Balanchine's "Liebeslieder Walzer." (Courtesy Paul Kolnik/City Ballet)

New York City Ballet’s spring gala came and went, as galas will do, and left behind two unnecessary new ballets plus new costumes for Symphony in C, that Balanchine masterpiece to Bizet, that has been absent from the repertory for four years or so, God knows why. It’s true that the Karinska costumes, which some of us have been looking at lovingly for a lifetime, had come to seem a little dowdy; why not freshen them up? The job has been done by Marc Heppel, the company’s director of costumes, and though the result is a touch heavy—trying just a little too hard for a fashion look, with a sprinkling of tiny crystals (a nod to the ballet’s original title, Le Palais de Cristal) and an over-determined cleavage—they’ll serve.

Unfortunately, the performance itself was under-determined. The first movement ballerina should be a paradigm of strength and authority. Why give such a role to Megan Fairchild, essentially a soubrette, whose twinkle-toes agility lacks command and power? Colleagues tell me that she was stronger at her second performance, and she’s a hard worker so that may well be true, but it’s unfair to her as well as to us to give her the responsibility for a major role to which she simply isn’t suited. Nor was I very impressed by Sara Mearns in the glorious second movement—she seemed self-conscious and even a little glum in what many consider Balanchine’s finest ballerina role, with its profound blend of majesty and lyricism. The company’s greatest ballerinas—from Tanaquil LeClercq, Allegra Kent and Suzanne Farrell down through Darci Kistler—gave us radiant, moving accounts of it; Mearns has a way to go. The brilliant allegro third movement, with its dynamic jumps and nonstop brio, was a triumph for Ashley Bouder and Joaquin De Luz, whose polish, the product of his strong Spanish classical training, is different in kind from the less-virtuoso style of the company’s S.A.B.-trained men. In the fourth movement, Tiler Peck took charge and easily propelled the ballet to its thrilling finale. The corps looked prepared throughout; the tempi were pushed.

The new ballets were by Peter Martins and Benjamin Millepied. The theme of the evening was France (hence Bizet). Is it worth describing them in detail? As a responsible ballet master in chief will do on occasion, Martins gave his new ballet, Mes Oiseaux, to members of the corps—three young women and one young man, all highly talented. The music was a propulsive trio for violin, cello and piano by Marc-André Dalbavie; the costumes by Gilles Mendel were French-fashiony—cut-outs exposing patches of the dancers’ skin, short black skirts with bright-color accents. This was one of Martins’s more effective outings—he’s always competent, usually empty, and occasionally stirring. There was nothing surprising here, but Les Oiseaux held together, a riff on the quintessential Balanchine grouping of a man and three women: Apollo, of course; Who Cares?; a central section of Serenade. The young man, Taylor Stanley—solid, strong, masculine, an excellent partner—has a big career ahead of him; the women—Lauren Lovette, Ashly Isaacs, tall, blond Claire Kretzschmar—are all well on their way.

Speaking of empty, Millepied has once again given us a template for emptiness. He’s got the moves, he’s got the glamour, he’s got the connections, he just doesn’t have anything interesting to say. This new piece, Two Hearts—irritating music by Nico Muhly; irritating modish costumes (black and white with ruffly effects) by Californian fashion designers Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte—is busy, busy, busy. As usual Millepied is more comfortable with small groups (duets, trios) than with larger ones, which in his hands always look cluttered and, yes, irritating. The commissions roll on in; the returns would be diminishing if they had anything to diminish from.

The rest of the season to date has been up and down. An all-Robbins program reminded me that his unpretentious duet Andantino from 1961 is elegant and pleasing, particularly when the featured ballerina is Tiler Peck, whose astonishing musicality and intelligence illumine every step she shows us. This has been a remarkable season for her, and the audience has caught on, despite the fact that she doesn’t sell and she doesn’t flirt. In fact, she could relax her principles and project a bit more personal charm on top of her dance charm—then, she’d be even closer to Patricia McBride, whose repertory she has partly assumed. McBride, too, could do everything.

Ashley Bouder has revealed new aspects of herself, softening her impact (it could hardly be hardened) with a welcome lyricism. Maria Kowroski has finally come into her own, finally accepting her ballerina responsibilities by overcoming her hesitations and revealing her stunning expansiveness and charisma. Sterling Hyltin has become another audience favorite, with her quicksilver attack and piquant prettiness. Alas, Sara Mearns has been frequently out with an injury.

