Diana Vishneva and Marcelo Gomes in "Onegin." (Courtesy ABT)

ABT has completed the first half of its spring season at the Met. We’ve had the Giselles (and their sister Wilis), Bayadére’s Nikiyas (and their sister Shades). We’ve been lucky enough to have the population of the Bright Stream collective farm and the visiting artists who come to cheer them up—though they’re pretty cheerful already. And we’ve had a brand new production of John Cranko’s Onegin. Did we need it? Did we need Onegin at all? No, but ABT needed it. How can the company fill the huge Met without the full-evening costume dramas that keep the tourists coming?

It was in 1965 that Cranko created Onegin for the Stuttgart Ballet and its highly regarded (though not by me) dramatic star Marcia Haydée, and it was in 2001 that ABT took it on. Ballerinas like to dance its heroine, Tatiana, and why not? She loves, she suffers, she has her revenge on the man who spurned her when she was a shy and sensitive girl, and she gets to glitter as Queen of the Ballroom after she marries the rich, older general who’s at the heart of Petersburg society. What she doesn’t get to do is any interesting dancing, but you can’t have everything. It’s waltz, waltz, waltz in the group scenes and lifts, lifts, lifts in the duets. The characterization comes from the emoting, not the steps.

For Russians, to whom Pushkin’s poem Eugene Onegin is sacred text, the ballet’s story and personae are as familiar and filled with meaning as, for instance, Romeo and Hamlet, are for us. Russians know whole stretches of it by heart, the way we know Shakespeare and Italians know Dante. We Westerners who don’t speak Russian know it best from Tchaikovsky’s glorious opera. (One of the peculiarities of Cranko’s effort is that although he uses Tchaikovsky music, it’s not music from the opera.) For us, Onegin isn’t part of the cultural consciousness; it’s just another story line.

Star performances can partly redeem it, and ABT is star-studded again, thanks to its recent influx of superb ballerinas from Eastern Europe. The Kirov’s Diana Vishneva, a paragon of strength, beauty and dramatic power, was the first-cast Tatiana—it’s a natural role for her. To cast the wonderful Natalia Osipova, now a major attraction here, as Olga was luxury casting; this isn’t a role that demands her exceptional speed and brilliance. Perhaps the most gratifying performance of all came from ABT’s own Marcelo Gomes as Onegin, that callow Byronic figure whose careless pride leads to the fatal duel that destroys three lives, including his own. Gomes is handsome, impudent, haughty yet sympathetic—a riveting figure with nothing riveting to dance. Does it matter? He’s as real a star as his colleague David Hallberg, and as appealing a personality.

The new production is by the estimable Santo Loquasto. It doesn’t help, it doesn’t hurt; it’s pretty, conventional, unexciting, like the ballet itself. No treatment of the décor could turn Cranko’s Onegin into a classic. And yet for all its vacuity as a dance event, Onegin has the virtues of lucidity and cohesion. It’s certainly an improvement over such recent other ABT attempts as The Lady of the Camellias.

Osipova’s Giselle was the same girl she first stunned us with several years ago—amazingly buoyant and secure. Her dancing is faultless, her interpretation more open to question. For me, her mad scene and death lack the ultimate pathos we’ve seen in Ulanova, Fonteyn, Makarova and others, including that other current European wonder, Alina Cojocaru. Osipova at the end of Act One leaves me grateful for her ability, not wounded to the heart. Hallberg, her Albrecht, is consistently thrilling. Those legs, that stretch, that grandeur, that radiance. A few mannerisms are creeping in—no doubt picked up at the Bolshoi, for whom he now also dances. The head is flung back just a little too melodramatically as he exits, flying; too much is made of the cape; even the famous hair looks a touch Sovietized. But he’s America’s finest homegrown danseur noble, and he’s entitled.

And then we see him in Ratmansky’s Bright Stream, in full Les Sylphides drag—good-natured, enjoying the joke, part of the fun. And (a quality he shares with Gomes) essentially modest. Bright Stream, with its nonstop energy and endless invention—the big black dog on the bicycle, the human tractor—delights the audience, although the house isn’t as full as it should be: no swans, no Wilis, no Shades. Just about everyone looks terrific in it, maybe because just about everyone, including the happily deployed corps, has something meaningful to do. And, maybe because it’s a ballet about a community, ABT looks like a community when dancing it. Its one weakness is the underdeveloped lead female role; Zina has lots to do, but a good deal of it is generic—we never really know who she is. Even so, Paloma Herrera brings some life to her. Sadly, Julie Kent is too wan, her technique too eroded, to do the same, nor should a woman of her years have to lie on her tummy on the ground, friskily kicking up her heels.

As for the sillinesses of Bayadère, they fade in the light of the great “Kingdom of the Shades” act. ABT’s corps descends the ramp with precision and dignity; the genius of Petipa has supplied the rest. Yes, we have to survive the Orientalia—the Rajah, the High Priest, the stuffed tiger, the ecstatic fakirs, the Bronze Idol, the fatal snake buried in the posy of flowers, the swaying harem-y dancers—but it’s all worth it for the Shades. And some of the nonsense can be fun.

Nikiya is one of the touchstone roles in classical ballet, and perfect for Cojocaru—tender, delicate, passionate, true. She and her superb partner, Herman Cornejo, convince us of their ardor and their doleful fate. Another new Russian import, Polina Semionova, seems twice Cojocaru’s size and was half as effective. The production, by Makarova, is handsome and coherent, but Bayadére is heavy, heavy, and long, long.

City Ballet wound up its spring season with a one-week run of Balanchine’s sublime A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Who can resist it? Shakespeare’s vision is irresistible, Mendelssohn’s music is irresistible. And Balanchine’s genius for narrative is beyond praise. The fluttering fairies and butterflies and bugs, the angry, disputatious Titania and Oberon, the endearing Puck, the two mixed-up sets of lovers, the wooing King Theseus (of Athens) and Hippolyta (Queen of the Amazons), Bottom and his rowdy artisan gang—they stride and scamper over the stage with absolutely clarity and perfect timing; there’s not a moment of confusion or blur.

Dream is now 50 years old. Happy golden anniversary!

This year some of the casting, at least of the two performances I saw, was questionable. Maria Kowroski is at her most gorgeous as Titania. She’s both soft and commanding, delicate and imperious, girlish and grand, innocent and sensual. Alas, Teresa Reichlen is short on these qualities. She’s an astonishing physical specimen, almost extraterrestrial—extremely tall with a small head and thin gangly arms. She has remarkable technique, but it’s dissipated as, flinging her limbs around, apparently uncentered, she unleashes a series of startling separate effects that don’t add up to a convincing character or a convincing style of classical dancing. Her one great role is as the big girl in “Rubies”; in ballets like Concerto Barocco and Dream she’s like Alice after drinking from the bottle she finds at the bottom of the rabbit hole.

Another of Peter Martins’s current favorites is pint-size Megan Fairchild. Unsuited as she was to the first movement of Symphony in C and the “Theme and Variations” section of Tchaikovsky Suite No. 3, she was even less satisfactory in the exquisite and subtle pas de deux that Balanchine created for Violette Verdy in the second act of Dream. Fairchild was nervous, and she faltered, but that’s not the basic problem; she’ll improve. What’s unfixable is that she will never be a paradigm of classicism, and she’s being given the big classical roles for which she doesn’t have the power, the amplitude or, for that matter, the essential articulation in her feet. We’re getting a replay of the Yvonne Borrée story. (On the other hand, she has real comic talent; she was the best thing going in the current revival of Susan Stroman’s Double Feature, a Broadway show masquerading as a ballet. Stroman has musical-comedy smarts, but she has no ballet vocabulary.)

At one Dream performance we had the tallest Butterfly (Brittany Pollack) and the shortest Hippolyta (Ana Sophia Scheller) I’ve ever seen. It was cuckoo. When Savannah Lowery thundered on as the Amazon Queen things were restored to normal: Get out of her way! There were charming performances from Taylor Stanley as Bottom and Chase Finlay as Lysander. from Rebecca Krohn and Sterling Hyltin as Helena and Hermia. The single finest performance of the season, not surprisingly, came from Tiler Peck in the Dream pas de deux—she’s so musically intelligent, so secure, so effortless, so fluent that the Fairchild version vanished like a … dream. But Peck has been these things in every role this season.

Dream is so rich that each time you see it you fall in love with something you hadn’t focused on before. This year, for me, the most moving moment lasted less than a dozen seconds. Bottom has served his purpose as the donkey, and when his worried pals come looking for him, there he is, restored, the donkey’s head vanished. Bottom’s himself again, and the five men hug and prance offstage, the goodness and health of their humanity revealed in a flash. Yes, Balanchine (and Shakespeare and Mendelssohn) are telling us what fools these mortals be. But they also know what mortals these fools be.

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Natalia Osipova in Alexei Ratmansky’s "The Firebird."

This last week brought us, by coincidence, new versions—new concepts—of two of the canon’s most famous ballets: The Firebird and Swan Lake. One was wonderful, the other unwonderful. So it goes.

Alexei Ratmansky is generally considered today’s most talented classical choreographer. Within the last weeks we’ve seen his moving Russian Seasons at City Ballet and his entrancing The Bright Stream at ABT. His new work is everywhere—Paris, Toronto, Amsterdam, Miami, as well as New York. And what he does is extremely various. All you can be sure of with him is unremitting invention, garnished by respect and generosity to his dancers—they’re constantly being stretched but never being pushed.

Now he’s stretched Firebird—and maybe pushed it a little, too. When in 1910 Diaghilev introduced it to Paris, it was a sensation: Fokine’s exciting choreography, Karsavina’s brilliant performance, and most of all, Stravinsky’s thrilling score. (It was his first ballet.) That version, more or less undiluted, is still performed in England, where it was revitalized when the title role was assumed by Margot Fonteyn, coached by Karsavina herself. Her performance was fierce, dazzling, moving—escaping the young Prince, Ivan, was a matter of life and death to her; somehow she combined flashing speed and attack with an inner humanity. Meanwhile, in 1949 the success of City Ballet was assured when Balanchine created his own Firebird for Maria Tallchief, with her revelatory demonstration of dance amplitude and power.

Ratmansky has turned his back on the Firebird’s humanity and individuality, her complicated mix of dominance and sympathy. He gives us a quick, darting creature in skin-tight fire-engine red, and she’s only one of 17 such creatures—there’s nothing to distinguish her from the rest of the flock except that she takes center stage. If you’re one of 17 birds, there’s not much humanity left to you. First-cast Natalia Osipova, she of the famous jump, surged back and forth across the stage, always in command; even when in Ivan’s grip she was in charge, as if she were toying with him rather than trapped by him. Osipova was totally effective, but she wasn’t really challenged as a dancer.

Her Ivan was the naïve yet manly Marcelo Gomes, as always completely invested in his role; you’re rooting for him from the start when you see him bursting out through a door in a bare room (a nod to Petrouchka) to search the forest for his lost love. When he finds her—in a bunchy green get-up—she, like the Firebird, is indistinguishable from her companions, except for the wit and intelligence that Simone Messmer brings to the role. (It’s been clear for some time that Messmer is one of the most interesting women at ABT. Who else could have looked so right a few seasons ago not only as one of Twyla Tharp’s Baker’s Dozen but as Giselle’s Myrthe as well?)

Ratmansky and Messmer liberate the Maiden from her usual bland persona, making her one of the two most engaging characters on the stage, the other being David Hallberg as the evil sorcerer Kaschei (a role performed in their dancing days by both Balanchine and Ashton). Hallberg’s Kaschei is both a menace and a hoot. He’s got up in glittery black, with emerald-green touches—his headdress, his gloves—looking a little like an Action Comics villain: The Green Spike. But there’s nothing comical about the way he controls and abuses the ensorcelled girls. When he’s overthrown by the Firebird, we’re both happy to see him defeated and sad to see him go.

Given the oddity of certain of Ratmansky’s choices, what makes this Firebird so joyous, so gratifying? As always in his work, there’s endlessly ingenious contrivance. Who else today deploys groups of dancers so clearly and tellingly? There are magical forest sets (by Simon Pastukh)—sometimes grotesque, sometimes beautiful. There are powerful and judiciously handled projections. The just-Russian-enough costumes (by Galina Solovyeva) are appealing. But most crucial is the way the action plunges propulsively ahead, with the struggle between good and evil hanging in the balance, until at the end the Firebird prevails, the girls emerge from their captivity with long golden tresses and long white dresses, and in a coup de théâtre, the captive boys are freed from the gnarled trees that have confined them. Stravinsky’s glorious climax ignites in Ratmansky a stirring affirmation of humanity and a vision of happiness restored.

How to describe the Australian Ballet’s Swan Lake? (Sorry: Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake, as it’s modestly named.) Here’s the idea. We’re at some Edwardian resort where Prince Siegfried, who’s in love with his mistress, Baroness von Rothbart, has just been married off to a somewhat unstable ingénue named Odette. Everyone is horrible to her, for no discernible reason, and she takes it amiss when her bridegroom brutally ignores her for the Baroness—in fact, she lashes out, breaks down, and the Royals bundle her off to a sanatorium where we watch her receiving hydrotherapy. (Is this a first?) At this point, something like an hour has passed, and no swans.

But Odette has a dream or vision in which she’s at a frozen lake (a huge round tilted disk) with plenty of sympathizing swans swanning around her. Siegfried turns up, but things don’t work out. Back in the sanatorium she’s further oppressed by him and the Baroness until somehow she gets away, apparently cured, and in a svelte white evening dress crashes the Baroness’s ball. (It’s a reverse of the traditional Swan Lake, in which it’s the wicked Odile who crashes the ball. Clever, huh?) The two women are locked in a contest for the feckless and characterless Siegfried. Odette apparently prevails—yet, as we’re closing in on three hours, we’re back at the lake and she opts to disappear forever into its dark waters.

All this is carefully worked out, with lots of subsidiary characters whose identity is clarified only in the program notes. The dance vocabulary is vulgarized and distorted classical, but you can say for Graeme Murphy that he knows what he’s vulgarizing. (Does that make it better or worse?) This work has been a hit for the Australian Ballet since its premiere 10 years ago, and has been a calling card for them ever since—undoubtedly because of the pointed echo of the Charles-Di-Camilla debacle. Another tasteful touch.

The Australian company, celebrating its 50th anniversary, also brought with it a mixed bill mysteriously titled “Infinity.” It began with an unfortunate show-and-tell of bits and pieces it performs combined with a mini-documentary about its history that might have been interesting if the spoken narrative hadn’t been battling to be heard over crashing music. There were a number of pas de deux (yes, the Don Quixote was one of them, the tempo so sluggish it felt like a train slowing down to let passengers off) and an excerpt from the second act of Giselle—a truly dreadful idea, not unknown to ABT galas. These were all performed with solemn correctness—the company’s strong training shone through all too clearly, as at a school graduation performance. (If only all these capable dancers could open up!) Nothing shone through Stanton Welch’s terrible Divergence except one’s relief that the Welch wavelet of a few years ago had passed on to Houston, where he’s now the resident choreographer.

Wayne McGregor’s Dyad 1929 is a good example of this capable British choreographer’s work. It’s highly energized and relentless—the music is Steve Reich’s “Double Sextet”—making its dancers work hard (and actually loosening them up). There’s excitement in McGregor’s work, but what’s it all about, Alfie? Better, however, this kind of assured competence than no competence, and Dyad 1929 is a step up from the Millepied and Martins pieces City Ballet served up this season. But like them, it’s more an exhibition of proficiency than a meaningful statement. (You only have to spot the references to The Four Temperaments to realize how deeply, perhaps unconsciously, Balanchine’s innovations have penetrated contemporary ballet.)

To wind things up, choreographer Stephen Page and some of his dancers from the Bangarra Dance Theatre joined in with one of his faux-primitive jamborees, Warumuk—in the dark night. It was dark night up on the stage of the Koch theater, all right; apparently the aborigine population never gets to see the light of day. It was all so carefully engineered, so handsomely accoutered, so passionately performed—so empty.

