BALLET VOICE

95.  Reckless/Feckless:  Ratmansky’s Paquita Grand Pas, Martins’ Swan Lake, and NYCB Performances, reviewed by Pippa Hammet

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         Like Proust’s invalided Aunt Léonie, our leader, the great Louise Ebersdorf, has taken to her queenly bed following the Vice President’s cruel reference to “childless cat ladies” and the President’s take-over of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.  Louise had always hoped to run the Center herself one day, but her advanced age and the real possibility that Trump will continue to rule over our land’s arts and sciences indefinitely have all but crushed that dream.  Louise fears that folk and beauty pageants, MAGA rallies, and professional wrestling tournaments will replace touring ballet troupes at the nation’s flagship K.C.  I keep reassuring her that much can be done from her safe room – and that Master Raro and I will make sure her orders are swiftly and perfectly realized.  Who knows?  Master and I could end up overseeing the debut of Louise’s proposed Manhattan company, The Ballet, under her reclusive direction.

         As Louise puts it, our country is in the hands of reckless Republicans and feckless Democrats, and even I – a happy veteran of successful gender transition – can feel the full body press of our President’s elephantine obsession with locker rooms, public restrooms and military barracks.  Oh, my.  Even though Louise needs our joint attention around the clock, she has released Master and me to go separately to New York City Ballet’s current season just down the block.  We spell each other in care-giving duties to make sure our boss has help at her beck and call around the clock and that we can also hie ourselves to the Koch Theater to keep Louise up-to-date with ballet intel.  We are therefore very busy and regularly sleep-deprived, but that is current S.O.P. at Ebersdorf Tower.  

          When I’m not at the ballet, I’ve been reading to Louise from the The Novices of Lerna, a collection of short stories by the Argentine writer Ángel Bonomini that Sandy recommended.  Perhaps it was this collection that prompted me to view the second half of the City Ballet season through the lens of Identity though, as a woman who used to be a man, at least biologically, the subject is always top of mind for me.  Perhaps that’s why this writer’s work has hit me so hard.

         In the title story, the narrator, a jurist named Beltra, is offered a fellowship at the University of Lerna in the Swiss Alps.  When he arrives, he discovers that the twenty-three other fellows (called novices under the terms of the contract) are physically identical to him and share some, but not a complete, set of mannerisms.  Additionally, for the six months of the fellowship, they are required to wear identical blue jumpsuits and keep their hair at the same length.  As such, much of the tale becomes a meditation on identity, on sameness and difference and the pleasures and distresses of each.  Late in the story the novices begin to realize that their numbers are diminishing.

         The university rector is forced to confess that an epidemic has descended upon the school and their fellows are being struck down, one by one.  At the conclusion, our narrator is the only one of his cohort who remains, and it becomes clear that the entire story is a metaphor for the individual finding his voice out of myriad innate possibilities.  One of the quiet supporting metaphors beneath the broad outline of the story is Beltra’s description of the Italian song he listens to obsessively. “The five voices, the five times the five singers, sang the line, were all unified in a single protagonist who from tenor passed to soprano, from alto to baritone, and then to another tenor and finally to the individualized group.  It was as if they were different layers of the same being, representing all human possibilities, and ending up integrated into a solitary lament.”

         Perhaps the Bonomini story that influenced my thinking the most is called “The Model.“  Here the narrator spends a long series of afternoons in the mansion of a woman who parades before him an endless array of luxurious outfits.  With each new ensemble the narrator creates ever more elaborate scenarios for their presentation.  Then in a postscript the narrator describes the creation of the story just told in which he explains that he had transformed a working-class vulgarian into an elegant fashionista and their obsessive and brutal lovemaking into the metaphor of the changing outfits with their attendant fantasies as if each time they met “she was magically the same and wonderfully different.”  Literary sorcery confessed in a charming postmodern gesture.

         City Ballet’s new Paquita Grand Pas after Marius Petipa – a sorcerer of the ballet if there ever was one -- is based on his 1881 Saint Petersburg revival of a successful French ballet from 1846, a comic melodrama (kidnapped baby, attempted murder, recognition scene).  The full-length work was set in a version of Spain under Napoleon’s armies, thus allowing Petipa to combine theatricalized folk, Roma, and classical dance styles along with mimed action.  Paquita was highly popular and remained in the Russian repertory for decades.