Two other Balanchine ballets were back—one, Kammermusik No. 2, after a long absence. This Hindemith onslaught of a score is not lovable, and neither is the ballet: It’s mechanical, driven, relentless—two couples, often in near unison—against a background of eight massed men, who act as one organism. How often did Balanchine use a male corps this way, apart from the nine “goons” in Prodigal Son and the male regiments in Union Jack? Since the men are so unparticularized, they further dehumanize a work that is far from human to begin with. We need to see Kammermusik occasionally, to ponder it, to acknowledge its virtuosity, and to give the dancers a chance to absorb it, but we don’t really miss it when it’s out of sight.

When Liebeslieder Walzer is out of sight, life dims. Surely this is one of the greatest and most original works in all of Balanchine. The rhapsodic Brahms songs swamp you with feeling when they’re well sung, and this season they were (in the past there have been disasters), all four singers caught up in the beauty and poignancy of the music. In the ’60s, Liebeslieder was appreciated by critics, not audiences; people would get up and leave the theater in the pause between the two sections. Today, the audience sits in rapt silence as the ballet’s four couples play out the complexities, the subtleties, of their interaction and demonstrate the astounding fecundity of Balanchine’s inventiveness and the depth of his emotion.

City Ballet’s dancers can sometimes seem uninterested and uncommitted (as for example they mostly did this season in Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet). But they seem to come to Liebeslieder in a spirit of reverence, aware of the privilege of performing in it. There were two casts. The more seasoned one brought together Kowroski and Bouder, Janie Taylor and Wendy Whelan, partnered by the Angle brothers, Sébastien Marcovici and Jonathan Stafford.

The younger cast introduced Peck, Hyltin and Fairchild (Mearns was still unavailable, so Kowroski danced again). No one dominated; no one, really, rose to the level of earlier performers like Diana Adams, Violette Verdy, Kyra Nichols, Farrell, McBride, but it didn’t matter: The younger dancers found the maturity to inhabit and honor this most grown-up of dance works. We are left with an unanswerable question: How can an hour of 19th-century waltzing lead to such transcendence?

John Jasperse talks about his Fort Blossom—on view recently at New York Live Arts in a version considerably expanded and revised from its premiere a dozen years ago—as reflecting a “kind of tough hope that … I feel is strongly needed by our culture in this particular moment in time.” I don’t know what he’s talking about, or for that matter what the words “Fort Blossom” signify, but I do know a powerful and meaningful dance work when I see one.

The stage is divided in two. On the left side are two women in short reddish-brown dresses. On the right are two naked men. The women for the most part move in tandem, shadowing each other, often with orange plastic see-through cushions strapped to their backs. One of the men, Ben Asriel, after an opening sequence in which, lying on his stomach, he humps his way across the floor, is soon engaged directly with the other man, Burr Johnson. An extended duet that is the heart of the piece finds them in a series of fierce physical encounters, embracing, contorting, simulating sex (one on top of the other, with only a clear plastic pillow between them that slowly leaks air and deflates). We’re almost less full frontal than full rearal—at one point an anus is offered up casually, as if it were a belly button. A cheek is laid tenderly down on a different kind of cheek. A foot slides gently down the crease in a pair of buttocks.

What’s so fascinating, apart from the extraordinary ingenuity of the moment-to-moment activity, is how unerotic, unpornographic all this turns out to be. The effect is sculptural rather than sexual, the genitals almost an irrelevancy. When clothes are simply absent, not provocatively stripped away, somehow bodies seem less like bodies and more like abstractions—think of two Brancusis coupling.

Until the end, the pair of women and the pair of men ignore each other, occupied with their own concerns. At the end, they come together in an easy harmony, a gathering of four dancers rather than a pointed reconciliation of genders. The women have transcended their dresses, the men their nakedness.

(On a happy personal note, the program bios tell that “in his spare moments away from dance, Johnson is in his garden or cuddling with his cat.”)

