premiered in 1994. It was designed as a rather fraught and highly interior piece—Robbins’s own psyche, set to Bach’s cello suites and transferred onto the body of Mikhail Baryshnikov—and that was how it was rehearsed and originally danced; I know this because I have obsessively watched the rehearsal tapes over and over, along with the tape of that first White Oak performance. But in the hands (and legs, and body) of the current dancer, Daniel Ulbricht, that anxiously contained quality, which may be the dance’s strongest element, utterly disappeared; it came across instead as a mere frippery, something light and frothy and easily tossed off.

Elsewhere on that May 12 program were two Balanchine numbers (including the grotesquely kitschy Western Symphony, which NYCB would do better to keep in permanent cold storage), a Justin Peck premiere called Bright, and a Pam Tanowitz premiere, set to Bartok’s Fifth String Quartet, called Bartok Ballet. The Peck was charming but slight; the Tanowitz (which was my real reason for choosing that program) was just the opposite. Bartok Ballet made no effort whatsoever to charm the ballet crowd, which is a relatively new audience for this serious, up-and-coming modern dance choreographer. Instead, Tanowitz almost literally dissected the music, rendering its buzzing complexities and folk-music allusions in frequent insect-like gestures of the arms, occasional Balkan-dance movements, and a nearly unending series of quick, rhythmically complicated steps. The piece never reached the level of what I would call dance—that lift-off feeling you get when the moves you are watching seem to enter your own body and carry you away on the music—but it was fascinating to watch and to think about.

I chose both ABT programs for their Ratmansky performances, and in fact each consisted entirely of his work, so I was perhaps too hopeful going in. I got my punishment squarely on the nose with the first concert, an evening-length performance of Petipa’s Harlequinade, as restaged last year by Ratmansky. If I tell you that this May 14 concert was even worse than Ratmansky’s 2017 confection Whipped Cream—and in most of the same ways—it may perhaps give you some idea of what was wrong with it. Both dances hark back in too many ways to the awful things the Kirov Ballet used to bring over here in the late twentieth century: that is, pieces of trashy choreography encased in horribly complicated costumes and sets but intermittently marked by moments of exquisite dancing. Whipped Cream at least had some truly comic moments and a few brief sequences of great dance; I couldn’t find any of that in Harlequinade, which began as pure pantomime and descended in the second act into endless waves of boringly repetitive court-style dancing. It was a positive relief when the evening ended.

The second Ratmansky program, on May 23, was better mainly because it contained three different selections (two of which I had seen before). The concert began with Songs of Bukovina, which would be a pleasant enough piece if someone else had choreographed it, but does not really employ Ratmansky’s incisive talents to the full. But it then moved on to On the Dnieper, a 2009 piece, set to Prokofiev’s score of that name, which I failed to appreciate fully when I first saw it. Now I can see that it is one of Alexei Ratmansky’s really excellent works, filled with true feeling and beautifully original movement, with not a false emotional moment from beginning to end. It is storytelling without pantomime, evocative gesture elevated in every case to dance, and the ABT dancers (who included, among others, Thomas Forster, Devon Teuscher, Catherine Hurlin, and Alexandre Hammoudi) did it full justice.

Unfortunately it was followed by The Seasons, a new Ratmansky piece, set to Glazunov, which had had its premiere at the season gala only a day or two earlier. Once again we were back in the territory of Whipped Cream and Harlequinade, with one eye always on the gala or family audience—down to the inclusion of young dancers from the ABT school (a device he also used in Harlequinade, with equally horrific effect). Perhaps I am the only person who feels this way, but what is really going on when grown men lift thinly clad little girls up in the air while the children spread their knees apart? If this kind of thing appeared in Mark Morris, it would be a purposeful commentary on child molestation, but here it seems marked by a willful obliviousness, which only makes it more disturbing. Ballet is bad enough already in terms of its highly fixed and (to me) frequently annoying gender roles; do we really need to watch this rigid behavior instilled in the impressionable young?

But enough of my ranting—you want to know about the dance. Reader, it was tedious beyond belief. Rarely have forty minutes seemed so long. I would never have guessed that Alexei Ratmansky could have reminded me of Peter Martins, but here we were, back in the world of endlessly repeated gesture and routine balletic combinations with which I had begun in Hallelujah Junction.  Well, no, that’s unfair: Ratmansky could never descend to the level of Martins, even on his worst day, and there were bits and pieces of pleasure to be found even in The Seasons. But there was not a moment of true feeling in the whole thing—a flaw that became particularly apparent when it was scheduled right after the heartfelt and beautifully executed On the Dnieper. Ratmansky, I am pleading with you: Give up on that gala audience, with its bottomless desire for confections and whimsy and superficiality, and get back to the Shostakovich-like virtues—sharpness, hardness, originality, ironic wit, and a strong dash of melancholy—with which you wowed us in the past. Ballet needs you, but not in this present form.