Just Warming Up

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The New York Sun

ABT’s spring seasons at the Metropolitan Opera are largely devoted to what are called the “classics,” the 19th-century full-evening ballets. Its fall seasons at City Center – where it has performed since 1997, when it renewed an association going back to the company’s earliest years in the 1940s – are different. The repertory is more expansive and more varied, because the programs are made up of shorter, one-act ballets, the archetypal ballet genre of the 20th century.


In terms of choreography, the three-week season that began Wednesday is especially ambitious. The company’s feet will both drub the floor in sneakers dancing Twyla Tharp’s 1986 “In the Upper Room,” and skitter on pointe in Mikhail Fokine’s 1908 “Les Sylphides.” Much of the season’s casting seems rather stodgy, though, an attempt to keep powerful dancers placated rather than to cast ballets judiciously. Nevertheless, there is potentially a great deal of first-rate ballet to be experienced over the coming weeks.


By an odd turn of the contractual screw, ABT retained the right to perform Balanchine’s 1928 “Apollo” even during periods when relations were frigid between ABT and Balanchine’s own New York City Ballet. ABT hasn’t performed Apollo for almost a decade, and I will be curious to see how far the company has worked itself back into a comfortable relation with Balanchine’s stylistic quirks. Rumbling with syncopation, “Apollo” transposes Attic grandeur into Jazz Age meter. Leading ABT men Maxim Beloserkovsky, Jose Manuel Carreno, and Ethan Steifel are each likely to make a sure-footed navigation of Apollo’s trajectory from youthful gaucheness to majestic command.


Fokine himself restaged “Les Sylphides” especially for the company shortly before he died in 1942. It remains one of the most magical ballets ever choreographed, as well as one of the most difficult to perform. An ethereal tribute to the Romantic ballet of the 1840s, it was also inspired by Isadora Duncan, whom Fokine had seen dance in St. Petersburg. It thus suffers when it is performed too piously or without an element of abandon. There will be many capable casts in ABT’s “Sylphides,” but the performance I am most looking forward to takes place on November 2, when Anna Liceica dances the Waltz. Ms. Liceica is one of those dancers so individualistic that companies usually don’t know what to do with them. Her Waltz last spring at the Met was rhapsodic, impulsive – not a bit pious.


But no ABT dancer is more avidly watched at the moment than Veronika Part. At 27, Ms. Part has already lived two artistic lifetimes. In 2002 she left the Kirov Ballet, where she had quickly become one of its most prominent young stars. After a difficult period of adjustment, she has now established herself at ABT. She is tall, voluptuous, and glamorous, and she has impeccable academic credentials. What is most gratifying about her work, however, is the way she molds shapes, lines, and images in a most personal way. She reminds us anew of the way in which strict, severe ballet can be a vehicle for emotional and supra-verbal communication. This season, Ms. Part will dance in “Les Sylphides” and “Apollo,” and star as well in a new ballet, “Kaleidescope,” choreographed by Peter Quanz.


As quintessentially American as Ms. Part is Russian, Gillian Murphy joined ABT in 1996, instantly raising our national banner of strong, brisk, technical prowess. In recent years she has also begun to demonstrate the healthiest and most sophisticated of ambitions, not only seeking the ballpark acclaim given to a personable young woman who can turn and jump brilliantly, but striving for the subtler reaches of artistic achievement. She has introduced all sorts of interesting wrinkles and curlicues to her formerly uninflected bluntness, expanding her range with every new role she tries. Ms. Murphy, too, will dance in “Apollo” and in the new Quanz ballet.


It is gratifying that ABT is finally beginning to understand the value of Kristi Boone, who joined the company in 2000. During the company’s Met season last spring, her searing energy in the “Sylphides” Prelude – traditionally meditative to the point of somnolescence – was a wakeup call for the entire ballet. Unfortunately, she won’t be repeating her Prelude this season, but her intensity should fit quite nicely into the company’s revival of Antony Tudor’s 1937 “Dark Elegies.”


“Dark Elegies”is not a pleasant diversion. It is set to Mahler’s “Kindertotenlieder” – songs lamenting the death of children – and is sere and gloomy, if meant to be ultimately cathartic. The company’s treatment of Tudor’s works over the last decade has been problematic. I frequently watched Tudor rehearse in the years immediately before his death in 1987, and I am sure that if he were still alive much of what ABT now puts on stage in his works would never be allowed.


Tudor devised his own choreographic language, which he often made awkward and torturous to convey emotional anguish. A once-over-lightly rendition is worse than nothing. One of the problems is that his ballets don’t stay in the repertory very long; they are revived and then quickly dropped, rather than repeated, which would bring improvement. In 2003, ABT stumbled badly with its revival of “Pillar of Fire,” a masterpiece Tudor created for the company in 1942. Only after a year in the repertory did it begin to show signs of life.


I feel more comfortable in welcoming ABT’s company premier of Kurt Joos’s 1932 “The Green Table,” an Expressionistic indictment of war profiteers and provocateurs. Also welcome is the company premiere of Jerome Robbins’s “Afternoon of a Faun,” created for New York City Ballet in 1953, a chance encounter in a ballet studio that manages to be both cynical and romantic. And another romantic awakening, both comic and poignant, will flourish on the American frontier when Agnes De Mille’s “Rodeo,” an ABT perennial for decades, is revived this season.


The New York Sun

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