         A reconstructed, full-length Paquita has been in the Paris Opera Ballet repertory since 2001 in a streamlined production by the late ballet master Pierre Lacotte.   (Unfortunately, the DVD of that version cuts the famous female variations in the Grand Pas, and the two lead dancers are both weak.)  Revealingly, when Balanchine was once asked why he did not mount a Paquita for City Center, he replied, “Because then everyone would see how much I have stolen from it.”  His mid-twentieth century updating of the Petipa “golden” Pas de Trois from Paquita’s first act became Mr. B’s Minkus Pas de Trois, which NYCB has now revived and performs in advance of Alexi Ratmansky’s version of the Grand Pas.  At the Koch Theater, we go from Balanchine’s brilliant revision of the classic trio (which he himself danced at his school graduation performance ) to Ratmansky’s setting of the large scale Petipa finale. 

         Over the decades, many Western companies have presented the Grand Pas, including the Trocks here in New York.  Alexandra Danilova mounted it for the School of American Ballet and for the Cincinnati Ballet.  The Soviets kept it in repertory in Russia across the twentieth century (the excerpt proved tour-worthy), and the Vaganova Academy has regularly performed it at graduations.  NYCB is a latecomer for the raid upon Petipa’s riches.

         And not a moment too soon; the current company has a number of ballerinas who can honor the traditions of this material while making something up-to-date and personal out of it.  I had the chance to see the casts led by Tiler Peck and by Mira Nadon.  Peck, with her strong technique and musical alertness, made her solo variation deliciously playful and free in its rhythmic details. Then Mira Nadon turned the role into something completely different the next night.  Nadon dances very big but with seeming effortlessness, so it appeared as though she were making it up on the spot inside of a gentle and private reverie.  Same steps; distinct creations.

         Ratmansky, NYCB’s artist in residence, produced what claimed to be a complete Paquita in Munich in 2014, a reconstruction that has now disappeared from repertory.  I caught it on streaming at the time and found the extended mime scenes to be very long and very dull.  Perhaps Munich lacked the mime-dance artists to sustain interest.  Ratmansky seems to have no sense of theatrical pacing in his revivals, a serious problem also in his ABT The Sleeping Beauty.  Either that, or he has no luck in finding companies with good mimes (the Danes, for example) or with an ability to move between stylistic levels in the dancing.  His ballets, new or old, do not “build”.  Roles for women in Ratmansky’s ballets are usually stripped of magic.  His women become girls-next-door or grotesque females who are conventionally threatening or masochistic, as in his version of Lost Illusions for the Bolshoi.

         Unsurprisingly, the NYCB Paquita Grand Pas turns out to be a mongrel production:  Soviet in outline, dustily archival in certain details, and shamelessly parodic in its speed-demon view of our New York company.  The ensemble veers toward a punchy folk style rather than danse d’école.  (The demotic touch may be an effect of Ratmansky’s apparent interest in various forms of communality in his original works.)  The production’s point of view has a way of losing focus, and the baton of Andrew Litton encourages the NYCB orchestra to lather things up with exaggerated allegro tempi.  With exceptions among the lead dancers, there is a general lack of classical poise amid the rush hour revelry.

         As I have found over the ballet seasons, Ratmansky’s own choreographic idiom is underdeveloped in its dance detail.  With this version of the Grand Pas, he has treated NYCB like a provincial ballet center, the equivalent of a snowbound Perm or tributary Minsk, rather than one which has historically had a clear identity in its relationship to classicism.  Over there, he doubtless would have included the children’s Mazurka, one of Paquita’s distinguishing beauties.  In New York, with all the resources of the School of American Ballet available, the traditional opening dance for young students has been inexplicably cut.  An underlying choreographic identity – a dominant taste for classical revivification -- is what is missing from this production.  In the Minkus Pas de Trois you can see the Balanchine touch and sense the original Petipa spirit.  Despite Ratmansky’s scholarly emphasis on authentic “steps”, Petipa has been ghosted from NYCB’s new Paquita Grand Pas.

         Ratmansky and the current administration of NYCB have found a way to take the Paquita revival less than seriously.  The opening entrée’s first enchaînement for four corps women ends in a suspended plié rather than a punctuating pointe tendu.  This detail has probably been excavated from archival notations, but the effect here is caractère; a company veteran in the audience can’t help but call up the ghostly shanks of character boots from Balanchine’s Cortège Hongrois.  The current Trocks’ version at the Joyce Theater comes closer to a 2025 classicism. 