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Gillian Murphy and David Hallberg in 'The Dream.' (Courtesy Geen Schiavone/ABT)

Through the ABT season just ended, the company had 10 female principals. (It has just added an 11th, the Korean Hee Seo.) Of the 10, six are Russian—well, Alina Cojocaru is Romanian—and three of them, Cojocaru, Vishneva and Osipova, are the biggest ballerina drawing cards. In other words, we’re back in the good old Ballets Russes days, when “ballet” meant “Russian.” Is it this lingering Russophilia that explains the company’s loyalty to the artistically irrelevant Irina Dvorovenko, its partiality for the odd mixture that is Veronika Part, and its recent welcome of Polina Semionova?

Semionova arrived not from the Bolshoi, where she was trained, but from the Berlin State Opera, where she became a principal at 18—and you can see why; she’s one of those dancers who goes in for, and wins, ballet competitions. She’s got a gorgeous slim figure and exemplary technique. There isn’t a moment of hesitation or doubt: she nails every step. What she doesn’t do is reveal anything—of her role or of herself. In both La Bayadère and Swan Lake she was step-perfect ... and anonymous. In a way, she’s the opposite of Part, whose luxurious body, eager willingness and uneven technique make her a constantly provocative question mark. (Whatever her virtues and flaws, though, Part has no business undertaking Terpsichore in Balanchine’s great Apollo.)

Diana Vishneva is not only a magnificent dancer but a magnificent actress—no one works harder or understands more. When she first turned up among us, she was a dominant force. Who else could so impress as Giselle or Odette-Odile and yet so dazzle (with the Kirov, her home company) in Balanchine’s “Rubies”? Vishneva is a ballerina on the highest level. And, in her very different way, so is Cojocaru, with her apparent ease and simplicity and her lovable nature. This season she did one Giselle, one bayadère and one Juliet—not nearly enough, but we’ll take what we can get.

And then there’s Natalia Osipova. She was the season’s undoubted star of stars, and she didn’t just drop in. Not only was she the lead in Ratmansky’s new Firebird but she charmed in his Bright Stream and gave us as well Giselle, Juliet and Medora in Le Corsaire. Her performance on July 5 in that latter role was like nothing I’ve ever come across—bravura dancing on a level you can only call exalted. It wasn’t just the famous jumps—so high, so quick, so light—or the thrilling fouettés or the astoundingly tight, rapidissimo châiné turns, the fastest I’ve ever seen. What’s so remarkable is the seeming ease with which everything is accomplished. Osipova never pushes, never strains; her flawless execution precludes the possibility of a misstep. She’s so strong and so musical that she can dance with the greatest delicacy as well as let off the big guns. She’s simply a phenomenon. That she’s not yet a dramatic artist on the level of a Vishneva isn’t a problem—she’ll become one if she makes up her mind to.

The other superb Medora I saw was our homegrown Gillian Murphy. Her technique may not be quite on the level of Osipova’s (no one’s is), but she’s very strong, very musical, and has become an appealing actress. Medora is barely a two-dimensional character, but Murphy finds both wit and passion in her: she understands that Corsaire, for all its melodramatic trappings—the pirates, the lascivious pasha, the slave auction, the gun, the knife, the poisoned flower, the shipwreck—is pure romantic comedy. Murphy is a first-rate dancer—the dancer City Ballet lacks for its most demanding Balanchine roles.

Forget its source in Byron’s famous dramatic poem; forget its relentless demands on the dancers. With its rum-tee-tum score sewn together from the music of five composers and its ridiculous plot and nonstop dance hijinks, Anna-Marie Holmes’s version of Le Corsaire is first and foremost a show. The audience loves it, despite its unkind length, and the dancers seem to revel in it. The corps, in Petipa’s classical “Jardin Animé” scene, looks strong and confident. And it’s given Craig Salstein his most successful role as the hero’s swaggering, treacherous second-in-command. Salstein has come a long way: from clever self-conscious shtick to full-out dance performance based on a constantly improving technique. Alas, the deteriorating technique of the Danish Johan Kobborg was no help to him as Pirate No. 1. He’s been a beautiful dancer, but not even back in the day could he have convinced in this unsubtle bravura role.

I SAW THE GILLIAN MURPHY Corsaire on what was both the final night of the season and the occasion of Ethan Stiefel’s farewell performance with the company (he’s now running the Royal New Zealand Ballet, and we have to hope he doesn’t carry Murphy, his fiancée, down under with him). He’s been an exhilarating dancer from the start, when he galvanized New York City Ballet audiences as a virtuoso classicist. But, like Gelsey Kirkland before him, he defected from Balanchine’s company for ABT—and with happier results than Kirkland’s. Beset by injuries, he’s been fading recently after 15 years of heroic service, but you wouldn’t have known it from this all-out last performance as the bare-chested Ali, the faithful slave. From the very start to the very end, this always electric, brash, bright American kid has given us everything he had.

In no small part due to him, ABT has for a long time now been recognized as ballet’s number-one residence for male stars. With his retirement, and that of Angel Corella only a week earlier, the male contingent may seem to have been depleted, but it’s actually as strong as ever, thanks to those three extraordinary and dependable stars, David Hallberg, Marcelo Gomes and Herman Cornejo—all different yet all compelling and appealing, and none of them Russian.

Don’t worry, though—the Russians are coming. The virtuoso Ivan Vasiliev, Osipova’s partner, is an ex-Bolshoi throwback to the old-time hotshot: amazing leaps, splits, pirouettes; the whole competition vocabulary. Is he Nureyev, the presiding spirit over this kind of dancing? No, because Nureyev also had a charisma, a sexuality and an artistry that Vasiliev in his early 20s hasn’t yet developed. But for the moment he provides thrills, so no one’s complaining. A couple of other Russian guest artists hover on the list of male principals—Denis Matvienko, Vadim Muntagirov—but since (like Roberto Bolle) they almost never perform, they might as well not be around.

Another Russian-born (but not Russian-trained) dancer in the company is the oddest of the lot. Tiny, blond Daniil Simkin, with his little-boy face—androgynous but not effeminate—has an exactness and a fluency that are a pleasure to watch. But he’s hard to cast, and his stab at the Prince in Swan Lake was a mistake—he simply lacks the amplitude and kept getting lost in the crowd. (Isabella Boylston, though—his Odette-Odile, also making a debut—demonstrated why she’s a leading contender for ballerinadom among the up-and-coming young women. Already admired for her brilliant jump and strong dance intelligence, she had thought and felt her way into the role, giving us a vivid if not definitive reading of it.)

The young Cory Stearns, rushed to prominence in the wake of gushing reviews, continues to baffle. Yes, he’s a very pretty guy (that may explain things), and yes he’s capable. But what does he have to tell us? Nothing yet, so far as I’m concerned. I’m more focused on two men still in the corps: the powerful, dramatic Roman Zhurbin (a terrifically menacing sorcerer, the Hallberg role, in Firebird) and the very young but elegant and charming Joseph Gorak. And the company has just promoted to soloist another pretty guy, Alexandre Hammoudi. With him added to Salstein and Simkin, along with the omnipresent (and omni-useful) Jared Matthews, Sascha Radetsky and Gennadi Saveliev, ABT has that essential element of a classical company, a gang of first-rate male soloists.

In fact, the present ABT company is filled with accomplished dancers on every level. Among the women, Sarah Lane continues to reveal elegant classical style—will she ever get a big break? Stella Abrera, Kristi Boone, Misty Copeland, Yuriko Kajiya, Simone Messmer and Maria Riccetto are all solid, and frequently more. And the corps is in good shape—always reliable and occasionally inspired. In other words, the texture of the company is impressively sound and engaging.

Only the repertory remains a problem—the annual Spring Parade of the Warhorses marches on; the Met audience must be fed its Swans and Wilis and bayadères and pirates. This year we had the vacuous Onegin back, but I had only myself to blame for going to it. We had Ratmansky’s hotly disputed Firebird and his joyous romp, The Bright Stream. We had two 20th-century masterpieces: Apollo (inadequately paced and interpreted) and Ashton’s masterpiece, The Dream, giving us Murphy and Hallberg at their very finest. And of course we had the Russkis. It’s painful to compare the substantial if mixed blessings of this lively season with City Ballet’s dispiriting one across the Plaza.

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A scene from 'Suite en Blanc.' (Courtesy Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images)

The Paris Opéra Ballet, which recently vacated the Koch theater, put its worst foot forward with its opening program. But what a pretty foot it was—so glamorously arched, so delicately pointed! That, indeed, is to a large extent the story of the company: exquisite technique for its own sake. Look, I go into arabesque! Behold, I balance on pointe! (Balancing is one of the dancers’ most cherished accomplishments: They get ready to get up there, they get up there, they stay up there. Applause!) Well, their training is immaculate, and since they have it, why not flaunt it? A few years ago I spent a day at their school, observing not only the perfect manners of the kids—they stop and bow or curtsy to grown-ups they pass in the halls—but the perfect manner in which they’re taught to produce steps. It’s beautiful to watch, but after a while I realized that something was missing: no one was connecting step production to musical impulse.

Opening night gave us a triple bill by choreographers I’m sure the Opéra considers to be French Modern Masters: Serge Lifar (Russian, but Frenchified by Diaghilev), Roland Petit and Maurice Béjart. Lifar had a stranglehold on the company from the ’30s through the ’50s, except for a brief period when he was banned for collaborating with the Germans. Alas, his many ballets are essentially without interest, which is why they’re danced almost exclusively in France—and even there, not very often. The most famous is Suite en Blanc, and it was this abstract demonstration of pedagogy that led off the season—a procession of short pieces (“La Sieste,” “Le Cigarette,” “La Flûte,” etc.) to the music of Lalo. Everyone’s in white, everyone’s on his or her best behavior, and everyone dances with the same correct and rather bland approach. On and on it goes, but it never gathers together. That the French consider it central to their tradition the way we think of Concerto Barocco and the English cherish Symphonic Variations only confirms one’s idea of the damage done to French ballet by the absence of a major choreographer throughout the 20th century.

The Petit contribution was L’Arlésienne to Bizet’s famous score (Christopher Wheeldon used it last year in Les Carillons),in which a distressed but very handsome young man (Jérémie Bélingard) just won’t settle down with his fiancée (Isabelle Ciaravola). When a giant window suddenly appears upstage, replacing the Van Gogh-ish backdrop appropriate to this story of Provence, you know what’s going to happen. Out he flies—whether because he’s in pursuit of the ineffable or because he’s irritated by his clingy girlfriend, we’ll never know.

Roland Petit was a sensation in New York in the late ’40s, when he brought us his company, his star (and wife-to-be) Zizi Jeanmaire and his saucy version of Carmen. And then there was Le Jeune Homme et le Mort, with the great Jean Babilée. All in all, he made 170 ballets before his recent death, and why the Opéra thinks any of them deserves revival is another mystery. I guess they have no one else to claim as their own—except the ghastly Béjart, whose Boléro, with its bare-chested protagonist bumping and grinding and anguishing on top of a round table surrounded by lesser bumpers and grinders would be more suitable in Vegas or the Cirque de Soleil than in a serious ballet company. Maybe that’s why audiences always greet it with roars of approval.

The second and redeeming program was Giselle, in a pretty production featuring the company’s biggest star, Aurélie Dupont. She exemplifies all the great virtues of the Opéra style: strength, articulation, amplitude; beautiful port de bras and épaulement; command. She’s not really a young peasant girl, and she doesn’t convey much in the death scene, but this isn’t a Giselle about its tragic story. It’s about elegant dancers. You know it the moment the peasants burst on to the stage at the beginning of Act One, the young men’s legs exquisitely sculpted and stylish in their taupe tights. (A sophisticated friend once remarked to me, “Only the French understand taupe.”) Is it biologically possible that no Frenchmen have hips?

The costumes throughout were impeccable, especially the billowing long white tutus for the Wilis in Act Two. Here Ms. Dupont came into her own, her surpassing technique allowing her to blaze her way through the most difficult passages without hesitation—a paragon of classicism. A touch marmoreal? Maybe. But this is not dancing you can complain about. Her Albrecht, Mathieu Ganio, was capable, but who was he? Was he a philandering aristocrat or a sincere young man deeply in love with a girl from the wrong class? I couldn’t tell. At the climax of the second act, he had no problems with the extended series of entrechats Albrecht has to contend with. But again, despite all the business with the cloak and the lilies, I had no sense of real grief or atonement. The Wilis were magnificently trained, rising to every occasion, even when at moments the tempo slowed down alarmingly—the marmoreal meeting the funereal. All in all, though, this Giselle is an appealing production with superb dancing, a far happier representation of the Opéra style than the sterilities of Suite en Blanc.

The third program showed the company being cutting edge—if your idea of cutting edge is Pina Bausch, with a 37-year-old version of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice. The idea is that as the principal dancers act out their roles, singers shadow them, commenting on, even participating in, the action. The problem is that anything Bausch can provide in the way of choreography is so inferior to Gluck’s noble music that it’s not just an irritation, it’s a sacrilege. She has also taken violent liberties with the music and the libretto—abandoning, for instance, the opera’s happy ending, and excising whole swaths of the score.

There are four scenes, through all of which poor Orpheus—deprived of both his lyre and his clothes (he wanders around in nothing but flesh-
colored underpants)—has to move about endlessly, trying to express anguish, defiance, love and despair through Bausch’s simplex, repetitive vocabulary. In the first scene he has one of the longest solos in memory, and poor, hard-working Stéphane Bullion could not keep it from being a great bore. This is the scene that has, as part of its décor, an immense felled tree emerging from a side wall and lying across the stage. Another scene (set in a lunatic asylum?) features 12-foot-high wooden chairs. Another has more comfy chairs and lots of mirrors, like a dressing room. (This is where the ravishing Elysian Fields scene takes place.) Everything is clearly intended to startle and provoke, but it just traduces a great work of art.

Why, one wonders, is Orpheus conceived as hangdog rather than heroic? He stands around, shoulders slumped, when he’s not oy-veying in spasms back and forth across the stage. (The whole thing, oddly, is sung in German, but there are no supertitles, and the Lincoln Center Festival hasn’t chosen to supply librettos, so who knows what all his kvetching is about?) When Eurydice returns to life, she’s in a chic red gown and has clearly been studying Martha Graham. Marie-Agnès Gillot is a striking and powerful dancer—you can understand how she can bully poor downcast Orpheus into turning back to look at her as he leads her up from Hell.

This final scene, set on a near-empty stage and presented simply, at least leaves us with a haunting image—the dead bodies of the protagonists and the singers who mirror them lying there (elegantly) as the curtain comes down. It’s not what Gluck and his librettist had in mind, but it doesn’t really interfere with his glorious music. Once again, less proves to be more. What Pina Bausch and the Opéra failed to grasp is that far less—in fact, nothing—would have been best of all.

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Jonah Bokaer in 'Eclipse' at BAM. (Courtesy Stephanie Berger)

BAM HAS UNVEILED its new $50,000,000 performance space, configured for 250 viewers, with a commissioned work, Eclipse, by the ex-Cunningham dancer Jonah Bokaer and his collaborator, the visual artist Anthony McCall. For this event, the space is square, seats all around with some more on a second level, and highly intimate—at times, if you’re sitting in the front row, you’re practically brushing knees with the dancers. Daring—yet in a way, that very closeness pushes you back from them: As they dart toward you and past you, you can’t help bracing yourself. And there are no seatbelts.

Eclipse is a concept piece,and its concept centers on 36 large light bulbs strung from above in a geometrical pattern and at different heights, some of them at times down below the dancers’ chest level. (The bulbs rise and descend, just as they glow and dim.) Bokaer himself is the master of ceremonies, in that it’s he who emerges out of the dark to slip among the bulbs, his closeness to them and emphatic gestures at them turning them on, so that the stage slowly grows bright(er). He’s the Old Lamplighter, except that he’s young, good-looking and a striking dancer, and he’s wearing a semi-fluorescent reflecting safety vest like those you see on the ground crew when your plane is taxiing in.

Bokaer’s (long) solo constitutes the first section of Eclipse,and it’sa pleasure to watch because he’s a pleasure to watch. The vocabulary is very specific, but I haven’t seen enough of his work to know whether it’s his standard vocabulary or one created for this work only. As he proceeds around the area, willing the lights to go on, his movement is fluent, or fluid, in contrast to sharp, angular gestures—an arm snapped back behind the torso, for instance. When at last the bulbs are all lit, he’s gone, through one of the four exitsat the corners of the square stage area.