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Gossamer Gallants. (Courtesy Paul Taylor Dance Company)

Who could have guessed that what Paul Taylor needed was a redhead? He recently found one (or she found him); her name is Heather McGinley, and she’s been blazing through the current season at the Koch—and not just because of her flamboyant hair. The Taylor Company has an astounding variety of talented leading women: Amy Young, who has grown at a steady pace into a dominating presence—lyrical, composed, radiant, except when she’s powerful, haunting and, in Big Bertha, malevolent, evil, grotesque; Parisa Khobdeh, ardent, exotic, exciting—and funny; Laura Halzack, beautiful, elegant, balletic, with a new forcefulness that makes her seem less of a lovely exception to the rule and more an exemplar of the rule; sassy, quick, daring Michelle Fleet … the list goes on. What McGinley gives us is a potential successor to the most thrilling of Taylor’s recent crop of stars, Annmaria Mazzini, whose reckless daring was sometimes nearly unbearable to watch. (Her hips eventually paid the price.) Watching McGinley in, say, Mazzini’s role in the wild rush of Syzygy was to feel that life as we know it may still go on.

Every great dance company, even when it seems poised in perfect balance, needs constant renewal of both repertory and performers. But if works of substance are to survive they also need a structured organization to house and nurture them. (That’s the looming issue for the Merce Cunningham repertory.) Fortunately for us, Paul Taylor is still, at 81, giving us two or three new works a year, and his organization seems to be humming along: witness the school, the junior company, and such canny management strokes as moving the annual New York season from the City Center to the Koch, where it looks ravishing. The music yet again had to be taped—a particular sadness now that the theater’s improved acoustics have made the sound quality so luscious—but the great open space of the stage and, even more, of the auditorium seems to have unleashed a new instinctive expansiveness in the dancing. It’s not only Halzack who’s dancing with greater force; nobody’s pushing but everybody’s flying.

The first of Taylor’s new works, Gossamer Gallants, I wrote about here in November when it was given its premier at the Performing Arts Center at Purchase. It was a charming romp then and that’s what it is today—Taylor having fun with horny bugs (guys) and murderous ones (gals). The humor is broad, but Jerome Robbins took care of the serious side of this story 60 years ago with The Cage. (That was Stravinsky, this is Smetana.) Taylor’s lifelong affinity for insects shines through and his lifelong talent for structure serves him yet again. A second new piece, House of Joy—too sketchy to be termed minor—is a cartoonish take on a cat house that’s as far on the wrong side of the tracks as you can get. One of the girls is a big clumsy guy in drag, one of the johns is an ultra-butch jill. Pimps get paid, the ladies go to work, someone gets beat up—and nine minutes into what you think is going to be a colorful tale, it’s over: narrative interruptus. There’s nothing P.T. enjoys more than confounding expectations.

The serious new work (music by Arvo Pärt) is called The Uncommitted, and it’s anything but cartoonish. Here are people who cannot connect, cannot communicate, cannot … commit. They’re in semi-dark, trying to find each other, to pair, but there’s no way: Singly they emerge from a huddled group, then grope their way back. They crouch, they crawl; they kick, they punch; they reach toward each other, then pull back. Then a final rejection: She reaches out, he walks away. This beautifully composed piece needs to weather, but it already makes itself felt. We’re not in the Hell of Last Look or the Heaven of Esplanade; we’re in Limbo—together and alone.

This season was especially generous with its revivals, beginning with the inexplicably shelved Aureole, that jubilant wedding of minimal Modern Dance with the glorious Baroqueness of Handel that announced Paul Taylor as a master. Here were five dancers and a buoyant new language so unadorned—walking, skipping, leaping—that a revolution had taken place without anybody announcing it. There went drama (Graham); there went theory (Cunningham); here came lightness, simplicity, musicality—pure pleasure. Aureole became Taylor’s calling card, and maybe he just got tired of seeing it. But he brought it back in mid-March to celebrate its 50^th anniversary, and during the rapturous curtain calls he stood on stage with the other four original dancers, side by side with today’s five: Michael Trusnovec, Amy Young, Michelle Fleet, Francisco Graciano and Heather McGinley. Talk about tears in eyes.

The mysterious House of Cards (not to be confused with House of Joy), set to Milhaud’s La Création du monde—music to me more irritating than satisfying—is dominated by the presence of a silver-gowned and -turbaned woman who hovers about and above the proceedings—another in the endless series of commanding female roles initiated by Taylor’s lifetime ally and foil, the implacable Bettie de Jong. Sometimes today she’s Laura Halzack; here she’s McGinley. Often she’s Amy Young, as in the horrifying Big Bertha, where’s she’s the psychotic carnival machine that drives the prototypical ’50s family—all Hawaiian shirts, pigtails and poodle skirts—to incest, rape and murder. The lyrical, wholesome Young we thought we knew turns out to be the ultimate all-American monster—which is also the message of the piece. As William Carlos Williams put it, “The pure products of America go crazy.”