         The wonderful extended variation for the corps immediately following the leads’ adagio is my perfect example of Petipa’s ability to blend a caractère inflection with classical form:  each combination of steps finds its accent in a new and surprising place within the phrasal gesture.  You sense that the choreographic invention could go on forever.  (This sauce-espagnole ensemble always reminds me of the corps women’s very Parisian galop in the vine festival of Giselle.  So Parisian!  So period!  So witty!)  In such material, the better the classical strengths of the dancers, the further the dance style separates itself from a caractère impetus, floats itself out of the gloss of Ballet-Spanish toward something crystalline. 

         Ratmansky is not into crystalline. His archival promotion of an essentialized nineteenth-century style only makes the general effect more pas de caractère.  And the increased speed in the musical tempi creates what Master called a “zany”, commedia del’arte ambiance.  (Dancing this material faster can make it more facile to produce, with no performative challenge to “float” the movement.)  Tiler Peck and Roman Mejia were merciless in the resultant Ratmansky Romp, bringing into their account some of the satiric hyperbole that Jerome Robbins made of Soviet style in the Fall section of his The Four Seasons.  The theatrically savvy Peck is particularly wonderful at those over-the-shoulder glances from a provocative Paquita.  In the event, Ratmansky has at least allowed this couple their high spirits.  You wonder if his scholarly interest in nineteenth century stylistic details is a pedant’s way of distinguishing himself from a sticky-musty Soviet background:  not exactly the healthiest choreographic inheritance.  But the mixture of old-and-older details never coalesces into a refreshed idiom for today’s best dancers.  If the lead ballerinas, like Peck and Nadon, do manage to make something coherent and new out of the material, it is due to their sorcery, not the ingredients Ratmansky has tossed into the brew.

         You cannot claim that Ratmansky’s historical approach is inconsistent.  The identifying theatrical flatness found in his ABT Beauty is present here as well:  the production doesn’t lift from within through schooled levels of dance strengths.  Ratmansky’s taste-testing of periods and styles is not unlike that of NYCB’s other resident dance-maker, Justin Peck, who would exploit imputed street-smarts.  Both choreographers are closer to a modern dance aesthetic in their choreographic impulse.  (Lincoln Kirstein would have described their stylistic registers as essentially demi-caractère.)  Together, they take the company from its received tradition toward some project far from ballet as we have known and admired it.  The Ratmansky revival may look right at home in a Trumped-up Kennedy Center when NYCB goes south on tour.  Our President promotes a “hot” arts compound and may find this Grand Pas sufficiently incendiary.

         For Master Raro and myself, the most disappointing aspect of the production is the restriction of the wonderful female solo variations to only four examples.  (Russian standard practice included at least seven in each performance, out of a claimed thirty-two available pas.)  But Ratmansky doesn’t really seem committed to the ballerina repertory, its technique or its lyric range.  If my readers are interested in Paquita‘s garland of solos -- and if they read Russian -- they can check out Yuri Burlaka’s book for a discussion of fourteen of the dances:  their names, their originating ballerinas, their many composers, and the various Petipa and School-of-Petipa works from which they are extracted for latter day exposure in the Grand Pas.  Paquita is a mine of ballet history.  Perhaps this new version can eventually be replaced in the company’s repertory over the coming decades and, in a future production, more of the women’s variations can be revived for American dancers to incarnate.

         The five variations Balanchine created for the lead ballerinas in his glorious Divertimento No. 15 demonstrate the endless variety for invention within classical dancing.  You can always tell an experienced cast from a newer one in this most delicate work, not only by the technical polish of the performers but by the wit they find in the material.  This is especially true in the Theme and Variations section of the ballet.  I saw the first performance of the second cast this season and, although only Nadon among the women was making her debut, this is not a cast that has had many opportunities to dance this work.  As a result, the frequency of repeated steps and phrases became surprisingly pronounced and a bit dulling.  A more experienced cast will use weight, accent, and rubato to shade and differentiate.  The delight -- the wit -- arises from the difference within the same.    Only Indiana Woodward, dancing the lead ballerina role, was able to zig-zag in and out of the music as if trading bons mots with the Mozart score.  Just as I hope Ratmansky or some future ballet master at the company increases the number of variations for the women in the house Paquita, I hope the casts of Divertimento No. 15 have ample opportunities to perform and grow in their roles, for this is the beating heart of a classical ballet company.  Further undermining the Divert cast I saw, the erratic orchestral tempos -- lugubrious opening, breakneck codas -- put the dancers too much on guard.  Perhaps the company’s conductors need a bit more rehearsing, too.