There’s a sound element—if you want to be kind, you can call it a score—consisting of what’s apparently the humming ofa film projector, interrupted by sudden loud spasms of noise (a landing helicopter, a train rushing by) announcing that one part of Eclipse is over and another beginning. There are four other dancers, two men and two women, all solemnly invested in the proceedings. The most intense, and very compelling, is CC Chang. She’s radically turned-in; she crouches, she convulses, she rushes at us—careful there! Later, there’s an affecting duet for two men, Tal Adler-Arieli and Adam H. Weinert, the head of one nestled against the other’s outstretched leg; this one’s foot resting on that one’s upper arm.

Eventually, things wind up, or down. The four are standing still, staring upwards, in an unfortunate echo of the portentous ending of Dances at a Gathering, before dispersing through the four exits in time for the Old Lamplighter to reappear and reverse his routine— this time his presence dousing the bulbs. Curtain—or, rather, blackout, since there is no curtain.

Eclipse is overlong and overly self-conscious, but it isn’t a fake or a zero; it just gets exhausting. It raises a crucial question: When does Concept morph into Gimmick? There’s been a lot of talk about Bokaer’s being inspired by McCall’s visual art, but the collaboration ceases to be interesting after a while, and surely would lose its punch on second viewing. That’s the trouble with concept—what’s left when the thrill is gone? For Bokaer to succeed in the long run, he’ll have to depend on his own mastery of the language and powers of invention; the lights and the sounds can follow.

THE AUDITORIUM up at the Guggenheim is a space of a different kind: a small stage at one end, an oddly laid out seating area facing it. It too has an effective intimacy, but a more formal one, perfect for the series of “Works & Process” programs frequently performed there.

This time round it was a lecture-demo: six leading dancers from Pacific Northwest Ballet demonstrating the points being made from the sidelines by the company’s artistic director, Peter Boal—maybe the best-liked guy in ballet. The topic was the way Balanchine changed and adapted his ballets through the years, sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically—as when he guillotined the opening scene of Apollo, the birth, and eliminated the ascent of the staircase at the end. PNB performs this later version according to Balanchine’s wishes, but rather than presenting a cogent argument for one version as opposed to the other, Boal leans on the Master’s rather snarky statement that it was his ballet and he could do whatever he wanted with it. (Boal is discreet about his personal preference, having been an outstanding Apollo himself.)

The dancers also displayed less obvious adjustments made to Apollo as well as to the other ballets under consideration. Two men, for instance, showed us how the “Melancholic” section of The Four Temperaments evolved, dancing their versions separately and then side by side. The first “Pas de Trois” from Agon received the same treatment. Deploying historic film footage as well as live dancing, Boal convincingly demonstrated that the ubiquitous showpiece Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux can be danced many different ways, presumably with Balanchine’s benign approval. The use of film throughout was particularly stimulating: I had forgotten just how fierce Jacques d’Amboise was in the first solo of Apollo half a century ago.

Pacific Northwest isn’t a thrilling company but it’s a vastly intelligent and responsible one, and it has an outstanding ballerina, Carla Körbes, who was allowed to get away from New York City Ballet. What she showed us of her Terpsichore was a revelation of how this role can be danced—light, confident, musical (of course), and captivating without being seductive or adorable. (None of those awful grins that ABT ladies go in for.) No wonder Apollo falls for her.

The leading male dancer, Seth Orza, also from City Ballet, is solid but also stolid; he doesn’t have much to reveal about Apollo. But a young man in the company, Matthew Renko, still in the corps, is everything that’s been expected of him since he was at the School of American Ballet. He’s intense, committed and interesting—reason enough, along with all the other reasons, to catch PNB when they turn up at the City Center in February.

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Chase Finlay in 'Apollo.' (Courtesy Paul Kolnik)

FOR A FEW DAYS, you could let yourself believe that City Ballet was a serious organization. After all, who can quarrel with the austere Balanchine-Stravinsky triple-bill of Apollo, Orpheus and Agon—the “Greek trilogy,” as it’s being cannily labeled?

Then, last Thursday, the Gala struck, and there we were again, trapped in Gimmicksville.

Why, you may wonder, would City Ballet be “Celebrating legendary fashion designer Valentino?” Not, as Peter Martins tells us in a mercifully brief if confused film, because the two men were old friends—Peter Martins has other old friends. Presumably he knew he could bring in a lot of Valentino chums and hangers-on to buy up expensive tables at the post-performance dinner and guarantee that a lot of paparazzi would be snapping away at all the off-the-shoulder gowns. Sorry, Peter—you can’t celebrate Balanchine and Stravinksy one night and Valentino the next. This is called sending mixed signals, or, if you’re feeling pretentious, cultural schizophrenia.

The evening might have succeeded if the Legendary One’s costumes worked, but they didn’t—they were showy fashion statements into which dancers had been poured and constricted. Poor beautiful Maria Kowroski was togged out in a striking red ruffled gown marred by a big bunchy thing at the neck that destroyed her line—this in a throwaway Martins duet called Sophisticated Lady that came and went years ago and should have been left in ballet limbo. The redoubtable Tiler Peck couldn’t prevail over the pancakey tutu that disfigured her in another dusted-off Martins duet, Not My Girl. (Fortunately for her partner, Robert Fairchild, his dinner jacket didn’t get in the way of his charming hoofing.) And Wendy Whelan, whose unusual body configuration needs all the help it can get, got none from the green schmatte she wore in This Bitter Earth, a preview of one movement from Christopher Wheeldon’s upcoming Five Movements, Three Repeats, set to an over-arranged version of Dinah Washington’s famous recording.

The climax of Valentino’s participation was the premiere of Martins’s new Bal de Couture, to music culled from Tchaikovsky. Of the 20 dancers, 18 were principals, and two were soloists. All to no avail—the choreography is so generic and the dancers’ roles so lacking in individuality that they could have been anybody from any ballet company. For the record: the first section was a fashion show, with nine couples coming down ramps, the women swooshing their pouffy black-and-white dresses and the men parading their elegant dinner jackets. Oh yes—then they all waltzed around, skirts swirling and flashing their red linings and revealing their (distracting) bright red shoes. To provide a break from all this formulaic waltzing, in wandered Janie Taylor in a pale mauve creation dripping long floppy sleeves and looking like a distraught moth in some kind of fraught duet with Sébastien Marcovici (jacketless, and with an open white shirt to indicate passion). They were interrupted by Fairchild, who also fraughted around with Taylor before handing her back to Marcovici and vanishing. Is this the start of a plot-line? No—the swirlers are back swirling until the whole thing just stops. The moth is history. Bal de Couture is supposed to be back in the winter season. Don’t hold your breath.

But bad ballets are commonplace. The deadliest gimmick of the evening was a performance of “Rubies” in which three different couples danced the three sections, and two different women danced the tall girl. It really doesn’t matter that teensy Erica Pereira was beyond irritating, or that some of the others were okay or more than okay. Switching dancers—twice—in the middle of a great Balanchine-Stravinsky ballet is just another sign of how City Ballet exploits its resources rather than honors them. At least the wonderful Karinska costumes weren’t Valentinized.

NOT EVEN BAL DE COUTURE could efface the impression made by the Greek trilogy—not because the performances were sublime but because the ballets are. Apollo, the oldest Balanchine ballet we possess, was made in 1928 and changed the history of the art form. It’s still one of the world’s most performed ballets: we saw it in the spring at ABT, and just in the next few months it will be seen in Seattle, in Miami, in Moscow, and in Ljubljana. It’s not only a masterpiece, it’s practical: if done in the final Balanchine version, without the birth scene, it needs only four dancers, simple costumes, no set and a string orchestra. It’s affordable.

On the other hand, it needs an Apollo—not just a very talented male dancer but one who convinces as the young god on his progress toward transcendence. And who looks like … a young god. First-cast Robert Fairchild is a handsome and very talented dancer, but he’s not yet, and may never be, a true Apollo, although he’s trying very hard—which may be part of the problem. His younger and less experienced and perhaps less talented colleague Chase Finlay is Apollo—the curtain goes up and there center-stage, holding his lute, is the god himself, before he takes a step. His body has filled out since he made his spectacular debut a few seasons ago, and his performance has too; he grips us throughout as he movingly grounds himself after his offstage birth and learns command. In no other role has he made a comparable impression, but then no other male Balanchine role is so exacting and so important. He—and we—were fortunate that his Terpsichore was Kowroski, whose grand manner combined with her natural modesty makes it clear why Apollo chooses her as his muse. First-cast Sterling Hyltin was just too lightweight; although she improves, she’ll never be a natural Terpsichore.  In her cast, only Tiler Peck as Polyhymnia was up to the job. No one was helped by the lugubrious tempi—Apollo is lilting, not solemn.

Back in its youth—the late ’40s and early ’50s—Orpheus was a glory, resonant with meaning and feeling, its Graham-related narrative expressionism plus its Graham-like Noguchi sets and costumes making it look modern and challenging. To many people today it’s inscrutable and old-fashioned, at moments almost risible, its story and symbolism murky and dense in ways that audiences and dancers find perplexing. And yet: the score is ravishing, the Noguchi décor extraordinary and the tale of Orpheus descending into the underworld to bring back his dead wife, Eurydice, profoundly moving. And of course much of the choreography is astounding—the interaction of Orpheus and the Dark Angel, the climactic anguished duet with Eurydice. Orpheus is a central Balanchine ballet and can’t be ignored, so it’s good that City Ballet keeps reviving it, even with mixed results. The thing about Orpheus is that it may not be easy to live with but you can’t live without it.

As with Apollo, the second cast was considerably more effective than the first. For reasons beyond my comprehension, the first-cast Orpheus, tall, spindly Ask la Cour, was paired with the sawed-off Dark Angel of Amar Ramasar—in their grapplings they looked like Mutt and Jeff; it was hard to take them seriously. Nor was Wendy Whelan anything more than dutiful as Eurydice. (Luckily for me, I have Maria Tallchief, the original, implanted in my brain.) On the second night, Sébastien Marcovici was far more moving than la Cour as the doomed hero, while Jonathan Stafford, although physically too slight, had the intensity the Dark Angel demands. And Janie Taylor’s passionate urgency justified the calamitous action that leads to Eurydice’s return to hell and Orpheus’s destruction at the hands of the Bacchantes. These three principals made a strong case for this landmark creation that once was so powerful and now baffles so many.Perhaps we just need to see it more often—and appropriately cast.

As for the once-revolutionary Agon, after more than half a centuryits lessons and revelations have been so absorbed into the language of ballet that it now seems almost conventional. The company performs it smoothly—maybe too smoothly; a littlemoresense of ongoing discovery might restore some of the excitement that attended the birth of this masterpiece.

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The Moiseyev Dance Company. (Courtesy E. Masalkov)

THE RULES FOR FALL FOR DANCE changed slightly this year—several more performances, spread out over three weeks, and a modest price hike—but the principle remains the same: a smorgasbord of wildly various disciplines and aesthetics, and equally various levels of interest and talent. You never know exactly what to expect, but you know there will be the good, the bad, and the well-intentioned boring.

Inevitably, there were four dance modes on view: classical ballet, “downtown,” ethnic/folk and novelties. It makes sense—the programs give audiences a chance to decide what they like, and give critics a chance to get a sense of companies and performers they might never be able to see otherwise—and to send up warning flares: If this bunch makes it back to town, STAY AWAY!

Ballet has been a problem for Fall for Dance since the beginning. There have been occasional happy surprises—the Aspen Ballet a few years ago, for instance (they’ll be at the Joyce next week)—but on the whole the choices have been tame and thin. Our two big companies are miserably represented: Usually they wander down from Lincoln Center with a duet. This year ABT put on Tharp’s Sinatra Suite, which we’ve seen all too often, though anything that brings us Herman Cornejo is a plus. City Ballet, absent this time around, usually gives Wendy Whelan taxi fare downtown, a partner and a Christopher Wheeldon pas de deux; this time we got Whelan and Wheeldon as usual, but under the auspices of Fang-Yi Sheu & Artists. It might as well have been a City Ballet moment, however, since three of the four dancers were from the company.

The ballet—Five Movements, Three Repeats—was new, and there was Sheu herself (well, it’s her company), barefoot in contrast to Whelan’s point shoes, though if this contrast was what the ballet was telling us about, it wasn’t telling us very much. Sheu is a strong, assertive dancer but not very interesting; the music, by Max Richter, is also strong, assertive and not very interesting. Wheeldon is obviously clear in his mind what the connections are among the movements and repeats, but he hasn’t made them clear to us. Nor can I figure out why in the middle of his careful duets and solos and trios he’s inserted Whelan dancing to the Dinah Washington recording of “This Bitter Earth”—we last encountered it (and her) a little while ago at the City Ballet gala. It looked better this time out, with Whelan rid of the ghastly Valentino concoction she was sporting then and dressed in a becoming costume by Reid Bartelme. Wheeldon is always efficient, but this is mid-level Wheeldon, not a keeper.

Another Wheeldon number, the duet from Carousel (A Dance), was the contribution of Pacific Northwest Ballet. It’s sweetly pretty in the Jerome Robbins young-ecstasy mode, with sweeping overhead lifts and rhapsodic expressions. And it brought us the wonderful Carla Körbes at her most lyrical. But this isn’t what we want to see from one of the country’s leading ballet companies. If Fall for Dance can afford to transport large groups from Hawaii and Indonesia and Hong Kong, it should be able to afford plane fare for a dozen dancers from Seattle to present a work of substance.

What was imported from Hong Kong was The Hong Kong Ballet (who knew?) with eight ardent and naive dancers giving their all in Luminous, a relatively new work by Peter Quanz—shmaltz by the bushel from this busy choreographer all of whose works seem to be acts of will rather than artistic impulses.

Worst of breed, worst in show, worst in memory was Ballet West, from Salt Lake City, in the “Grand Pas” from Paquita, a mainstay of the classical repertory that demands the highest level of Petipa technique and style. From the first seconds it was obvious that this company lacks everything Petipa requires; it all looked like an under-powered graduation performance at a second-level ballet school. The ballerina was clearly chosen because she can do, sort of, the barrage of fouettés the climax calls for—I won’t embarrass her and her colleagues by naming them. Regional? Provincial? Definitely not ready for the Big Apple. Poor gifted Elena Kunikova who staged it—we know how thoroughly she understands Paquita from the version she made of it for the Trocks. Where were those fabulous boys when she needed them?

TWO HIGHLY ADMIRED CHOREOGRAPHERS from downtown were displaying their wares at the City Center. Pam Tanowitz’s Fortune, performed by Juilliard Dance to a (live) quartet by Charles Wuorinen, is in her severe, high-minded mode, with lots of silence punctuating lots of jumping, and the clever disposition of Juilliard’s score or so of dancers. (Tanowitz is one of the few modern choreographers who deploys groups effectively.) As usual with her, there are little hints of ballet—you keep feeling that the dancers are raring to rise on point. I wish she’d let them.

Tanowitz is coolly worthy. Jodi Melnick is hotly self-absorbed. Her onstage musicians are much too loud, and like so many narcissistic performers, she goes on much too long: She’s interested in herself, why wouldn’t we be? She and her three colleagues wag their bottoms and swing their arms casually and toss their heads—Melnick’s reddish mop of hair is practically a fifth performer. She’s not without talent both as a dance-maker and a dancer, but Solo, (Re)Deluxe Version is more irritating than appealing.

As for novelties, there was the gone-in-a-flash Shutters Shut from the Nederlands Dans Theater, two goony performers in Cubist-inflected costumes having fun to a recitation of a Gertrude Stein poem about Picasso that begins “If I told him would he like it.” And a group called TU Dance (two ex-Ailey dancers) had a hit with High Heel Blues, more because of its use of Tuck and Patti’s lament about a woman who can’t resist buying shoes she knows in her heart will never fit her than because of any original dance invention. I don’t understand why it didn’t show the lamenter in high heels—at least she could have been trying them on and kicking them off.

