An Auspicious Opening

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The New York Sun

The opening-night gala of American Ballet Theatre’s season offered a rare chance to see Jerome Robbins’s “Afternoon of a Faun” in the theater in which it was first performed by New York City Ballet in 1953. It looked absolutely marvelous.


Robbins’s version replaces Nijinsky’s faun and nymph with two dancers in a ballet studio looking at their own mirrored reflections as much, if not more, than they pay attention to each other’s manifest presence. Once the young man actually kisses the young woman, she finds reality somehow too confounding and vanishes as suddenly as she had appeared. The theater’s relatively small stage and auditorium brought this enigmatic episode very close to us, and the studio’s rippling walls of silk enclosed an enchanted space.


It is not easy to open a gala evening with something so intimate, and in this, ABT’s first performance of the ballet, Julie Kent and Ethan Stiefel offered a good but still tentative performance. From Mr. Stiefel, a little less swagger and a little more spellbound languor would have helped us remember that the young man is a descendent of the faun’s woodland mysteries. Ms. Kent’s legs and arabesque looked very beautiful, but we needed to sense a little more erotic heat beneath the elusive exterior.


The climax of the evening was its closing, a revival of Agnes De Mille’s “Rodeo,” which was well rehearsed and infectiously performed. When De Mille choreographed it in 1942, she was in the process of learning how to make a ballet; she did make several good ones, but her true province was and would remain revue and Broadway. The ballet is oddly paced and stitched together; like an heirloom quilt or hooked rug from the frontier epoch it represents, it is redolent with the flavor of authentic folk art.


For once ABT’s dancers didn’t seem bored or bewildered by a specimen of 1940s dance drama. As the ranch owner’s daughter, Jennifer Alexander performed with the evident understanding that her role was a rich one despite having few dance steps, and she made eloquent nearly every moment of pantomime. Isaac Stappas, as the head wrangler, was tender, appealing, human.


Erica Cornejo danced the cowgirl heroine and was very convincing lassoing broncos with the guys, as well as funny when she hit an unexpected snag and fell on her pratt. Some of the poignancy of the role, however, is as yet scanted in her performance. Craig Salstein, the champion roper who finally recognizes the cowgirl’s allure, made a better impression than he has in the past. He danced with a less obstreperous zeal, though it may be that the role’s zany antics are the perfect modality for his need to please.


Watching “Rodeo” for the first time in a while, I felt that De Mille was very sympathetic, very generous to her heroine: When the cowgirl changes from blue jeans into a dress and wins the champion roper, you don’t believe she has been completely domesticated – she has simply tied another string to her bow.


In between came the “Paquita” pas de deux, here credited as “after Petipa” and danced by Irina Dvorovenko and Maxim Beloserkovsky. Ms. Dvorovenko retains a habit undoubtedly instilled in her native Kiev, a stage-to-audience signaling that jars the aristocratic reserve that is the more appropriate tenor of “grand ballets” of the 19th century. Her smile let us know that the series of ballonnes releves she performed in her solo was difficult and meant to be applauded. But the applause was not wrung unwillingly, nor could I deny that she deserved it.


Mr. Beloserkovsky’s technique gleamed splendidly in his solo. The piece suffered, however, from being performed without a corps de ballet, which customarily frames and entwines the principals’ movements in an integrated way that differs from other 19th-century ballets as they have come down to us.


Possible accusations of stereotypical casting do not seem to have plagued ABT ballet master Kirk Peterson when he cast the company premiere of his 2001 bagatelle, “The Howling Cat,” a series of whirls around a balleticized tango floor. The leads were assigned to Argentina’s Paloma Herrera and Cuba’s Jose Manuel Carreno. The two dancers seemed happy that they had not been called upon for yet another rendition of the virtuoso warhorse “Diana and Acteon.” But “The Howling Cat” nevertheless heeded the unwritten law that Mr. Carreno, whether he be Acteon or not, must face the ABT gala audience bare-chested.


Mark Morris’s “Gong,” created for ABT in 2001, circulates archetypal stances of Asian dance and theatrical atmospherics with modern dance and ballet. The dancers take it terribly seriously and mine every gestural allusion for its suggestion of mystic reverence. The women dance on pointe but there is nothing technically treacherous about what they do. Ballerinas Gillian Murphy and Michelle Wiles appeared to enjoy concentrating instead on projecting every movement very powerfully.


Front and center stage, as she too rarely is, soloist Anna Liceica warranted our close scrutiny as a high priestess inscrutably immersed in shadowy rituals. Mesmerizing in the ensemble was Maria Bystrova; she has been unaccountably lost in the corps since joining ABT in 2000, but Ms. Bystrova is gorgeously statuesque, a kinetic Winged Victory who glows with star charisma.


The same cast will perform “Rodeo” on October 22 & 26, and “Gong” will repeat on October 21, 22, 23, 25 & 29, and November 3 at City Center (131 W. 55th Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, 212-581-1212).


The New York Sun

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