         The season ended with two weeks of Peter Martins’ staging of Swan Lake.  I was able to catch four of the performances -- Unity Phelan dancing with Joseph Gordon, Mira Nadon paired with Peter Walker, Unity Phelan a second time, and Miriam Miller partnered by Chun Wai Chan.  Each night the house was packed.  Martins’ production has to be the most cynical version of this ballet in repertory and, as such, it may be the Swan Lake of our age.  In Martins’ twist ending the lovers’ bond is so strong it causes the death of Von Rothbart, and yet the spell still can’t be broken because of Siegfried’s misplaced oath.  In more Romantic settings, the lovers break the spell by hurling themselves to their deaths and thus unite in the Hereafter.  Alas, there is no redemption from the fateful misstep in Martins’ telling of the tale.  This novel ending has been noted often in dance criticism, but what I’ve yet to see is a discussion of the first overt moment of dark mechanisms at work in this staging.  During Siegfried’s contemplative solo at the end of Act I, Von Rothbart appears for the first time in the ballet and, as if an irresistible but alien thought, draws the prince toward him, which is to say to his lakeside realm.  Siegfried has been identified as the mark, the tool, the “useful idiot” in current geopolitical parlance.  He’s set up by Von Rothbart from the beginning in order to seal Odette’s fate.  Talk about a cynical world view, and yet I will let the reader determine the degree to which this mirrors our current political miasma.

         The first Odette/Odile I saw this season was Unity Phelan. Phelan had danced her Paquita variation with a remarkable combination of strength and delicacy and her Concerto Barocco a bit earlier was, as Sandy called it, “lucidly poetic.”  I’m not sure what I expected from her Swan Queen but it was, surprisingly, the most remote of those I saw.  This is not to say it was unsuccessful, but one had to work more to read her portrait of the role.  I went back to see Phelan a second time to confirm my observations and, for the most part, my initial impressions were correct.

         Phelan’s Odette, a world-weary creature unwilling or unable to truly believe her deliverance would come, meted out the changes in her emotional journey as though each needed to be earned.  Her vulnerability read in her guardedness, not her openness.  Throughout the Second Act pas de deux she never fully gave into an abandon and even when she leaned back against Gordon as if in a moment of tender trust, she controlled her développé with an almost judicious care. It was only after Siegfried’s oath that her back arched over his knee in a gesture of full vulnerability.  This Swan Queen was not going to place her fate in the hands of any twenty-one-year-old princeling who came along, and to that I say, “Amen, sista.” 

         In the Fourth Act, betrayed as she long feared she would be, Phelan's Odette mingled her grief with resignation, and it is in this acceptance of her fate that she finds strength once she forgives Siegfried.  One can almost read her thoughts as she pulls his hand down from the impotent third oath and wraps his arms around her waist; “Don’t be a fool, boy. That ship has sailed but at least we have love which has to mean something even if it changes nothing.” 

         Just as Phelan’s Odette was less emotionally vulnerable than we’re accustomed to, her Odile was less obviously malign, at least in the first of the two performances I saw.   I’ve always bristled at the notion that the prince can’t tell Odile from Odette, but by making them more similar than usual, Phelan made his error more plausible, the betrayal more tragic, and Gordon’s prince more poetic. In the words of Bonomini, she was “magically the same and wonderfully different.”  The main distinction between her two swans was that her Odile danced bigger, with more freedom and dare.  Certainly, there were the quick retractions of her extended hand and some sly looks.  These are built into the choreography. But the main currency of her identity here was the release and scale of her movement and, as such, you could plausibly understand Siegfried’s credulity; why, after all, couldn’t this be Odette dancing in unguarded anticipation of her liberation? By the second performance, Phelan had allowed more of the standard malice into her portrayal, though credit must be given to all the Odile’s I saw, and to the coaching staff as well; none indulged in the coarse vamping one sees in other productions. Credit must also be given to Joseph Gordon whose dancing was not only classically clean but whose mime conveyed an earnest and touching longing that lifts Siegfried into a more complete character.