The Martha Grahams turned up with the apparently obligatory excerpts from Chronicle (1936)—not again, please, Martha—and there was an extended sequence from Jared Grimes purporting to show a Transformation in Tap which “entertainingly reveals the journey of a young dancer who seeks to create innovative perspectives in tap dance live on stage.” Grimes is a pretty good tapper, and so are his four colleagues, but I just don’t want a message with my tap, and he goes on too long, like just about everyone else. Including the much-admired Balletboyz, 10 guys imported from England who put on a highly charged exhibition of guy stuff called Void. They’re non-stop explosive as they fling themselves at and on each other and crash to the ground, all to pounding music and grim lighting and visuals, and they’re fun to watch—for a while. Then the inevitable law of diminishing returns sets in, and the whole thing, at last, just stops—not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a fizzle.

BY FAR THE MOST INTERESTING OFFERINGS this year were the folk/ethnic ones, although most of them suffered from the raging epidemic of endlessness. The three Asian works all displayed intensity, sincerity and onstage percussion musicians, including singers. (Alas, neither the Hawaiians nor the Sumatrans offered translations of what they were singing—maybe the words don’t matter?) Before the curtain went up, a voiceover explained that Shantala Shivalingappa’s piece was about Shiva, the Lord of Dance, and Ganga, Goddess of the sacred river Ganges, both of whom were impersonated by the much admired Shantala. She’s a slim, attractive figure who moves gracefully—but I found that her Eternal Feminine aspect as Ganga wasn’t very different from her Eternal Masculine aspect as Shiva. It all had to do with Shiva using his head to deflect or absorb a deluge from the river. To each his own.

The group of artists called Nan Jombang from Padang, Sumatra, produced an extremely sophisticated drama decked out in Sumatra-wear which featured chanting and wailing, intoning and yelping, hair-tossing, hand-clapping, swaying, swinging, shouting, screaming, drumming and yet more drumming in a work called Tarian Malam (Night Dances) that announces itself as a “contemporary narrative about the earthquake that struck the region in 2009.” The group is supported by an impressive number of important international cultural organizations, and is as far from unmediated ethnic dance as you can get—this piece is orchestrated and polished to within an inch of its life. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t effective. Even so, at two-thirds its length it would have been twice as impressive.

From Hawaii came Ka Leo O Laka I Ka Hikina O Ka Lā with the world premiere of Hula Kane: The Ancient Art of Hawaiian Male Dance. Eleven near-naked smashing-looking guys—green garlands on their brows, green necklaces at their throats, green really skimpy thongs at their not-very-private privates—leaped and bounded and brandished sticks and percussion instruments for a very long time. In one section they looked like a group of nine male strippers shaking gourds. But it was all good-natured fun, if this kind of thing is your idea of fun.

The high point of the entire season was the return to New York after many years of the glorious Moiseyev Dance Company, which knocked our socks off when they first turned up here in 1958. My socks were knocked off all over again at the City Center last week as their galvanizing dancers filled the stage with dazzling energy, dazzling footwork, dazzling teamwork, dazzling costumes and dazzlingly beautiful women. They did four of the company’s classics, created between 1938 and 1959, featuring Kalmyk dances, Tartar dances, Bessarabian Gypsy dances and Moldavian dances. It was all tumultuous, sexy (relentlessly heterosexy) and alive with the joy of performing and the radiance of good will. Please, somebody, get them back here in full force for a season of their own!

A promise: If anything major takes place at the fifth and last of this year’s programs, you’ll hear about it here.

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Craig Holland and Janie Taylor in 'Year of the Rabbit.' (Paul Kolnik)

HAVING EMBARRASSED ITSELF (AND US) with its horrible Valentino gala, City Ballet pulled itself together later in the season and gave us many pleasures, as well as much hope for the future. Let us for once dwell solely on the positive.

During the Stravinsky-Balanchine weeks, there was Maria Kowroski, breathtaking with her glamour and expansiveness in that pair of seemingly modest efforts known as Monumentum/Movements, which swell in meaning the more often you see them. There was Tiler Peck, ravishing in Divertimento from “Le Baiser de la Fée,” that tantalizing fragment from a full-evening ballet that vanished half a century ago. There was Megan Fairchild in Danses Concertantes, the first role I can remember seeing her in that suits her perfectly—her quickness and charm not undercut either by cuteness or by the anxiety that comes from being cast as the kind of ballerina she’ll never be. There was a pleasing performance of the novelty Scherzo à la Russe by students from S.A.B., though all too many of them seem to have imbibed smiley-ness in the cradle. Fairchild and Chase Finlay looked good together in Duo Concertant—she has something of the cameo affect of the original girl, Kay Mazzo, and he can, maybe, some day, approximate Peter Martins. Other dancers had good seasons: Sterling Hyltin, Janie Taylor (at last being used fully), Sébastien Marcovici, Robert Fairchild and Savannah Lowery, who was particularly interesting as the Princess in Firebird, performing full-out rather than in the usual pallid throwaway style this role is too often reduced to.

But the great excitement of the season was the only premiere—Justin Peck’s Year of the Rabbit, fulfilling all the hopes everyone has had for this 25-year-old member of the corps. The curtain goes up on a bunch of guys arranged in such an original way that you gasp. It’s amazing how you can tell within seconds that a real voice and a sure hand are in charge. Peck isn’t yet a master, but you know right away that he’s a big talent, reveling in his powers of invention.

Rabbit is a ballet in seven parts, featuring six of the company’s major dancers, although its finest effects are for the corps. The music is by Sufjan Stevens, and it’s immensely danceable—this has clearly been a close collaboration; Peck himself did the cheery blue-with-white-trim costumes. Ashley Bouder slashes through the air. Joaquin De Luz bounds and whip-turns. Teresa Reichlen has been handed a role that takes perfect advantage of her extraordinary long-limbed body and strong technique—at last someone is identifying her rather than just exploiting her; let’s hope Peck can do for her what Christopher Wheeldon did for Wendy Whelan. Janie Taylor and Craig Hall perform their intense duet as if it were one long phrase. The entire corps seems galvanized, happy to be part of this happiest of occasions—the coming-out party of a real choreographer.

The sense of occasion was emphasized by the company Rabbit found itself in: Benjamin Millepied’s vapid, trendy Two Hearts and Wheeldon’s over-extended and under-invented Les Carillons. Yes, comparisons are odious, but we’re not the ones making them; that was done by whoever put this program together. That City Ballet may have found itself a first-rate dance-maker is the most heartening news of the year.

DOUG VARONE, at his recent season at the Joyce, waited till his second program to put his best foot forward. Program A included an extended new work, Caruggi, to an obscure oratorio written by Mozart when he was 15 and sounding nothing like himself—it’s generic 18th-century stuff. This is the biblical story of Judith and Holofernes, but you’d never know it, since the action isn’t literal and no libretto or synopsis is supplied. As always, Varone moves groups of dancers with great fluency, but for me Caruggi was a let-down—as if it was made on autopilot. Unlike the revival of his Ballet Mécanique, to George Antheil’s famous score. With its echoes of Metropolis and its dazzling (and dizzying) scenic projections, Ballet Mécanique is a period piece from that highly charged period, the ’20s—an appropriate vehicle for Varone’s eight highly charged dancers, who get no rest, and neither do we. The evening began with a striking, intense piece to one of Schubert’s “Moments Musicaux,” Aperture (1994), which gives us two men and one woman seen very, very close-up—small, controlled gestures of arms and hands, even fingers. It’s understated and compelling, one of Varone’s signature explorations of human relationships.

Program B opened with a revival of the mysterious Boats Leaving (2006), to a Te Deum by Avro Pärt. We do not understand the literal nature of the crisis the dancers are undergoing, but as they surge back and forth from despair to hope, we do understand the depth of their feeling and the significance of their experience. This is a grave and beautiful work, enhanced by superb lighting by Jane Cox. Another new piece, Able to Leap Tall Buildings, was another small-scale work (two dancers), at times aggressive, at times somber, but always gripping. And then things ended with a bang. Rise (1993) is one of Varone’s go-for-broke kinetic marathons, featuring the impossibly tall and thin Julia Burrer sweeping the sky with her immensely long arms and goading the entire company into thrilling rushes and falls and clashes and clutches. It’s irresistible. 

A QUICK REPORT on the final Fall for Dance program, of which one quarter was fun. Not Shen Wei Dance Arts’ Rite of Spring (two-piano version), which managed to be minimalist and pretentious at the same time, to say nothing of interminable; it took 17 not very interesting dancers to confirm that the last thing we needed was yet another Sacre. Not No Comment from the LDP-Laboratory Dance Project, in which, per the program notes, “A testosterone-fueled group of male dancers prowl the stage in a physically charged, acrobatic work that combines contemporary choreography, hip hop and martial arts”—to say nothing of one poor guy who has to stand still for minutes pounding his chest, as if trying to resuscitate himself in an episode of ER. Definitely not the María Pagés Compañia, “Conceived, Choreographed and Directed by María Pagés,” starring María Pagés, who does three very long solos in three very long, tight-fitting gowns, one of which involves more red material swirling around her ankles than Martha Graham every dreamed of—the whole thing a kind of bastardized flamenco. How do you say “ego trip” in Spanish?

But I did get a kick out of an Australian group called Circa in a piece called Circa—three guys, three gals, in the only witty display of acrobatics I’ve ever seen. You might think that wit and acrobatics don’t go together any more naturally than dancing and acrobatics, but this bunch pulled it off. Sometimes they looked a little shaky as they clambered up and down each other, but you’d be shaky too if you were stepping all over your supine partner in red high heels. (He took it like a man, although there were moments when his manhood seemed alarmingly vulnerable.) The six brave performers swung each other up, over and around, piled up on each other’s shoulders and swam through the air with confidence if not ease. And who will ever forget what one of the girls did at the climax of the show with five bright-blue hula hoops! Talk about rotation!

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Cory Stearns and Veronika Part in 'The Moor’s Pavane.' (Courtesy

A.B.T. just dropped into the City Center for a week—all the time it could get, and not nearly enough. The fall season is when the company is free to mix and match, focusing on one-act works and younger dancers who don’t get much of a chance during the Met’s spring marathon of full-evening classics (and bores) that demand Stars, however faded.

The company managed to cram six ballets into its seven performances, most of them worth looking at and a few of them exceptional. I myself had no need to see, ever again, Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo, which premiered in 1942 and which I was taken to see a few years later. It was this ballet that won de Mille the chance to take on Oklahoma!,and it was an A.B.T. calling card for decades, trotted out when management felt it’d better pay a little homage to the very difficult Aggie. Also, it’s fun. But you don’t want to be exposed to its cutenesses very often.

The Leaves Are Fading had something of a vogue when Antony Tudor made it in 1975, largely because of Gelsey Kirkland’s ravishing performance. The company has been loyal to Tudor, too, and hauls it out every few years, to less and less effect. The problem is that it’s too long for what it has to tell us, and too repetitive in the way it tells it. We’re in the world of Dvořák string music, and not the best of it, and by the time the lead couple and the three secondary couples and the corps have rhapsodized around in the same swirly way for what seems an eternity, you just want those leaves to wither and be done with it. Hee Seo gave a lovely performance, but she can’t yet hold an essentially dull ballet together.

Twyla Tharp’s In the Upper Room is an A.B.T. staple, and one of my favorite modern pieces, but the company, absent much of its star power, doesn’t do it full justice these days. Kristi Boone and Simone Messmer are mismatched as the “bomb squad” that opens the ballet. Sascha Radetsky, Patrick Ogle and the delicate Jared Matthews are not very stompy “stompers.” Only Isabella Boylston, Craig Salstein and Herman Cornejo (of course) brought to it the tsunami of energy that Tharp demands; the company as a whole just doesn’t have the stamina.

On the other hand, a non-star cast was fully up to the more subtle demands of Mark Morris’s Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes (1988), to piano music by Virgil Thomson. You can sense Morris’s pleasure as he played with the classical vocabulary, creating a hybrid that for the most part works charmingly; that’s right, Mark—when a girl is up on point she has more sweep! This is a piece in which the 12 dancers swiftly come and go, following each other in solos, duets and groups with the fluency that is so characteristic of Morris’s choreography. It’s not really a Morris masterpiece, but it’s to be cherished.

The big surprise of the season was the excellent revival of José Limon’s most famous work, The Moor’s Pavane, to sublime music by Henry Purcell. It’s not a retelling of Othello but a compressed formal dance for the four central characters, with as much focus on Iago and Emilia (here called The Friend and the Friend’s Wife) as on The Moor and The Moor’s Wife. Marcelo Gomes was the Othello figure, his noble carriage and the controlled amplitude of his emotion creating a moving if not tragic character, though he doesn’t have the brute power Limon brought to his creation. Desdemona is pallid to begin with, and Julie Kent simply made her more pallid; when she dies you hardly notice she’s gone. But Cory Stearns, who can be so bland, was a thrilling Iago—a lithe, dangerous charmer. And Veronika Part as a conflicted, even complicit, Emilia was simply the best I’ve ever seen her. Her heavy beauty and dramatic intensity—and the glorious red dress she wears—dominated the proceedings. Indeed, the costumes, originally by Pauline Lawrence, Limon’s wife and opulently recreated here, were utterly magnificent, almost stealing attention from the dancing except that they suit it so well. This Pavane was directed and “reconstructed” by Clay Taliaferro, who brought back to life a dance that has been both over-performed and neglected.

Finally, there was a new ballet by Alexei Ratmansky, Symphony #9, the first of three Shostakovich symphonies he’s choreographing to make up an evening program in the spring. It’s so full, so highly charged, so teeming with invention that it’s hard to take it all in at one viewing. The first movement is a joyous explosion—bang! Craig Salstein and Simone Messmer, two of the company’s most individual soloists, are jaunty and sparkly—perhaps too much so,they’re in such contrast to what follows. But then this is a ballet of contrasts, just as the symphony itself is constantly, almost willfully, changing gears. The duet that follows for Gomes and the company’s striking new ballerina, Polina Semionova, draws us into another, darker world. The corps, as in most Ratmansky works, has a crucial role—crashing on and off, grouping and regrouping, sometimes deliberately masking the principals. And then Herman Cornejo bursts on, his amazing good-natured, wholly un-narcissistic virtuosity carrying the ballet to its conclusion. The structure of the piece is in clear response to the music, and everything Ratmansky does is intelligent and interesting, but I don’t yet see Symphony #9 as a whole. The black, white and gray costumes, by Keso Dekker, are too busy—they distract rather than contribute. Jennifer Tipton’s lighting, of course, is perfect.

AND THEN AT BAM, WE WERE EXPOSED to the late Pina Bausch’s final offering, completed only weeks before her premature death. It’s called “…como el musguito en la piedra, ay si, si, si…” (Like moss on a stone), and it was inspired by a company visit to Chile. Here’s how it starts. A girl in a white nightdress who sometimes barks like a dog is handled and abused by one or more men. She has a lot of dark hair. Other women, in elegant gowns, appear; they’re not treated very well either: one of them, for instance, sits in a chair while a guy spills water on her as she refreshes her makeup—this, presumably, because when he kindly brought her a glass of water, she spat it out. Men chase back and forth across the stage. The stage itself slowly splits apart, like cracking ice, but no one notices. One sassy lady lies across the legs of two men whose shirts she’s ripped off and forces them to do sit-ups. Somewhere along the way, a couple clasp each other through prickly boughs that they’ve carried on. A tall woman saunters onstage knitting a long, tan scarf that (as you knew it would) keeps getting longer and longer and longer. Eventually, to mournful tango music, different women have extended solos that are meant to be sexy and are sexy, in the tradition of Rita Hayworth in Gilda. Others are tormented, as befits the tango music that begins to dominate. A couple of guys suffer.

In other words, it’s an accretion of shtick masquerading as a Statement. Once, Pina Bausch was about something, however disagreeable. By this point she was repeating herself—and the self she was repeating was sadly passé. The BAM audience lapped it up. I, on the other hand, tiptoed out of theater when the intermission mercifully came around—after an hour and a half.