What a lavish, generous season! We’ve had the happy return of the subtly pleasing Arabesque (Debussy); the surprise return of the long-gone Junction (1961—another veteran of half a century) with its bright primary colors and clever, assertive moves (pretty blonde Jamie Rae Walker, all folded up, handed from boy to boy as a perfectly content little package); the profundities of Taylor’s recent meditation on war and death, Beloved Renegade; the always welcome greater and lesser hits—Company B, Cloven Kingdom, Mercuric Tidings, Piazzolla Caldera, Brandenburgs, Promethean Fire, Syzygy, Roses. And of course Esplanade.

This is a repertory that must survive, and to ensure that it does, the parade of extraordinary dance talent must march on. Consider: Taylor’s finest dancer, Michael Trusnovec, is now in his mid-30s—he and Amy Young are the company’s senior dancers. He was astonishing from the first for his explosive virtuoso technique—explosive, yet somehow contained and spare—but also for the refinement of his posture and carriage. Today we see that, like Baryshnikov, he has ceaselessly worked to become as fine an artist as an executant. Whether as the “Beloved Renegade” or the Apollo-like figure in Brandenburgs, or the murderous father in Big Bertha, or in any of the more abstract works that he anchors, he is a paradigm of style, intensity and modesty. So what happens when he too eventually walks away? There’s a clutch of younger men moving into central roles, and we can’t know whether any particular one of them will become not his replacement but his successor. On the other hand, there’s the newest guy, Michael Novak. His look is deceptively bland, and he doesn’t make a play for your attention, but from performance to performance his intelligence, musicality and artistry grow. He could be the One—if there’s going to be a One. Start watching. We’ll all be watching. Paul Taylor is watching.

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Abdiel Jacobsen and Diana Vishneva in 'Errand into the Maze.'

This has been Martha Graham week in New York. Every year or two the Graham company bravely flings itself at us, living out its dream that things can be again as they once were. Alas, they can’t. To begin with, Graham as a creative force was a thing of the past long before she herself was a thing of the past. And then, in total fury mode, she expelled from her company the magnificent dancers who should have been the keepers of the flame. Today, the dancers are not on this level—they’re highly capable, but they’re not larger than life the way Graham’s own dancers seemed to be. The only real exception has been Fang-Yi Sheu, and apart from special appearances, she’s now a thing of the past too.

The most telling event of the week was the guest appearance of the superb classical ballerina Diana Vishneva in a gala performance at the City Center of Errand into the Maze, one of the many works in which Graham used myth—in this case, the story of Ariadne and the Minotaur—to express her sense of her own violent clashes with, and victory over, the demons who beset her; three times she confronts the “Creature of Fear” before prevailing over him and emerging into the light. Vishneva is a dancer of extraordinary range and accomplishment—and dance intelligence. She’s also a prodigious worker. I watched her in St. Petersburg years ago attending a master class Merrill Ashley was giving on Balanchine technique to the principal dancers of the Kirov. Almost all the others seemed impatient and bored; she was hungrily soaking up everything Ashley was offering. No wonder she became the best Rubies girl since Patricia McBride.

Vishneva brought the same focus and determination to Errand into the Maze and gave an honorable performance. But Graham isn’t Balanchine—that is, a classicist. No amount of intelligence or diligence or talent can substitute for the primal power of Graham’s movement: She could slowly raise her arm and the heavens trembled. At every moment she expressed the utmost intensity; everything was a matter of life and death. Vishneva gave it her all, and bravo, but her all is not, finally, Graham’s all. When later in the program Sheu returned to the company to give a passionate performance of Chronicle, we saw the real thing—the surge of untrammeled feeling that was natural to Graham and those she had raised.