         Like Phelan’s, Mira Nadon’s Odette doesn’t quickly capitulate to Siegfried; however, her conception of this creature is quite distinct.  Nadon’s Odette maintains a regal bearing, so you never once forget she was a princess before the spell.  Her épaulement, while pliant, is always sculpted.  There’s a beautiful length to her neck and lift to her chin, aristocratic but not haughty, and her gaze is never fixed upon Siegfried.  Such indecorousness would be beneath her.   There is also an airiness beneath her upper arms even when held low.  In fast piqué turns she dances more underneath herself than usual, but this allows her to float a slow turn out of a series of quick ones.  She catches the air beneath her extended arms to alight softly upon the lake.  Our breath stops.  When she does capitulate, it is not to the man but to the promise of deliverance.  More than any Odette I’ve seen before, she marries the aristocratic bearings of Queen and swan in one. 

         The contrast between Nadon’s white and black swans was like Phelan’s, etched in movement rather than mannerism.   For Nadon’s third act, the air was gone.  Straight arms increased her scale and, as she sank into a mockery of Odette’s "dying swan” pose, she used them to repel the approaching prince.  Her movement drew lines and jagged angles in the space.  The rounded arabesques of a gliding swan gave way to the streamlined spear of a falcon honing in on its prey.  Her gaze was a dart. 

         Miriam Miller, the last of the swans I saw, was the most emotionally immediate and unguarded.  I heard there were some glitches in her first performance.  I caught her second, and here all the jitters were gone.  Miller's Swan Queen is clearly in love with this young prince and dances the pas de deux as an outpouring of feeling, a liquid rush from line to line.  In the quiet moment when she leans back against Siegfried, her leg floated into an extension as if moved by a mysterious force beyond will or consciousness.  At the conclusion of the pas de deux, my neighbor turned to me and whispered, “She’s from another planet.”  Certainly, in that moment of quiet tenderness, Miller was on another emotional plane. The drama in her portrait is in the effort to maintain a sense of dignity despite the rush of feelings.  As such, her first act solo reads like a creature working to regain her bearings, to recenter herself, after the emotional swell of her encounter with Siegfried.  Until the very end of the act, there is a rapture in her interplay with Chan which only dissipates when the transition to swan is complete.

         In the final act, betrayed, Miller’s Odette is almost somnambulistic with grief.  Then, in rushes Chan and their love -- their hopeless love -- is rekindled.  With gleeful malice, Von Rothbart and his dark minions herd and harness Odette and her avian court and toss Siegfried around like a child out of his depth.  It is only when Miller stands before Chan and a phalanx of white swans, flinging her arms to the side, chest lifted like the prow of a most fearsome man-o’-war, that Von Rothbart is checked and begins to wither.  So powerful was Miller’s protective gesture that a smattering of spontaneous applause spread through the house.  This was the first time I made the connection between Giselle saving Albrecht and Odette as the protector of Siegfried, and it was only because of the clarity of Miller’s intention.  This Odette has some serious mojo. 

         Chan and Miller brought clarity to this ballet’s bitter conclusion, as well.  An ardent and poetic Chan desperately pulls Miller’s changing arms down in a vain attempt to thwart her transition but, inexorably, from fingertip to wrist, to elbow, shoulder and back, her arms become wings before our eyes, and she fades into the flock one last time. My mind may say “cynical” but my heart breaks.

         Rumor has it that NYCB plans to bring into its future repertory the recent full-length Canadian Romeo and Juliet choreographed by Ratmansky.  (Has the company considered acquiring the version that Frederick Ashton made for the Royal Danes in 1955?  It could provide a wonderful test for the men of today’s New York company.)  Whoever has now encouraged an import of the Ratmansky R&J may be unaware of the distaste Balanchine often expressed for Prokofiev’s music.  I suppose that one counter argument might be that local balletomanes are at length tired of the tabloid Martins version of the ballet and long for a Soviet-style lugubriousness.  As Tchaikovsky inquired after a trip to Bayreuth:  “Is this really what audiences want?” 

         NYCB continues to trust a Peter Martins managerial template in its repertory choices and commissions for new works.  Martins’ Beauty and Swan Lake can fill the Koch Theater to capacity.  It was Martins, after all, who brought in Ratmansky for a period as a visiting choreographer, following his four-year directorship of the Bolshoi Ballet; and it was Martins who offered him a choreographic residency, at that time refused.  In 2025, Martins no longer has his title, and Ratmansky returns after a decade with American Ballet Theatre, now in situ.  Martins continues his rule by fiat in absentia.

     

P.H.

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