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'poem.' (Ian Douglas)

’Tis the season when they’re cracking nuts at City Ballet and dispensing Revelations at Alvin Ailey, but let’s take a look at some other stuff that’s been going on around town, all of it “modern,” or “postmodern,” or something. The liberating shake-up that the Judson Dance Theater administered in the 1960s in the wake of the Merce Cunningham revolution is still reverberating—in some cases, with the same people! The choreographer Deborah Hay, for instance, was on the first Judson program in 1962, and half a century later, she’s among us again with a work called As Holy Sites Go/duet at the holy site of St. Mark’s Church.

Jeanine Durning and Ros Warby, identified as “guest dancers/choreographers,” are the performers—vastly different in look (Durning short and somewhat squat, with a ton of disordered dark hair; Warby tall, lanky, hair neatly bobbed, with endless arms and legs), but equally strong and experienced. Durning’s movement is more emphatic, assertive; Warby is more of a severe rag doll. They both frequently sink to the ground, Durning as if it’s where she really lives, Warby as if she’s politely dropping in. Sometimes they’re dancing close to each other, even with each other, but much of the time they’re roaming the large beautiful space of the church as if they’re unaware of each other’s existence. Midway through the hour-plus program they break into a cappella singing—something liturgical. There are long silences and stillnesses—the dancers stop, and we wait; they’ve gone from slo-mo to no-mo.

What’s it all about? You can sense an idea at work, a concept, or perhaps a methodology—this isn’t narcissism but rather the result of serious consideration. To what end, though? Isolated moments are interesting, because the dancers are interesting, but As Holy Sites Go doesn’t go anywhere; it just keeps going.

AT FIRST, THAT ALSO seemed to be the case with the two pieces that Tere O’Connor showed us at New York Live Arts. The first, called Secret Mary (why?), again presents strong and committed dancers, four of them, in assorted sizes and shapes, including ex-City Ballet corps member Ryan Kelly and small transgender (or cross-dressing?) and lower-case choreographer devynn emory. Their movement, too, is a throwback to Judson style—studiously informal; I found the casualness mannered. O’Connor can be austere and close to cute at the same time, but like Hay, he always knows what he’s doing. You just don’t always know why he’s doing it. Secret Mary seems to me an extended exercise by a very talented pro.

When it morphs into poem, though, something larger begins to happen. There are five new dancers now, all completely capable (the world has an unending supply of real dance talent). Best known is the virtuoso Silas Riener, who made such a huge impression in the final days of the Cunningham company, and who has star quality on top of his startling abilities. In poem, however, he’s on more or less equal terms with his four colleagues—a more striking presence, perhaps, his back more flexible, his energy more dynamic, his hair more determined, but his role is not more central.

In this piece, O’Connor goes beyond demonstrating his intelligence and his dancers’ gifts: He acknowledges his audience’s expectations. For instance, he doesn’t suppress his wit, as when the three men are on their backs on the floor, their legs pointing into the middle of their group and exploding upward into clever patterns like snowflakes in a kaleidoscope. And he gives us a series of related moments when one man holds another upside down, almost cradling him, which build into a final moving tableau, with Riener on the floor, looking up with feeling into the eyes of the estimable Michael Ingle. poem becomes a work, not simply a series of interesting impressions.

LUCY GUERIN, who presented Untrained (at the new Fishman Space at BAM), has danced for Tere O’Connor and has worked with Deborah Hay’s Warby—everything connects. Guerin is Australian, as is her cast, and she’s brought us from Australia an amusing one-off: Two untrained guys shadow two professionals, trying to mimic their movements, and revealing the immense chasm between the trained and the untrained. The audience laughs at the clumsiness of the regular guys, but it’s good-natured and appreciative laughter: No one’s feelings are hurt, and you enjoy the collegiality and generosity on display. Here there’s no sense of faux-naïveté—the amateurs are patently amateurish, even if once in a while they may exaggerate their hopelessness. They bravely try to follow the steps, but they never pretend to be dancers.

The disparity of accomplishment is, of course, glaring, and we quickly learn the lesson that there’s a difference in kind, not just degree, between the trained and the untrained. But then the piece opens up into something quite different—a kind of unglitzy A Chorus Line, in which the four men speak feelingly of their lives: their relationships with their fathers, what distresses them about their bodies—one with psoriasis, one overweight, etc. It sounds corny, but it isn’t; these are all decent guys, self-aware, feeling. They’re equally funny or touching when they turn into cats or when they eat a cookie or when one by one they demonstrate—a high point—how they pull off a T-shirt and pull it back on.

The four men are equally hard-working. They’re equally appealing. It’s just that two of them are dancers and two are not.

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Liam Roddick in Alston's 'Unfinished Business.'

After all these years of saying the same thing about the Alvin Ailey company—terrific dancers, awful repertory—I’m finally accepting the inevitable: I’m not going to change my mind, and they’re not going to change their ways. And why should they, given their juggernaut success all over the world? Audiences just love them, the way they love Cirque du Soleil and Béjart and Riverdance (the latter recently deceased, and not a moment too soon).

You have to be optimistic to be a dance critic, and so I’ve never stopped hoping, particularly after Robert Battle replaced Judith Jamison as artistic director and for his first season imported Paul Taylor’s Arden Court to shake up the mix and give his dancers something beyond Ailey and faux-Ailey and faux-primitive and faux-spiritual to lean on. It looked pretty good last year, despite its basic incompatibility with the training and the practice and the sheer physicality of the Ailey dancers, but it was too good to be true. This year Arden Court wassadly coarsened; instead of the dancers stretching themselves to do justice to Taylor, the dancers are stretching Taylor to look like Ailey. Bringing in an alien piece of major choreography isn’t enough—it’s got to be maintained.

Without the Taylor police on their backs, the Aileys, like most performers when coping with something new and difficult, fall back on what they know they’re great at: athleticism, push, look-at-us-ism. The subtleties of Taylor, the wit, the ease, the human connection are gone. The brilliance of Arden Court’s structure and inventiveness manages to gleam through, but that’s a reflection of Paul Taylor’s talents, not of the Ailey treatment.

As for Battle’s other choices this season, my heart sinks as I report them. Jiří Kylián’s Petite Mort (1991) is just as reprehensibly manipulative and vulgar as it’s always been. It’s a bad off-pointe ballet exploiting Mozart and tarted up with cutenesses—much (nervous) male play with épées in its first section, and in the second, much female hilarity with constructions moving on rollers that have been made to look like 18th-century ball dresses. This kind of meretricious work often relies for its effects on extra-dance novelty rather than on steps, which is just as well, since Kyliàn’s quasi-balletic vocabulary is so minimal and derivative.

The company looked far more at home in Garth “Lion King” Fagan’s From Before (1978). Drums, colorful Caribbean costumes, much shaking of booty (a bonanza for pelvises, both male and female), tons of energy, happy dancers—and why not? A harmless piece of pastiche like this is right up Ailey’s alley.

Another Night is a new work by the latest flavor of the season, Kyle Abraham, who has been “Heralded by OUT magazine as one of the ‘best and brightest creative talents to emerge in New York City in the age of Obama.’” He’s certainly capable, agreeably feeding the Ailey appetite for high-energy, relentless action. We’re at a party, the 10 brightly dressed dancers flashing and splashing their moves almost nonstop—lots of flirting, lots of sex, lots of good-natured athleticism. We’ve seen it all. But that’s what Ailey feels most comfortable with—the mixture as before. Let’s hope that next time out, Abraham will take a few chances.

Battle’s own contributions were all too modest. There is a solo called In/Side, which I saw performed by Kirven James Boyd, whoflings himself to the ground in anguish, thrashes, rolls around, his mouth yawing open in soundless despair. The music is Nina Simone’s version of that diva vessel “Wild is the Wind.” I hereby present this year’s “Oy Vey” award to Battle, Simone and Boyd—and everyone else who dances this role. Boyd reappeared in a Battle duet called Strange Humors, partnered—or shadow-boxed—by Samuel Lee Roberts. This is a less agitated and therefore more bearable snippet, but it’s just another opportunity for Ailey exhibitionism.

The best revival—and the company’s only original work of quality from the last 15 years—was Ronald K. Brown’s Grace (1999). It’s framed by two versions of Duke Ellington’s famous “Come Sunday,” and includes other artfully selected music from spiritual to rock. Brown presents a convincing and moving struggle between pure forces in white led by Linda Celeste Sims (now the company’s senior ballerina, following the retirement of the wonderful Renee Robinson), and the devils in red, led by the matchless Matthew Rushing ... and purity prevails. (It’s a somewhat sexy purity, but who’s complaining?) Demetia Hopkins, a recent addition to the company, made a particularly strong impression.

The worst thing that’s happened to Ailey in the past few years is the vulgarization—the erosion—of its one undisputed masterpiece, Revelations. The company now performs it in several versions, including the one I was trapped at. The opening scene, the moving “I Been ’Buked,” is now swamped midway through by a swarm of extraneous dancers from the company itself, from Ailey II, and from the School—cute little persons indeed. The solemnity is gone, the atmosphere is destroyed, but the kids get a great big hand. A little later on,the deeply moving male solo “I Wanna Be Ready” is cheapened and undercut by the addition of two additional male dancers echoing the soloist. “We Wanna Be Ready”? (What next? The Dying Swans?) And the entire stirring finale is pumped up by the return of Ailey II and the kids, while down the aisles pour still more dancers rockin’ their souls in the Bosom of Abraham—and blocking the view of much of the audience. Because all these superfluous bodies are crowding the stage, we are denied the encore that has become an essential component of Revelations. And why this travesty? Revelations has been a surefire hit for more than half a century—maybe the chief reason for the company’s success. It’s artistic suicide to cute-ify it, and we can’t consider Mr. Battle a serious artistic director until he restores it to its wonderful self.

WHAT BALM TO FOLLOW THE FEBRILE AILEY performances with Richard Alston’s triple bill at the handsome Alexander Kasser Theater at Montclair State University in New Jersey. Alston was hailed last week by Alastair Macaulay in The New York Times as the most accomplished of all post-Ashton European choreographers, and he should know—he’s been watching Alston since 1978. I first saw and loved his work only a couple of years ago in a piece he made for the small and adventurous New York Theater Ballet (they’re planning another for the coming year). Then last year he brought to Fall for Dance what was by far its most distinguished presentation, Roughcut.

Roughcut was also the opening work in the Montclair triple bill. Again I was knocked out by the flow of invention, the unforced energy, the consummate musicality. Music: Steve Reich. Ten dancers, all of them steeped in Alston’s style and breezing through the complicated footwork that is his hallmark. Outstanding among the outstanding dancers was a young Frenchman named Pierre Tappon, the latest in a series of virtuosi Alston has discovered and nurtured. Slight in build, nimble, fearless and exact, Tappon is a riveting performer—yet without clamoring for attention. In other words, not an exhibitionist.

In the second piece, Unfinished Business, Tappon leads the concluding Gigue, but the finest moments come in the central duet (to the andante froma Mozart piano sonata, beautifully played on stage by Jason Ridgway). Ella Braund and James Pett are thrillingly lyrical, sculptural, emotional—and quiet. No one since Ashton and Balanchine has given us so perfect a passage for two dancers—not Wheeldon, not Ratmansky, not Morris.

The program concluded with the American premiere of Alston’s A Ceremony of Carols, to Benjamin Britten’s ravishing rendition of medieval Christmas music. This is another simple-seeming but deeply sophisticated work (it touches on the Virgin Birth and the Crucifixion), deploying not only Alston’s entire company of 12 but also the all-female Prima Voce singers. (In England, it was sung by the all-boys Canterbury Cathedral choir.) Here the singers are on stage, at times mingling with the dancers—their black robes setting off the striking scarlet of the dancers’ costumes. Everything is highly charged yet unforced. As in all Alston’s work, the foundation is the steps, not the concept, yet the concept is true, and achieved. This was the climax to a superb program—as I say, a balm to the soul.

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Ida Nevasayneva (Paul Ghiselin) as 'The Dying Swan.' (Gene Schiavone)

The big event at the Trocks’ season at the Joyce (the Trocks, of course, are Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo), was a restaging of Laurencia. Well, not the entire Laurencia, which is a 1939 multi-act Soviet piece of what they used to call choreo-drama—all heroism and uplifting patriotism, the kind of thing that led to Spartacus and Stone Flower—but of its non-narrative finale, 17 minutes of classical dance with colorful Spanishy costumes and a strong infusion of Spanishy folkiness. Like most of the Trocks’ Russian repertory, it was staged by Elena Kunikova—exact in steps and style, so you know you’re getting the real thing, with the guys disciplined to the tips of their pointe shoes. They do a terrific job, but you can’t help wondering what they could do with the story itself—the peasant uprising that turns on an attempt by the local military Commander to snatch the passionate Laurencia from her boyfriend, Frondoso. (The tyrant, you’ll be stunned to learn, is done away with: The People triumph!)

What we have here is the celebration of that triumph, and it’s packed full of energetic classical dancing. But the material is more generic than original—the legendary Russian/Georgian dancer Vakhtang Chabukiani, who choreographed it, was no Petipa. Nonetheless, it proved an immensely popular vehicle for his over-the-top performance style and the brilliance of the renowned ballerina Natalia Dudinskaya, and it became a tempation for generations of future Russian dancers for whom he was a lodestar. (To see Chabukiani at his absolutely most extraordinary, watch him on YouTube as Othello—a wild, deranged savage. As Frondoso, seen in his later days, he’s chunky and less than polished, but still a hurricane.) Laurencia isn’t helped by its score;Alexander Krain’s music is of such lack of distinction that you forget it even while you’re hearing it. Where was Minkus when we needed him? Actually, he was right there at the Joyce, with his winning score to Petipa’s Paquita, also staged by Kunikova and perhaps the Trocks’ greatest current achievement. That formidable ballerina Yakatarina Verbosovich (Chase Johnsey) nails every arabesque and fouetté, and the company’s latest danseur noble, Marat Legupski (Giovanni Ravelo), is even dumber-seeming than his mentally challenged predecessors.

Legupski is also gloriously vacant as the Nijinsky figure in Les Sylphides and the Prince in Swan Lake, his Soviet-gold hair ablaze and his stare fixed on some ineffable vision up in the empyrean—no wonder he never seems to notice his ballerina. In fact, it’s not clear he’s aware that he himself is on the stage. His technique is not exactly top-drawer—the men dancing as men tend to be less strong than the men dancing as women. For real virtuosity, we have the immortal Olga Supphozova (Robert Carter) and the aforementioned Verbosovich, whose Black Swan Pas de Deux was frighteningly powerful and convincing. Here we approach the line between the real thing and the ... the what? This was a more exciting Black Swan than all too many I’ve seen in my (long) day. And to the roster of ballerina fame we can now add the up-and-coming Marina Plezegetovstageskaya (Roberto Forleo), who was our affecting Odette and an outrageous Taglioni in that battle of divas, Pas de Quatre.

The hardest thing for the Trocks to get right is the balance between authenticity and jokiness. Swan Lake seems too jokey today; Laurencia not jokey enough. The older repertory involves many too many pratfalls, many too many ballerinas knocking each other over, much too much spotlight hogging. The foibles of the old Ballets Russes aren’t relevant any more; the real nonsense of dance today is the pretentiousness of the concept-obsessed avant-garde. But this is a ballet company, comfortable in its après-garde genre and superb at what it does. And its best jokes are as good as ever. When Ida Nevasayneva (Paul Ghiselin) bourrées out from the wings as The Dying Swan, not just dying but seriously molting, it’s ridiculous, it’s hammy, we’ve seen it again and again—and it’s very, very funny.

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Lauren King and Robert Fairchild in George Balanchine’s 'The Nutcracker.' (Paul Kolnik)

For eight weeks, the only music heard at the Koch Theater has been Tchaikovsky. First, the annual six-week Nutcracker-fest; then, a fortnight of other Tchaikovsky-Balanchine masterpieces, disfigured only by Peter Martins’ Bal de Couture, which is about to make its return appearance after its unfortunate preview at last season’s gala—a glitzy tribute not to Tchaikovsky or Balanchine but to the fashion designer Valentino. It was the company’s dreariest attempt to juice up the box office since Martins’ equally ghastly collaboration with Paul McCartney.