Today’s company is filled with beautifully trained dancers—they move splendidly and with devotion. You could see them at their best as the powerfully charged chorus in Night Journey, Graham’s version of Oedipus and Jocasta. Led by an anguished Blakeley White-McGuire, they succeeded in evoking the horror of the dreadful catastrophe they know is coming and cannot prevent. The blind seer Tiresias, wielding the terrifying staff that helps propel him back and forth across the stage, is a non-fail role, and Samuel Pott did it justice. Miki Orihara’s Jocasta is less convincing—she’s a lovely and experienced dancer (she’s been with the company for 25 years)—but I find her more vulnerable and sad than doomed; there’s a certain blandness. Tadej Brdnik always excels as Graham’s studly (and not very bright) Greek heroes, like Jason in Cave of the Heart and here as Oedipus. You can admire all these performances, but if you check out the film of Night Journey or the YouTube sample of it, even with the seriously over-the-hill Graham, you see the difference between Graham dancers then and now. The fierceness of Helen McGehee as the Leader of the Chorus is almost feral, and the Tiresias of Paul Taylor is simply astonishing; most people today just have no idea of what a great dancer he was. The potency and the magnitude of his movement are the qualities Graham demanded of her dancers, and that is what she got from them. And they are the qualities we miss today.

It was not a good idea to bring back one of Graham’s few “comic” works, Every Soul is a Circus (1939). “The Empress of the Arena”—guess who that was—is daydreaming about herself in various avatars under the discipline of “The Ring Master” and with her sidekick “The Acrobat.” Graham was obviously having a great time lolling around, acting out, demonstrating what a great sport she was about her art, her troupe and herself. Alas, humor was not her strongest point, and today this faux-romp looks strained and moribund. The most interesting thing about it is trying to infer how she saw her two male dancers: Erick Hawkins—strong, masculine, dominating—and the light and mercurial Merce Cunningham. Their qualities come through; Graham understood other dancers as well as she understood herself. Too bad the piece is interesting only historically. (An odd note: Every Soul is a Circus premiered only 13 months before the famous Gertrude Lawrence-Kurt Weill-Ira Gershwin-Moss Hart musical Lady in the Dark, about another fractured and confused personality whose fantasies run riot—the third and climactic one set in a circus! Clearly, something was in the air.)

On a sad note: Last week also brought the death of Ethel Winter, one of the most ravishing of all Graham dancers. The first Graham work I ever saw was Clytemnestra in its original season, and the stunningly beautiful and regal Winter was, needless to say, Helen of Troy. No wonder Paris made off with her. Ten years of war, yes, but what a woman!

In the early 1920s Diaghilev had the very young George Balanchine making ballets for the opera in Monaco—someone had to do it. Very rarely has anyone of comparable stature been assigned to this thankless task, but in recent years Mark Morris, Christopher Wheeldon and Doug Varone have acquitted themselves well at the Met, and someone there decided that Benjamin Millepied, that busy bee of a choreographer, could do the same for the current production of Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina. The result is a disaster, if you can assign such a loaded word to something so inconsequential. In the final act, at a boyar’s feast, six lithe girls in long black skirts with slits (so they can thrust their legs through them) weave around while the lord’s male attendants turn tactfully away. They needn’t have bothered. This lazy dance has no allure as well as no point. It made me nostalgic for the bad old days of slave-girl spectacles in Aida. A pity, because everything else about the production was terrific.

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Stephen Petronio in Steve Paxton's 'Intravenous Lecture.' (Photo by Julie Lemberger)

The eternal and uneasy relationship between ballet and modern dance endures, but radically altered in tone and intensity. For decades it was war—an either/or standoff—with time-outs for wary collaborations, like the one between Balanchine and Graham when in 1959 they joined forces (sort of) for Episodes, or earlier, when Merce Cunningham made The Seasons for Ballet Society and almost two decades later presented his Summerspace at New York City Ballet—only now on pointe.

Times changed, passions subsided, and brute necessity prevailed. Twyla Tharp set her sights on ballet, and ballet, hungry for major talent, succumbed. But equally important was the need of ballet dancers to have somewhere to go when their classical technique began to give way to crumbling knees and hips. Nureyev and Fonteyn fooled around with Graham; more seriously, post-ballet Baryshnikov invested his genius in Mark Morris and other major (and minor) modernists; and today it’s hardly news when an ex-ballerina or -ballerino appears with a modern company. It’s comparable to the way fading movie stars in the ’50s recharged their careers by slumming, and triumphing, on previously despised television: Loretta Young, Fred MacMurray, Robert Young, Barbara Stanwyck, Donna Reed.

