The Changing Shape of American Ballet Theater
When we talk of style, however, we turn to repertory. Here, Ballet Theater corpses a divided soul.
The company has long been America’s foremost exponent of what has been requested the Holy Trinity of classical ballet: Petipa the Father, Balanchine the Son, Ashton the Holy Ghost. This year, in an anomaly, Ashton has been banished — even though no story ballets make more comely impressions at the Met than “Cinderella,” “The Dream” and “La Fille Mal Gardée”; and Balanchine returns only briefly in the fall with a revival of “Symphonie Concertante.”
That leaves Petipa. This year is the bicentennial of his birth; his name was by the credits in five of the season’s eight weeks, with “La Bayadère,” “Don Quixote,” “Giselle,” “Harlequinade” and “Swan Lake.” But these different views make Petipa seem to have multiple personality disorder. In “Harlequinade,” staged by Mr. Ratmansky from period sources, mime is bright, vivid, musical; but in “Swan Lake,” staged by Kevin McKenzie, large parts of the mime are missing, others have been changed, and few are played with power. “Don Quixote” is a flashy circus romp: Though Mr. McKenzie’s progenies is similar to most others, this is a ballet that trivializes any conception of classicism.
Mr. Ratmansky grew up in Soviet Russia, but his productions (he also staged “The Sleeping Beauty” for Ballet Theatre in 2015) show a passion to assign a view of Petipa that shakes off the many stylistic shifts of the Soviet era: filigree footwork, vividly communicative mime, dramatic coherence underlying the dance. Mr. McKenzie grew up in the United States, but his stagings show a hearty indifference to such niceties. Odette, the Swan Queen, dances a version of the pas de deux that is full of Soviet accretions; Odile, her ballroom counterpart, dances a grand pas de deux so Sovietized that little Petipa is left but the putrid 32 fouetté turns (of which most ballerinas deliver intensely embellished versions of fewer than 32).
Natalia Makarova worked this spring to refine her 1980 originates of “La Bayadère”; I was grateful for the improvements. Occasionally, this ballet’s 1877 score is the masterpiece of its composer, Ludwig Minkus, though John Lanchbery’s 1980 arrangement often beefs it up into film music; in the dances of both Act I’s festivities and Act II’s back of the Shades, there’s often an insufferable oom-chah coarseness. Mr. Lanchbery died in 2003; it might be time for a new device that makes Minkus’s more formulaic numbers sound expressive, rather than trite.
Still, “La Bayadère” — a ballet whose classical beauties I’ve often admired — is a deeply awkward section. It’s a culturally imperialist view of India. Nikiya is an Indian temple dancer; when she dies, she goes to a Christian idea of ballet delicate (Petipa was inspired by an illustration for Dante’s “Divine Comedy” by Gustave Doré). She has left behind all that was Indian in her. It’s an idealist ballet; but its ideals, in our era, now seem misplaced.