But let us now praise famous men. That miracle of music and dramatic imagination, Nutcracker, was in really good shape when I saw it, twice, toward the end of its run—I had waited for the company’s two newest Sugar Plums. Both gave remarkably appealing performances, though in very different ways. Lauren King, a soft, pretty strawberry blonde, has been an eye-catching demi-soloist for some time now, always musical, always engaging—a charmer but not a dynamo, in a company of dynamos. Lauren Lovette is closer to the City Ballet norm: strong, clear, musical, succeeding through dance power and ballerina-like self-assurance. I’d probably take a small child to see King, who’s a more lovable and enchanting hostess in the Land of the Sweets, and a dance connoisseur to see Lovette sail through the gloriously expansive climactic duet.

Lovette’s Cavalier was Chase Finlay, who is turning himself into a true danseur noble, at least in look and manner; his partnering is getting there. Teresa Reichlen, with her natural big jump, was a pleasing Dewdrop, but in the same role, a newcomer, Mary Elizabeth Sell, was seriously irritating. She has the moves, but she’s selling herself at every moment, punctuating rather than phrasing. Calm down, girl. Claire Von Enck was a musical and pleasing Columbine. And let’s celebrate Robert La Fosse, back where we are always happy to see him as a subtle, compelling Drosselmeier. David Prottas made a good stab at the role, but his stance, his walk and his demeanor are just too young. Even so, one of the important things about Nutcracker is that it gives up-and-comers like him chances at arresting roles while providing audiences and critics with a look at the future. But the greatest thing about Nutcracker is, and will always be, the marriage of the greatest of ballet composers with the greatest of choreographers.

The first week of general repertory brought some surprises. In Mozartiana, Tchaikovsky’s tribute to Mozart, Sterling Hyltin made a highly persuasive debut. This was Balanchine’s last creation for Suzanne Farrell, and has been successfully performed by a range of large-scale dancers, including Maria Calegari, Kyra Nichols and Maria Kowroski. Hyltin bears no resemblance to any of them: she’s petite, delicate, quicksilver, with no grandeur about her—that’s why she’s at her least effective in the solemn opening “Preghiera.” But from then on, she danced with a lightness and playful brio that showed the ballet in a new way—perhaps more Mozart than Tchaikovsky. Chase Finlay nimbly traded tricky variations with her.

Teresa Reichlen’s relaxed technique carried her through the ultra-demanding ballerina role in Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2 (née Ballet Imperial). Tall, thin, with exaggeratedly long limbs, she doesn’t seem the type—she’s more willowy than imperial—but it worked. As the second ballerina, Ana Sophia Scheller was her usual efficient, uninteresting self. But nothing can seriously diminish this tremendous masterpiece.

The one disappointment on this opening program was Serenade, the quintessential Balanchine take on Tchaikovsky and perhaps his best-loved work. The corps—crucial to the ballet—was in good condition, if occasionally ragged, but the three ballerinas were ill-matched and subpar. In her first appearance after a long layoff due to injury, Sara Mearns, making her debut in the tragic central role, looked somewhat out of shape. She plunged in, though, as she always does, and no doubt will find her way. Ashley Bouder, that powerhouse, is really too assertive a dancer to fit easily into the high romanticism of Serenade. And Megan LeCrone made no impression at all as the Dark Angel. The three women didn’t seem to belong together on the stage. Surely, with its abundance of superb young women, City Ballet can do better than this.

At the Sunday matinee, everything came together. To begin with, Mearns was at her finest in Swan Lake. Too often she shows us what a wonderful dancer she is without revealing much about the specific role she’s dancing. But there’s a true and deep identification with Odette—her performance is one long concentrated phrase of hope, despair, transcendence. The turbulent Balanchine version exactly suits her turbulence as a dancer. The hunters rush rather than wander on, Odette and the full complement of 30 (black) swans are driven rather than drifting, and the orchestra, under guest conductor Gerry Cornelius, was excitingly propulsive—and sounded resplendent in the improved acoustics. Jared Angle has grown into a mature, responsive Prince. What a glory Balanchine’s Swan Lake is! It shames both ABT’s silly version and Peter Martins’ soulless one.

Then came one of the finest performances I’ve seen in years at City Ballet: Tiler Peck in Allegro Brillante. I was sitting with another old-time, somewhat jaded critic, and we were gasping in delight at Peck’s sublime command—the tossed-off triple pirouettes, the incredible tight corkscrew turns, the musicality so natural, so effortless, so secure that everything in this explosive ballet just flowed easily along with no hitch and no push. Here was Balanchine dancing at its pinnacle. If only he had been there to see it.

Finally, an exemplary presentation of Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3, with the three prequel movements that Balanchine added in 1970 to his thrilling Theme and Variations (1947). Many of us wouldn’t miss them if they vanished, but on this occasion they held our attention—partly, again, because of the effectiveness of the orchestra. Rebecca Krohn was glamorous and authoritative in the near-kitschy “Élégie,” with its flowing long gowns and flowing long hair. Abi Stafford and Ana Sophia Scheller were capable and bland as ever in, respectively, the “Valse Mélancolique” and “Scherzo.” And Ashley Bouder, back in her native territory of high-stakes technical demand, gleefully nailed Theme without a flicker of hesitation, abetted by Andrew Veyette, who managed the eight consecutive double-air turns with aplomb, landing flawlessly on his knee after the last one. All this, and then the triumphant glittering finale! Who could ask for anything more?

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Michelle Fleet and Michael Novak in 'Perpetual Dawn.' (Tom Caravaglia)

How gratifying that Paul Taylor’s current season—it runs until March 24—is packing them in at the Koch. I’ve never seen such large and enthusiastic audiences for his work, and I go back with him almost 50 years. It’s as if last year’s move from the City Center to Lincoln Center has woken people up to the fact that he’s not only startlingly original but that, apart from Balanchine’s, his is the largest and most important—and most enjoyable—dance repertory we have in this city. And that his company of 16 dancers is ravishing too.

He’s a quirky one. Who knows why some pieces reappear after many years, others are cold-storaged permanently, and still others subtly mutate? For instance, this season’s revival of his brilliant, cartoonish Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rehearsal)—in the year of Sacre’s centenary—projects a new atmosphere. Not because he’s changed the action or the steps, but because of casting. “The Girl,” whose baby is stolen and who emerges as the original Sacre’s “Chosen One,” has had three inspired interpreters since 1980, when the piece was new. Ruth Andrien, Kate Johnson and, most recently, Annamaria Mazzini were explosive, searing. With Mazzini, alas, retired, Taylor has handed the role to Laura Halzack—beautiful, lyrical, and here bland rather than blazing. The piece holds together, but it’s not as effective. Also less exhilarating than usual is that giant hit Company B. It’s casting again. Eran Bugge, for example, is a charming dancer, but “Rum and Coca-Cola” has to be more sexy and less cute. Or maybe Company B is getting a little tired. Or maybe I am.

On the other hand, two more recent pieces look better than ever. I was resistant to Eventide 15 years ago, partly because my musical taste doesn’t run to English Pastoral (in this case, Ralph Vaughan Williams). But it’s more strongly cast today, the melancholy atmosphere more convincing, the feeling more subtly conveyed. Or has my eye grown more subtle? Offenbach Overtures, always a diverting romp with its exaggerated parody of French 19th-century dance hall manners and traditions—talk about flouncing!—is still a hoot, but it’s a hootier hoot today, and not just because Taylor (and the costume designer, Santo Loquasto) have had the boys deck themselves out with perfect little mustaches to complement their bright red uniforms. The comic duel has always been the high point of the ballet (the two antagonists start out ready to kill each other and end up in each others’ arms), but with Michael Trusnovec and Sean Mahoney, it’s reached perfection. But then Trusnovec is always perfect, and Mahoney has unleashed himself this season: he’s become a major player. And then there’s the gorgeous Parisa Khobdeh, who’s as funny as she is beautiful, with her floppy hat and floppy hairdo and exquisite timing. Watch her in the background as she plucks at her skirt in bored irritation while her rival, Michelle Fleet, is strutting her stuff. If looks could kill! The whole piece came alive, its only flaw (and this has been the case from the start) being that there’s just too much of it. Why Taylor decided to take on this Frenchy froufrou stuff we’ll never know, but we’re lucky he did.

Just as we’re lucky to still have with us his oldest surviving piece, 3 Epitaphs from 1956, in which five humanoids, or ape-oids, concealed from head to foot in dark gray skintight costumes with some glittering reflectors attached, galumph around to early New Orleans jazz. There’s a central couple—the huge James Samson and the tiny Eran Bugge—and wherever he goeth, she followeth. Why is it so funny? Why is it so moving? Because to Paul Taylor, that’s what people are.

We’ve had three Bach pieces already this season, with more to come. The magnificent Promethean Fire has been with us almost annually since its post-9/11 premiere, but Junction came back into the repertory only last year, with its primary-color Alex Katz costumes and its unorthodox vocabulary (one woman standing casually on the back of a crouching man, another folded up into a package and handed from guy to guy) seemingly at odds with the Bach cello suites it’s set to. Historically, Junction is significant—this was Taylor’s first piece to Baroque music, a year before his 1962 breakthrough hit, Aureole, to Handel—and it has its charms, but you can see why it was Aureole that broke through. As for Cascade, to Bach piano concertos, it’s solid, it’s worthy, but for me it’s not on Taylor’s highest level, the level of Musical Offering, Brandenburgs and, of course, Esplanade, all Bach and all still to come. Each section of Cascade is effective, but they don’t really add up to a cohesive whole. (By the way, this is among the works that would most benefit from live music—can we dream that, with the company’s new box office success, live music may be a possibility?)

Finally we get to the two new pieces that Taylor offers us every year. One is called To Make Crops Grow, a bewildering title until you see what it’s about. In a way, it’s another take on Sacre—in an annual ritual, one member of the farming community is chosen by lottery to be sacrificed to the gods in order to fertilize the fields: there’s to be another “Chosen One.” The farmers seem agreeable enough, until the “Ritual Conductor” presents them with a box from which they each have to pluck a piece of paper and hope it isn’t the marked one. The characters are differentiated—The Young Wife and the Elderly Husband, the Newlyweds, the children—and Taylor has given them distinctive things to do on the way to the horrible denouement, when the Chosen One, after agonizingly trying to escape her fate, is crushed to death with stones. Khobdeh is superb in this dramatic role—she can do everything!—and the music, from Ferde Grofé’s famous Grand Canyon Suite, is a brilliant choice. The dance as a whole, though, isn’t as strong as the story on which it’s based; Shirley Jackson’s famously shocking “The Lottery,” which saw readers canceling their New Yorker subscriptions back in 1948, is a lot scarier. (I’m surprised that Taylor doesn’t acknowledge Jackson in his program notes.) But we can see why Taylor was drawn to it: violence beneath the surface is one of his most persistent themes.

The other new piece, Perpetual Dawn, made me totally happy. The music is once again Baroque ... but with a difference. Here we have neither the severity of Bach nor the grandeur of Handel, but the lively, almost jolly work of the obscure Johann David Heinichen, an almost exact contemporary of those two masters. The music is fresh and appealing, and it perfectly supports Taylor’s intentions: he’s showing us young people frolicking, chasing each other in innocent attraction, at the dawn of the day and of their lives. The set and costumes by Loquasto are charmingly pastoral, the girls in peasanty dresses, the boys in pants cut off at the knee. They could be Brueghel villagers. One of the girls, Michelle Fleet, is left out of the pairings—she wants a boy too. Though there’s a touch of melancholy in the setting and lighting, no one’s going to be left out in the end—this is an earthly paradise—and she finds her mate in a finale that’s not quite as strong as what’s come before. What’s particularly interesting is that this is Taylor’s first Baroque piece that isn’t abstract but is about individual guys and girls doing guyish and girlish things; the human-scale level of Heinichen’s music makes this possible—in fact, inevitable. How wonderful that at 82, Paul Taylor is still rejoicing.

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Young in Taylor's 'Perpetual Dawn.' (Photo by Tom Caravaglia)

Bill T. Jones is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company with a two-week season at the Joyce. He’s been a MacArthur “Genius” and a Kennedy Center honoree. He’s won two Tonys—for Spring Awakening and FELA!—plus countless other awards and prizes and honorary degrees. He’s collaborated with Toni Morrison, Jessye Norman, Peter Hall. Most importantly, he knows how to put a dance together. So why, ultimately, is an evening of Bill T. Jones (let alone two evenings of Bill T. Jones) so depleting? Because despite the kinetic excitements he can provide and his sheer facility and the Big Ideas he sometimes unleashes, you don’t end up feeling his work is really about anything—certainly not the music he chooses to use for it.

The five dances currently on display deploy five musical big guns (all well served by the Orion String Quartet): Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Ravel and Schubert—these dances must be meaningful, right? You stake a large claim when you choreograph to Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” quartet, and it was predictable that the dance content couldn’t possibly rise to Schubert’s occasion—this is music too profound to be anything but diminished by a slick vocabulary like Jones’s. The piece is called Story/—don’t ask why—and Jones explains in a program note that it “employs a random menu of movement that meets the music thus crafting a lively conversation between Schubert’s quartet and the choreography.” Sorry, Bill T., but Story/ isn’t a conversation; it’s an exploitation, using this deep music to lend gravitas to dance that has no depth. There’s one beautiful passage—a slow duet, the man and woman (Jennifer Nugent and LaMichael Leonard Jr.) rolling and stepping over each other in a gripping and touching way—but the rest essentially is visual noise. And aural noise, too—what a terrible idea to have the dancers roar out or clap for emphasis at big moments! (It happens in other pieces too.) Well, Balanchine told us what to do in situations like this: close your eyes and listen to the music.

By far the most successful piece on display was the classic D-Man in the Waters, made in 1989. Mendelssohn’s glorious Octet for Strings is dancey, and Jones fills it with a rush of energy that reflects the music’s. Dancers throw themselves, sliding, across the stage and hurl themselves into each others’ arms or onto each others’ bodies—yes, Jones has clearly absorbed Paul Taylor’s Esplanade, and it’s had a commendable influence on him. He also employs a favorite effect of his—fluttering hands and lower arms—and there’s a semaphore-like arm movement he favors. He’s at his best maneuvering his dancers on and off stage and through intricate, pleasing patterns—the patterns seem inevitable, and the dancers have them down cold. I could have done without the pumped fists at the climax and a few other too-easy tropes, but I had a good time with D-Man, which is more than I usually have with the art of Bill T. Jones.

Alas, I didn’t have a good time with Continuous Replay, the only one of these pieces I’d seen before. This is the one in which little Erick Montes Chavero, with his black mustache and beard, enters naked from the stage-right wing and begins a series of athletic poses and postures that he constantly repeats, though with changes, while the other dancers follow him on, also naked, and walk, run and circle to Beethoven string quartets. The gimmick—sorry, the donnée—is that as the work progresses, they slowly don their clothes, until at the end only Chavero is still as nature made him. Continuous Replay proves, as so many other dance pieces have proved, that most people look better with their clothes on. To add to the fun, many Jones alumni join in, so that we end up with people of every age and shape on the stage. They seemed to be having a good time.

No need to walk you through the other dances, because ultimately all Bill T. Jones pieces are the same Bill T. Jones piece—only the music changes, and the number of lifts and throws. But his broad spectrum of dancers—the miniature Chavero, darting and whirling until at times you want to swat him; the flaming (and accomplished) redhead Jenna Riegel; the ardent Nugent with her shaved head; the beautiful I-Ling Liu; in fact, the entire gutsy troupe—are terrific to watch, and they occasionally convince you that what you’re watching is more than superficial. 

The second and third week of the Paul Taylor season at the Koch brought forth as many wonders as the first, not the least of them Esplanade. No matter how often one sees it, it reveals new riches—the sure sign of a genuine masterpiece. As new dancers slip into roles we associate with their predecessors, we’re forced to reconsider. No one can ever efface the memory of Annamaria Mazzini’s wild abandon as she crashed recklessly to the ground in the final section, but Parisa Khobdeh—a nonpareil beauty who can be glamorous, dramatic and funny—gives us a more lyrical abandon that subtly modifies the texture of the whole. Laura Halzack is less austere, more serene than the astounding original, Bettie de Jong, in the dominatrix role of the slow movement. Michelle Fleet, who used to be somewhat nervous in the brilliant role of the girl in pink who runs backward, has found her way and is now transcendent. Robert Kleinendorst, a company rock, now brings extra zest and all-out commitment to his performance. But these alterations or emendations only expand our sense of what Esplanade has to offer, the way new interpretations of Giselle can help us see the ballet in new ways.