This past week brought us three examples of this forced marriage. First, and oddest, was the appearance of City Ballet’s Wendy Whelan with the Stephen Petronio company. Whelan has been a stalwart ballerina whose fascinating spidery look was less suited to classical Balanchine than to Christopher Wheeldon, who made her a star with Morphoses and Polyphonia and who remains a great favorite with City Ballet audiences. But she’s been in the company for more than 25 years, and she’s not what she once was. Her appearance with Petronio was therefore a sensible step in her post-ballet life as well as a marketing plus for an established modern dance company that lacks box-office heft.

Here’s what she did: In a solo called Ethersketch I (from 2003), starting upstage (wearing a gold-mesh tunic over tiny shorts) she moved slowly downstage doing standard Petronio movements, like his big swirling swing of a leg. And then—blackout. The whole thing can’t have lasted four minutes. (A man in the audience shouted “More!”) What can she have been thinking of? What can Petronio have been thinking of? To me, I’m afraid, it felt like mutual exploitation.

The rest of the program included a Steve Paxton shaggy-IV story (the astonishingly flexible Petronio himself telling gay-inflected anecdotes while trailing behind him a rolling IV-drip on a pole); a robust performance of what to me is his best work, City of Twist, a post-9/11 piece expressing admiration and sorrow for our traumatized town; and a newly commissioned work, The Architecture of Loss, that deals with the same material but in a more generalized and lugubrious way, the costumes (raggedy, formless, seaweedy, wan) presenting a serious obstacle to enjoying the work of Petronio’s polished and expressive dancers.

The appearance of Ashley Tuttle, formerly a radiant presence at ABT, as the central figure in Pam Tanowitz’s Untitled (The Blue Ballet) was more substantial than Whelan’s but no less puzzling. Tanowitz, a highly acclaimed minimalist modernist—cerebral, austere, deliberate—has been inching toward ballet; now she’s up to her neck in it. Tuttle is not only in this piece but observing it, as again and again she stands back from the five other dancers and watches them quizzically as well as admiringly. They’re in grays; she’s in blue—as the song says, they come from two different worlds.

The piece is set to Morton Feldman’s endless “String Quartet #1”—a work of such austerity that it makes Tanowitz’s dance look glitzy. (Well, no, nothing could, but you know what I mean.) It’s so worthy, it’s so impressive, it’s so dull. What’s interesting is that Tanowitz’s work is built around Tuttle and yet she doesn’t seem to belong in it. What I felt most strongly was how the dance was yearning to be performed on pointe. Tuttle’s lyricism added a lovely dimension to Tharp’s Broadway hit Movin’ Out, where her classical background defined her character; here it’s food for Tanowitz’s ruminations. It’s as if Untitled were taking place in her head, not on the stage.

The latest performances of the always refreshing New York Theatre Ballet reaffirmed the ballet/modern semi-marriage vows. Merce Cunningham’s Septet, from 1953, is perhaps his most balletic work, and it’s a beauty (music by Satie, not Cage, which explains a lot). The company has grown comfortable in this piece, and does it proud. It also gave a confident and affecting performance of another modern classic, José Limón’s The Moor’s Pavane (1949). This compressed retelling of Othello, reduced to four characters, is so brilliantly structured that it grips you from start to (horrifying) ending. Pauline Lawrence’s magnificent rich costumes retain their power—they’re as central to the action as the dancers. The company’s leading young man, Steven Melendez, was subtle and careful as the Moor; it’s not his fault that he’s still more boyish than mannish. Most riveting were Philip King as Iago and Rie Ogura as Emilia.

Last year NYTB presented A Rugged Flourish, a new work by the leading British choreographer Richard Alston, and they brought it back last week—an example of a modern dancemaker successfully creating a work on pointe. And two young dancers from the ballet world—Gemma Bond and Antonia Franceschi—offered works new to us, both of them highly promising. Franceschi’s City Scenes, for three couples, was convincing and fluent—nothing tentative or awkward—to a nostalgic score by Allen Shawn. Bond’s Run Loose, to Lizst, was a quick burst of high spirits: happy boy-girl encounter, at full speed. Finally, a fascinating revival of a solo, An Eccentric Beauty Revisited, by the early postmodern hero and wit James Waring. Elena Zahlmann brought out its sly self-regarding humor. Satie again, and a faux-Orientalist costume after Bakst. Judson Church meets Diaghilev.

There are few ballet elements in Hora, the new work by the Batsheva Dance Company. (Demonstrators were carrying on outside BAM—possibly the same folk who are demanding that the Park Slope co-op stop stocking products from Israel.) Hora is the work of the company’s artistic director, Ohad Naharin, and it features 11 of his powerful, propulsive dancers—don’t get in their way! Those dominatrix thighs!

At the start, the dancers are seated on a bench at the top of the stage. In various groupings they move toward us, then erupt into their mostly floor-bound activities: almost no lifts or jumps, nothing airborne, nothing light, a lot of squatting. There’s the odd shudder, the odd cork-screwing to the ground; at one point five women rotate on their bottoms. It’s all outbursty rather than fluent. Worst is the use of hideously synthesized morsels of classical music—“The Ride of the Valkyries,” “Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune,” “Clair de Lune,” the Also Spracht Zarathustra music from 2001: A Space Odyssey. And then, after an hora, it was over.

Finally, a work to which the words “ballet” and “modern” have no relevance. Yes, Boris Eifman was back at the City Center, scene of such previous excrescences of his as Red Giselle, Russian Hamlet, Tchaikovsky and The Brothers Karamazov, all of them hideous throwbacks to Sovietski melodrama. Just as Balanchine lovers can spend hours arguing over which are his greatest 10 or 20 masterpieces, Eifman connoisseurs can enjoy themselves debating which is his absolute worst. It’s usually the last one you’ve seen, in this case Rodin, which thrilled its overwhelmingly Russian audience at the City Center last weekend. Alastair Macaulay calls these pieces “psycho-sexo-bio-dance-dramas” and whereas that’s accurate, it doesn’t fully describe the horror, the horror. (Don’t worry—he takes care of that elsewhere.)

Poor Rodin—not only is he suffering the anguish of Creation (a recurring theme for the hypercreative Eifman) but he’s torn between his demented mistress, Camille Claudel, and his sex-starved wife, Rosa. No wonder he pounds his chest, writhes, thrusts, and contorts his face into expressions of despair. You would too if you had to visit Camille in the asylum where a flock of grimacing loonies pranced about you in white nightgowns and bonnets. There are happy workmen stomping around Rodin’s studio, there are happy grape-crushers in a harvest celebration, there are happy reporters rushing in and out scribbling about the Master’s latest masterpiece. But most of all there are countless lifts, alternately ecstatic and tragic. And endless ripping off of clothes—his, hers, theirs. Oh, yes—he also sculpts. So does Camille. Eifman is such a confused storyteller that it’s not clear whether, as in some feminist fantasy, she really did all the work while Maestro got all the credit. But the last we see of him he’s up on a platform slamming away at a hunk of marble—bang, bang, bang. Curtain.

editorial@observer.com

At right, Amber Star Merkens in 'A Choral Fantasy.'

Why Beethoven’s flawed and surfacy “Fantasia in C Minor for Piano, Chorus and Orchestra”? Why all the military bombast? Why so literal a translation of music into movement? It’s a puzzlement—but then Mark Morris frequently chooses to puzzle us. Sometimes his puzzles charm and tease; in his new A Choral Fantasy—premiered at BAM this past week—he neither charms nor teases; he assaults.

Tall, elegant Amber Star Merkens is leader of the pack, personifying the piano elements of the score. She and the 14 other dancers in her troop are togged out in Isaac Mizrahi’s dark-green uniforms with lots of gold trimmings—they’re handsome and slimming, and highly suitable for marching, of which there’s going to be a lot. With his usual mastery of group movement, Mr. Morris has his dancers swarming all over the stage, breaking into clusters that morph into other clusters. Run, run, run; leap, leap, leap; and, most persistently, march, march, march.

Not since Balanchine’s Stars and Stripes have we seen so much marching on the stage, but Stars gives us jolly, tongue-in-cheek marching, to Sousa. Morris gives us pure swagger, arms pistoning, to Beethoven’s portentous drumbeats. Where are the jackboots? They’re all that’s missing to top off this tedious strutting and stomping. Eventually the excellent Trinity Choir joins in with a short, arid paean to life, love, art and God. (Fortunately, Beethoven rolled over, and years later gave us the real thing with the “Ode to Joy” climax to the Ninth Symphony.)