The company goes from strength to strength. This season, Sean Mahoney reached a kind of stardom, his passionate energies fully let loose. James Samson has a new authority as he anchors ballet after ballet. As for Michael Trusnovec, now the company’s senior performer, what is there left to say? He is incontestably a great dancer, his blinding focus, artistic imagination and beautiful plastique never seeming to diminish—and his dedication and intensity almost religious in quality. He is equally compelling and moving as the terrifying Man of the Cloth in Speaking in Tongues, the tormented narcissist in Taylor’s darkest work, Last Look, and the spiritual poet, Whitman, dying in Beloved Renegade. He had no predecessor, unless it was Taylor himself, and I cannot imagine a successor. He has no equal among America’s male dancers.

Finally, another devastating departure from the company: the estimable Amy Young, whom we have watched evolve from a bland, almost invisible presence into a superb dancer—womanly, arresting, both gracious and powerful, and these recent years, central to Paul Taylor’s vision. Unlike dancers who leave when their powers erode, Young is leaving by choice, to start a family with her husband, Robert Kleinendorst, so her departure is far from a tragedy for her. It’s only a tragedy for us.

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The Mark Morris Dance Group performing 'Crosswalk.' (© Stephanie Berger/MMDC)

In the small theater on the fifth floor of his Dance Center across from BAM, Mark Morris is presenting a smorgasbord of four chamber pieces, three of them to live (and beautifully played) chamber music—and three of them new to New York.

The one we know, The Office, from 1994, is the most striking. Five plainly but handsomely dressed people are waiting in the anteroom of some bureaucratic office, waiting for ... for what? One by one, they’re summoned into an inner office by a stern functionary, not to be seen again. While the others wait their turns, they dance together in ingeniously differentiated stretches of Slavic-folk-inflected dance inspired by ravishing Dvorak bagatelles for two violins, cello and harmonium. Here Morris is totally at home, building suspense—Who will be summoned next?—while giving his dancers rich material to explore. The beautiful Maile Okamura dominates the scene with her lithe body and expansive movement. Faceless bureaucracy and anxious supplicants (or victims) are hardly original. (I kept thinking back to Gian-Carlo Menotti’s The Consul, an opera that ran for eight months on Broadway in 1950 and won a Pulitzer. The heroine confronts the bureaucratic process: “What is your name?” “Magda Sorel.” “Age?” “33.”) But the somewhat gimmicky premise doesn’t undercut the strength of what Morris shows us.

The second piece—the pièce de resistance, presumably—was A Wooden Tree, set to jaunty semi-cute snatches of song by the obscure (to us in Brooklyn) British songwriter Ivor Cutler. These are parodic ventures into a kind of folkiness very different from Dvorak’s—they’re a little Gertrude Stein, a little Edith Sitwell, a lot self-conscious: “Here’s a Health for Simon,” “Deedle, Deedle, I Pass,” “I Love You but I Don’t Know What I Mean,” “Cockledoodledon’t.” Eight performers dance and prance around in workaday clothes, making little whimsical gestures and having a bang-up time. Maybe you have to be a Brit. The kicker is that one of the eight is Mikhail Baryshnikov, at 65 just one of the kids. He’s hardly singled out, except by the eye of everyone in the theater—how can you not watch Baryshnikov as hard as you can, at any age and under any circumstances? He seemed to be having a good time—at moments you had the feeling that A Wooden Tree was just something Mark and Misha cooked up together as a lark. Morris throws in an energetic coda as an encore, and here’s where Baryshnikov erupts. I wish it had been used as the legitimate finale of the piece itself, instead of as an extra—it might have pulled the whole thing together.

Then came a strong, passionate duet for Jenn Weddel and Spencer Ramirez called, in fact, Jenn and Spencer. (If a different couple performs it, does the name change?) Here the music is a suite for violin and piano by one of Morris’s favorite composers, Henry Cowell, and it’s a beauty—strong, tumultuous, resonant. Jenn is in a floor-length russet/mauve gown (at times I was afraid she was going to trip on the hem of its skirt). Spencer is in black pants and a formal white shirt with its sleeves rolled up. Something charged is happening. Is it high romance? Is it violent antagonism? She slaps him hard—it’s antagonism, I guess—but it’s clear that all is not over between them. This adult man/woman stuff is rare in the Morris canon, but he handles it elegantly, and Jenn and Spencer bring Jenn and Spencer to emotional life.

Finally: Crosswalk, a company piece—eight guys, three women. The engaging music is von Weber’s “Grand Duo Concertant, for Clarinet and Piano,” and the dance picks up on its rushing energy and high spirits. The three sporty gals are in orange—are they cheerleaders? The men are in white tee shirts. Are they athletes? They begin as if they’re running races—on your mark! get set! go!—yet they become a community, if an unorthodox one. A woman in orange replaces one of the bloc of eight men, and the odd man out is swept up by the other two women—none too comfortably. The color-swapping is both unsettling and stimulating: it keeps the piece as a whole from seeming too familiar in its pushing, running, somersaulting vocabulary. As always with Morris, everything in Crosswalk is perfectly organized and proceeds like clockwork. Maybe a little too much like clockwork. But in a world where most choreographers just don’t know how to put a piece together, we can only be grateful for his effortless mastery.

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Irina Dvorovenko as Vera Dvorovenko and Shonn Wiley as Junior. (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Of all the hit Rodgers and Hart shows, only Pal Joey and On Your Toes—well, maybe A Connecticut Yankee—seem to be revivable. We know dozens of the songs from Jumbo, Babes in Arms, The Boys from Syracuse, By Jupiter and the rest, but we don’t know the shows, unless we think we can infer Babes in Arms from the Mickey and Judy movie version (which—thank you, M-G-M—managed to omit most of the sublime score, including “My Funny Valentine”).

Why has On Your Toes survived? Apart from the terrible movie from 1939, three years after the show, there was a Broadway revival in 1954 (a flop), and another one in 1983 (a hit, with Natalia Makarova as the Russian prima. Well, she was a Russian prima). And now the City Center’s Encores! series has unleashed it again, and we can confirm that it’s definitely not the dopey plot that keeps it turning up again and again—the backstage and on-stage antics of a Ballets Russes-like company don’t constitute a plot. Nor can the ups and downs of a pallid romance between an ex-Vaudeville hoofer and a sweet young thing of a wannabe songwriter hold your attention longer that it takes the two of them to sing the show’s biggest hit, “There’s a Small Hotel.”

No, the answer has to be the dance element. On Your Toes is famous for being the first Broadway musical not only filled with dance but centered on dance—for being about dance. And for being George Balanchine’s first show (there would be three more) with Rodgers and Hart, for which Rodgers wrote his finest orchestral piece, the climactic “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” ballet, on which everything hinges. In 1968, Balanchine revived it for City Ballet—with Suzanne Farrell as the stripper and Arthur Mitchell as the hoofer—and we think of it now as a stand-alone ballet. (In just the last two weeks, it’s been performed at City Ballet and Miami City Ballet.)

So although the dancing was hardly mentioned in Brooks Atkinson’s favorable Times review of the original (he was all about the songs and the singers), the Encores! staging is all about the dance—a far cry from the early Encores! productions, when a bunch of singers sat on stools reading their lines and once in a while got up and moved. This version is bustling, polished, ambitious—are the powers that be hoping for a move to Broadway? Their production of Chicago, transferred in 1996, is still running!

Here’s what worked. The casting of the ABT ballerina Irina Dvorovenko (who’s about to retire) as the campy-vampy Vera Baronova. Dvorovenko’s affectations and calculated mannerisms have made it almost impossible for me to watch her in classical roles, but here she was funny, charming, even sexy—and no more over-the-top than the role requires. Another real-life ballet star, Joaquin De Luz, gave us a convincingly preening and hammy danseur noble in the grip of murderous Slavic jealousy. Christine Baranski sang the clever “The Heart Is Quicker Than the Eye” with the vocal wit of a Broadway star of the period. The orchestra, under Rob Fisher, made hay out of Hans Spialek’s terrific 1936 orchestrations. And the director/choreographer Warren Carlyle scored a tremendous hit with his extended, exuberant, tumultuous setting of the title song, as the rush of ballet dancers and swing dancers, both competing and teaming up, peaked again and again. A real show-stopper—the audience was in bliss.

Alas, most of Carlyle’s choreography was not up to this level. His substitution for Balanchine’s first-act closer, the brilliant parody of Scheherazade known as the “Princess Zenobia” ballet, was thin and formulaic; surely he could have built on what the film shows us of Balanchine’s intentions. So we miss the wonderful moment when the five blacked-up slaves throw off their upper garments, and one of them (the hero, of course) reveals his assertively white chest. Did they think the original was politically incorrect? Carlyle’s stuff for the music school kids in “The Three B’s” and “It’s Got to Be Love” was sub-generic. Yet he performed something of a miracle getting this complicated and sometimes confusing mix of a musical into such smooth shape in so abbreviated a rehearsal period—while coming up with his thrilling “On Your Toes” number. Talk about grace under pressure!

Luckily, no one tampered with “Slaughter” itself. It was badly cramped on the City Center stage, half of which was occupied by the orchestra, but Susan Pilarre’s staging was accurate and honest, reflecting the show version rather than the 1968 ballet version. Alas, her hoofer, the very young Shonn Wiley—although he’s appealing, worked valiantly and has the moves—doesn’t as yet have the stage charisma of a star. And this was a Ray Bolger role! Dvorovenko let herself rip, but she couldn’t rip for two.

The oddest aspect of the production was to be found in the  opening credits. No mention of Balanchine; “Directed and Choreographed by Warren Carlyle.” So much for “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.” And yet, tucked away pages later, there’s the standard nod to the Balanchine Trust and a mention of Pilarre. It’s a puzzlement.

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Sterling Hyltin and Gonzalo Garcia in 'Hallelujah Junction.' (© Paul Kolnik)

Peter Martins has been making ballets for 36 years now, ever since Calcium Night Light, in 1977. As I remember it, City Ballet’s orchestra was on strike, the company was shut down, and somewhere in Brooklyn Martins previewed this startling duet (to Ives) for Heather Watts and Daniel Duell. Everyone trooped out to see it, everyone was knocked out by it, and soon it was in the company’s repertory. Arlene Croce described its climax as “a staccato, nonstop, seriocomic pas de deux in which limbs become hinges and handles, bodies are clamped together, then slid part. The choreography,” she went on, “makes not one superfluous gesture, everything stands out with bright-edged clarity, and the flatly factual tone communicates an instantaneous emotion.” Balanchine liked it enough to insert it into his own Ivesiana, where it didn’t belong, but the compliment to Martins was immense.

Calcium was a fortuitous debut, and Martins’ ballets through the next several years confirmed this happy first impression: Sonate di Scarlatti, Eight Easy Pieces, Lille Suite were less personal statements than serious attempts to master his craft, under the eye and influence of the greatest of all teachers and exemplars. These works were all fluent and pleasing, and they added up to a convincing apprenticeship. When Balanchine chose Martins as his successor, he knew he was getting a hard-working, competent, and eager dance-maker.

In the immediate years after Balanchine’s death, with the entire responsibility for the company on his shoulders, Martins focused more on that responsibility than on his own creative ambitions, but he went on developing new works—eventually, scores of them. Who can remember them all? Who would want to? Far too many seemed to be by the numbers, and the numbers weren’t distinctive. Can we really distinguish one of his ballets set to the music of Michael Torke from the next? They all seemed flashy, trendy, empty. He made works to offer opportunities to his younger dancers; he made works to explore the limits of partnering; he made works for his ballerinas, in particular his wife, Darci Kistler, at first to rejoice in her glorious talents, later to veil her diminishing powers. He made his versions of the classics. He mounted Festivals, Homages, Projects. He went in for desperate, gimmicky collaborations—with Paul McCartney, the architect Calatrava, the designer Valentino. He raised money.

Now he’s been in charge for 30 years, and the company is securely afloat—his single greatest achievement. And he’s celebrating with a new version of his 1988 American Music Festival, which had been a good idea that unfortunately led to paltry results. He’s also celebrating by putting forward his own work with uncustomary boldness—Martins has always been modest. This past week, however, was notable for two things: an all-Martins evening, and a total absence of Balanchine. In all the years going back to 1948, I can’t remember a week in which not a single Balanchine ballet was performed, apart from those week-long runs of Martins’ Swan Lakes, Romeos, etc. An accident of scheduling? Perhaps.

The focus on Martins’ ballets has been instructive, occasionally gratifying, and ultimately saddening. His Rodgers and Hart pastiche, Thou Swell, shows him at his exploitative worst. (On second thought, the mercifully brief Sophisticated Lady, to Ellington, may be even worse.) His Fearful Symmetries, to John Adams, is sound and fury signifying nothing—and signifying it for a long time. Barber Violin Concerto is a valiant but unsatisfactory response to that overwrought piece of music (it was more interesting when, originally, the second couple was performed by two Paul Taylor dancers).

But. River of Light, to a dense but powerful score commissioned from Charles Wuorinen and with ravishing lighting by Mark Stanley, has depth and resonance. I can’t remember having seen it before, and would happily see it again. The duet The Infernal Machine, to Christopher Rouse, is a fascination of gnarly partnering (it was good to see Ashley Laracey in a prominent role), and another duet, Purple, to Torke, at least gave us a chance to watch the enigmatic, elusive Janie Taylor.

The oddest Martins event was the return of Calcium Night Light. This piece has never lost its provocative appeal, but it came close the other night, due to suicidal miscasting. Martins is relentlessly pushing Sterling Hyltin, and she’s a lovely dancer. But Calcium isn’t lovely; it’s feisty and abrasive. Her silky smoothness is antithetical to the thorny nature of the piece, just as Robert Fairchild’s wholesomeness is; there are half a dozen women in the company more suitable for the role. Only Peter Martins’ psychiatrist, if he has one, could explain why he would sabotage one of his best ballets this way. Even so, the originality and cheekiness of Calcium could be detected through the pallid miscasting. We were right back in 1977—this guy had talent.

It comes through most powerfully in Hallelujah Junction, a really exciting work made a dozen years ago and set to a really exciting two-piano score by John Adams. (Its title refers to a truck stop near the California-Nevada border.) The two grand pianos, beautifully lit, are raised high above and behind the dance area; we can see the two excellent pianists, Cameron Grant and Susan Walters, preside unobtrusively over the dancing. There’s a couple in white—Hyltin and Gonzalo Garcia—and a man in black, Daniel Ulbricht. There are four couples in black. Hyltin is lithe and sinuous—not as expansive as Kistler, the original, but radiant. Garcia is stalwart and gracious. Ulbricht shows us his formidable technique without showboating. What’s so remarkable about the piece is the superb sense of structure: The principles, the four couples, come and go in a rapid and inevitable flow, everything exhilarating and natural, everything stimulating, in contrast to the febrile hokeyness of Fearful Symmetries. Hallelujah Junction is Martins’ finest ballet, and why it isn’t in the repertory of more companies is one of the great mysteries. But the greatest mystery—the sad mystery—is why, if he could make this good a piece, he hasn’t made more on its level. Like Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, he coulda been a contender.

We’re in the midst of a two-week season at the Joyce of the highly successful Hubbard Street: Dance Chicago. Why this success? I’d like to ascribe it to the company, 19 strong, who are so hard-working, so devoted. But they’re not charismatic enough to explain it, and there are no stars. It has—sigh!—to be the nature of the repertory: tons of propulsion, a gallon of angst, too often a very dark stage (to show how serious things are), uninteresting music (to which no one pays much attention), and a whole lot of conviction. These people really think they’re doing something important.

There’s a piece, Untouched, by the respected (though not by me) Aszure Barton, who, the program notes tell us, developed the choreography before selecting the (sentimental) music, which, it turned out, would be by Njo Kong Kie, Curtis Macdonald, and “Ljova.” The women made the most of their slit skirts. There was sliding, squatting, fluttering of hands. Lots of intense contortion. Ana Lopez was Spanishy leading the concluding section. What’s it all about, Aszure?

There’s a nice piece by an ex-Hubbard dancer, Robyn Mineko Williams, that shows a flair for invention and a becoming modesty. And a piece by Alejandro Cerrudo, a current dancer, also the resident choreographer, in which three men in flesh-colored unitards, looking naked in the semi-dark, do solos to Dean Martin versions of “Memories are Made of This,” “In the Chapel in the Moonlight,” and “That’s Amore”—the point, presumably, the contrast between the sexiness of the dancers and the corniness of the music.

Following the three dancers in flesh-colored unitards came 16 dancers in flesh-colored unitards in something called Too Beaucoup by the Israeli couple Sharon Eyal and Gaï Behar. The dancers also sported tight platinum blond wigs and white contact lenses. Defying the gloom, they marched, they strutted, they jogged—nothing could stop them. This went on so long that I might have lost consciousness if I hadn’t been so pissed off at the arrogance of these people thinking they had anything at all to say, let alone this much. Too Beaucoup may not be the worst ballet of the year, but it’s hands down the most boring.

The two longest works, together on Program B, are by the well-known choreographers Ohad Naharin and Mats Ek. The Naharin is called Three to Max because it’s a blend of two of his previous works, Three and Max, one of which I’ve seen at Fall for Dance, though I can’t remember which one. The whole thing is a jumble of earnest energy. Naharin can be interesting, but not this time out.

The Ek has at least the advantage of novelty. How many ballets have you seen in which five women dance with vacuum cleaners? Or in which a baby doll is extracted by its mother from a smoking oven? Of course, this raises the question of how many such novelties you want to see. Casi-Casa, also apparently two different ballets at one time, is a series of surreal episodes. But here the disjointedness doesn’t matter. Do we care in what order we watch the smoking oven, the door that separates a tormented couple who climb all over each other until they decide not to, and the chaise longue, in and out of which slithers a guy on whose head a lady places a brown bowler? Some of all this is fun, some of it irritating, some of it just silly, but it has one advantage—it’s brightly lit.

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David Hallberg in Ratmansky’s 'Chamber Symphony.' (Photo by Marty Sohl)

Why, when writing about a week that included the long-awaited Ratmansky/Shostakovich trilogy at ABT and a new ballet by Justin Peck at City Ballet, begin with the annual School of American Ballet workshop performance? Because in the long run, the health of the school and its relationship to its parent company are of greater importance than any individual ballet, however good (or disappointing). And because this year’s workshop was so heartening, so satisfying.

To begin with, the entire program was Balanchine, whose work, despite the relentless proliferation of inferior ballets within the repertory, remains the bedrock of New York City Ballet and its chief raison d’être: if the school fails here, there’s no hope for the future. (Sometimes the powers that be at S.A.B. forget that—there was a year without any Balanchine at all.) In the past, there have been workshops dominated by a young dancer everyone was already talking about—Darci Kistler, for instance; within a year, Balanchine had her dancing leading roles in the company. Then there have been workshops that lacked even a consistently high level of achievement, as if the ballet gods were sitting back, taking a well-earned break. What made this year so happy was the overall level of excellence, and one’s sense that every one of the kids up there was excited and raring to go—some of the seniors directly into the company, others dispersed around the country, but all of them secure in the knowledge that they were accomplished dancers, ready to dance, their technique solidly in place.

The first ballet was Balanchine’s great Divertimento No. 15, to Mozart, from 1956. Everything is exposed classicism, elegant, demanding—it has to look smooth and fluent and joyous, and it’s hard. It also has a central ballerina role that demands extraordinary allegro technique. The girl who performed it, Daniela Aldrich, carried it easily before her, stitching the floor so swiftly and precisely that she gave the impression of having more time than she needed. The girls who performed the four other Variations were also steady, polished and agreeable—not a clinker among them. (This, take it from me, is rare in performances of Divertimento.) The three boys not only handled their jobs proficiently but demonstrated an effortless style. And the eight girls in the corps—clearly the cream of this year’s crop—had the Balanchine spirit, the Mozart spirit. What more could you ask?

The credit for all this goes, of course, to the school itself, but more particularly to Suki Schorer, its senior teacher (she’s been a member of the faculty since 1972), whose 47 stagings for the workshop include four earlier Divertimentos. She brings a refinement to the dancers, an esprit, that was a hallmark of her own dancing back in the day. It’s easy to compare her stagings favorably with a lot of what we see at the company, so we have to bear in mind that the workshops have far more time to rehearse than the company does. Even so, it’s hard not to speculate on what City Ballet’s Balanchine would have been if Schorer had been a leading ballet mistress there through the last decades.

Tombeau de Couperin, which Balanchine created for the 1975 Ravel Festival, is like no other of his works: 16 corps dancers, no principals. It, too, is a joyous work, a young work, and like Jerome Robbins’s Interplay, it only really looks right when danced by kids, or the next best thing. Were all 16 of the workshop kids finished dancers? Hardly—some of the boys looked so young you were startled to see them partnering girls. But all of them had the bounce, the ease, that Tombeau demands. This was a moving performance of a work that can sometimes seem dry.

Finally, Walpurgisnacht Ballet, a wild romp that Balanchine created for a 1975 Paris Opéra production of Gounod’s Faust. Twenty-four (tall) girls fling themselves across the stage, purple tulle skirts billowing, hair streaming. Is it elevated? Is it elegant? Is it essential? No, no and no. But it can be fun, and Susan Pilarre, another senior teacher and stager, brought out the best of it—or the worst, depending on how you look at it. Her girls held nothing back—a restrained Walpugisnacht would be a contradiction in terms. The ballerina role was for Farrell, and Isabelle LaFreniere is no Farrell. But then no else is either. She danced strongly and confidently; she pulled it off. The crucial thing is that in this ballet, as in the other two, the students were dancing the right way, with the right spirit. The School of American Ballet is doing its job.

Alexander Ratmansky has seven times choreographed to the music of Shostakovich. New York’s first real view of him came in 2005 with the Bolshoi production of the composer’s The Bright Stream, a ballet Stalin had shut down after the premiere of its original version in 1935. It was a revelation—who expected that a Soviet story about a collective farm, some touring ballet dancers and a cast of assorted workers (plus a bicycle and a dog) could be so charming and so deft? Since then, Ratmansky has worked tirelessly around the world, restaging classics and creating new work for just about any company that has invited him, but especially for City Ballet and ABT, whose artist in residence he became several years ago. He has used the music of other Russians—Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky (his Nutcracker for ABT)—but he returns almost obsessively to Shostakovich, with whom he obviously has a close personal affinity. Now he has presented a bill of three strongly emotional works to the music of this composer—a daring idea, and one that clearly has special meaning for him: this is no programming gimmick.

The first piece, Symphony No. 9, was shown last October at the City Center. Now, with the same cast but on the larger Met stage and with costumes changed significantly for the better, it has a grander, less intimate effect. Although it shares a near-oppressive darkness with the other two, it contains a beautiful lyric duet for Polina Semionova and Marcelo Gomes, some breathtaking moves for Craig Salstein and Simone Messmer, and crowd-pleasing pyrotechnics for Herman Cornejo. (Well, if you have a Cornejo, you flaunt him.) This is the most conventionally constructed ballet of the three, propelling you forward, its excitements somehow at home with its forebodings.

Chamber Symphony, set to an orchestral arrangement of String Quartet No. 8, is the most anguished of the three ballets, its protagonist—David Hallberg, bare-chested under a black velvet suit—representing the suffering artist, the suffering Shostakovich, but one hopes not the suffering Ratmansky (who, as it happens, gives every sign of being remarkably composed, sensible, practical—not unlike Balanchine). Hallberg weaves through a corps of 12 aggressive dancers while engaging in fraught encounters with three muses (the composer had three wives). Ratmansky always gets the best out of his dancers, and Isabella Boylston, Paloma Herrera and Julie Kent make the most of roles that are not strikingly individual. There’s an impressive, ominous backdrop (by George Tsypin) of severe large-scale drawings of gray masks, and the lighting, by Jennifer Tipton, deepens the general atmosphere of threat. Suffering artists are not my thing, and there’s a touch of oy-veyness about this piece that at times comes close to the edge, but Ratmansky is so sure-handed (sure-footed?), so fluent, so inventive and so sincere that it convinces.

The final piece—Piano Concerto No. 1—is the most edgy and quirky, at times light-hearted, yet always with the tragic Russian sense of danger looming. Think of those two superb Russian ballerinas Diana Vishneva and Natalia Osipova—both in brightest red unitards—huddling together, as if against a storm. The backdrop, again by Tsypin, scatters Soviet detritus across the sky: red planes, red stars, red hammers. Ratmansky has left Russia behind—quitting his job as head of the Bolshoi, moving to New York—but it’s always with him. It will be fascinating to see how American he becomes. Certainly he admires our dancers, and not just the Russians among them: the entire company responds to his gifts. He makes ABT look like the company it should always look like.

The big question is whether these three ballets should necessarily be performed together. Do they detract from each other? To my mind, although they have a very strong impact shoulder to shoulder, they ultimately would benefit from being seen separately. There’s just too much going on—by the third ballet you’re exhausted, and your attention wanders. So how would they fare embedded in mixed bills? Certainly, last season, Symphony No. 9 stood potently on its own.

(Next week: Justin Peck and New York City Ballet.)

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Robert Fairchild in Justin Peck’s 'In Creases.' (Photo by Paul Kolnik/City Ballet)

City Ballet’s schizophrenic spring season has packed up its wares and gone away, leaving some of us (well, me) exhilarated, bewildered, and depressed. Maybe we’re the ones who are schizophrenic. The idea, which dominated the repertory almost until the end, was to revive the American Music Festival of 1988—an odd idea, considering how disappointing that festival turned out to be. Alas, good music doesn’t necessarily guarantee good ballets.

What guarantees—or at least semi-guarantees—good ballets is good choreographers, and they are thin on the ground. In the 30 years since Balanchine’s death, only two names have been taken seriously by most serious ballet-lovers: Wheeldon and Ratmansky. Everyone’s looking for the next major talent; the problem is to keep oneself from jumping on a bandwagon prematurely. At City Ballet, there’s only one candidate—Justin Peck, recently made a soloist, three of whose works have been presented by the company in the past year. That’s the fast lane, and he deserves it. Other companies are already jumping on the bandwagon, and I suppose Peck is in danger of the too-much-too-soon syndrome, but somehow I doubt it. His work never seems forced or willed; it seems to come easily, naturally, from a quick and brimming intelligence rather than a drive to succeed.

The piece we’ve seen most recently, In Creases, is actually the earliest of the three: it was first shown last summer during the company’s Saratoga season. It reveals the same qualities Peck has demonstrated in his other work: fluency, originality, energy, dash and wit—the last of which has not been much in evidence in the choreography of recent years. Suddenly there’s a new grouping, a new conformation of forces; how did we get there? It’s all so fast, yet never blurred. The four men and four women are equal—until suddenly they’re not: Christian Tworzyanski and Sara Adams step out as a couple, both of them suddenly revealed to us as potentially important dancers. Who knew? And then Robert Fairchild, who this year has confirmed his place as the company’s essential male dancer, is soloing, eating up the territory, fully charged at every moment without ever hogging attention. He’s a lovable, modest dynamo. But Peck always brings out the best in dancers. His pals in the company obviously like dancing what he gives them, and so they give him everything they’ve got. Maybe there’s a future after all.

Fairchild also turned in the best performance I’ve seen in years of the male lead in Balanchine’s Who Cares? The guy in this role needs to be charming (it was originally made for that shameless charmer Jacques d’Amboise). He needs to be a terrific partner—he has three ballerinas to look after. He needs to have explosive energy for the finale. And he needs to hold the whole thing together without detracting from his ladies, and in a black costume that at times just doesn’t read against the black of the background. (They keep changing all the other costumes, for the worse: the poisonous cerise and turquoise for the corps girls of the opening sections are astonishingly vulgar.) Fairchild doesn’t lose his concentration for a moment, and whatever he’s in, the audience loves him.

I wish I could be as enthusiastic about the three ballerinas. Sterling Hyltin in the Patricia McBride role (“The Man I Love,” “Fascinatin’ Rhythm”) is very lovely, both romantic and high-spirited. She just doesn’t take the final step of letting loose. The extensions could be more extended. The leaps onto the guy’s shoulder could be more daring. What she needs is an hour’s coaching from McBride, but that’s not the way City Ballet works. Ana Sophia Scheller has learned to smile, but her strong dancing remains characterless. The disaster was Abi Stafford—stiff, dull, out of place. This level of miscasting constitutes cruelty to a dancer. What’s Gershwin without swing?

Hyltin shone throughout the rest of the season. Her debut as the central girl in Serenade was convincing and moving, even though we associate the role with dancers less ethereal. She was enchanting in Western Symphony, poignant in Stravinsky Violin Concerto. She doesn’t have the brio, the supreme musicality of Tiler Peck (who does?) or the plangency and inner life of Sara Mearns when Mearns is at her best (at the moment, she’s just too heavy). But Hyltin has a unique and appealing quality that connects with the audience, and she grows in her roles. Example: contrast the misguided performance both she and Fairchild gave in Peter Martins’ Calcium Night Light a couple of weeks earlier with their final performance of it. Something went right. This was now a contest, not a date.

A number of other things have gone right. Richard Tanner’s interesting Sonatas and Interludes, to fascinating music for prepared piano by John Cage, was danced by both Mearns and Peck (Tiler, not Justin; they’re not related). But the hero of the occasion was Amar Ramasar, who has finally graduated into the responsibilities of a committed male principal. This was a beautifully judged performance; he’s finally focused. The orchestra has been sounding worthy of the theater’s vastly improved acoustics—particularly strong was Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3 (a favorite of Balanchine’s) under the leadership of Daniel Capps. Teresa Reichlen and an up-and-coming boy from the corps, Zachary Catazaro, made the best argument I’ve seen in years for the schmaltzy “Elegie” movement of the Suite by utterly believing in it and going full throttle.

It was wonderful to have Ivesiana back, that obscure and powerful Balanchine ballet that has been in and out of the repertory since 1954. It was in “The Unanswered Question” section that we first saw Allegra Kent, beautiful and mysterious, held aloft by three men, never touching the ground, while Todd Bolender, below, vainly tried to capture her. The girl today is Janie Taylor, who would be ideal if she didn’t have all that yellow hair gushing down her back; in role after role, it distracts us from her dancing. The “In the Inn” section has gotten cuter over the years; the lighting has gotten darker.

Perhaps most rewarding of all was the command, the sheer beauty of Wendy Whelan in Ratmansky’s Concerto DSCH. Her long and valiant career is drawing to a close, yet here, in a role created on her, she was at her finest. And superbly partnered by Tyler Angle, a mainstay of the company, as is his brother Jared.

But even apart from the uneven nature of the season’s repertory due to the American Music gimmick, there were disappointments. Megan Fairchild should not be dancing pure classical roles—her unclassical body and limbs and her minimal feet sabotage her strong allegro technique. Her Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux was not a pretty sight. But she redeemed herself in Martins’ Barber Violin Concerto, not only in the final movement, when she swarms around and over her partner like a drunken hornet, but in the opening romantic movement, where, in a flowing dress, she was expressive and persuasive. Finally, there is the mixed blessing of Ashley Bouder, undoubtedly the strongest of the classicists. She nails the “Theme and Variations” section of Suite No. 3 with no effort at all. So why is she punctuating more and more, exaggerating effect after effect, undercutting the purity of this glorious role? Why doesn’t someone stop her? Why doesn’t she stop herself? She appears to have everything—except taste.

And speaking of taste, what about the trendy junkiness of the bits of décor by the FAILE art collective that litter the theater? Well, we can comfort ourselves by thinking that they’re more appropriate defiling a theater named for David H. Koch than one simply known as the State.

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