A Choral Fantasy is cleverly put together and highly polished, and it’s danced efficiently by Mr. Morris’s wonderful dancers. As always, they’re energized and focused, although it has to be said that as familiar faces and bodies phase out of the company, a touch of homogeneity is setting in. Well, maybe that’s appropriate for a work that suggests authoritarianism and displays a mechanical relationship between the choreography and the score.

To precede the Beethoven piece, Mr. Morris brought back his hour-long version of the Virgil Thomson-Gertrude Stein opera of 1934, Four Saints in Three Acts (although it has 14 saints and four acts). This famous work was first performed by an all-black group of singers and dancers and was staged by Frederick Ashton after Balanchine declined. Stein’s libretto is loopy yet slyly evocative, its most famous passage beginning “Pigeons on the grass alas.” Thomson’s music is light, jaunty, faux-simple. And Mr. Morris has decorated it all with a series of enchanting primitive backdrops by Maira Kalman in the blaring pinks and yellows and blues that kindergarten children love.

I’ve resisted this Four Saints since its premiere a dozen years ago—too much of it skirts cuteness and winsomeness. But this time around it came to life for me. Partly, I think, because the music has never sounded as good as it did now with the MMDG Music Ensemble, the Trinity Choir again and eight superb soloist singers. If you couldn’t always make out the words, that was probably a problem with the acoustics—and with the bizarreries of the text. The spirit and the sound were captivating. Everything added up to a major minor work.

In addition, a cast change helped lead me to a new perception of the dance. St. Teresa, the central character, has always been performed—powerfully—by the superb Michelle Yard. Midway through the second BAM performance she tore a calf muscle and, after a brief pause, was replaced by Rita Donahue, a more buoyant and less insistent dancer, and one who depends less on a relentless smile. Her performance the following night was charming and pleasing; her lucid St. Teresa altered the balance of the work. Although her billowy, white, diaphanous, near-baby-doll costume still compels your attention, Ms. Donohue is less a stand-out and more the most prominent figure of an ensemble. (She also had a new St. Ignatius, Samuel Black, as her partner; like Ms. Donahue, he’s a less vivid personality than his predecessor, John Heginbotham, but he’s stronger and more intense.)

Four Saints is long, and all of it is danced; the oratorio approach is bypassed by Mr. Morris. As a result, there are stretches when, to fill out the music, he seems to be vamping. But for the first time my patience wasn’t strained. Either this work is growing up or I am.

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Tyler Angle, Maria Kowroski, Amar Ramasar, Sara Mearns, Robert Fairchild, Wendy Whelan and Daniel Ulbricht in "Les Carillons."

As ye sow, so shall ye reap. When a ballet company spends a lot of money on gimmicky pieces, it’s stuck with them for a while—they have to earn their keep. Likewise, when it spends a lot of money on an arid version of a classic, it too has to serve again and again. In its current season, City Ballet is reaping what it sowed: Yet another go round for Peter Martins’s arid, antiromantic Romeo and Juliet, and exhumations of the awful Lynn Taylor-Corbett Seven Deadly Sins (gimmick: Patti LuPone singing—badly—the Kurt Weill/Lotte Lenya songs) and the awful Peter Martin Ocean’s Kingdom (gimmick: music by Paul McCartney). I can’t imagine any knowledgeable ballet-lover wanting to see any of these more than once. The rest of the season is standard City Ballet fare: lots of Balanchine, though nothing out of the ordinary (no revival, say, of Kammermusik No. 2), but some of the big guns—Vienna Waltzes, Union Jack—to complement some of the delicious small fry: Steadfast Tin Soldier, Donizetti Variations. And an assortment of Robbins ranging from the dreary In Memory of … to the frisky Interplay to the classic Fancy Free. And then there’s the one real event: a triple bill from the gifted if erratic Christopher Wheeldon, centered on a newly commissioned piece called Les Carillons. I can tell you what the music is—Bizet’s first and second L’Arlésienne Suites. I can tell you who’s responsible for the bewilderingly pallid and blobby mess of a backdrop (Jean-Marc Puissant) and the oddly unbecoming costumes—boys in brown, one arm bare; three leading women in red gowns, two others not, corps in shimmery blues (Mark Zappone). But I can’t tell you what this ballet is, because on first viewing I didn’t detect a through-line or a unified approach; its five movements seemed more about creating complicated movement for its five ballerinas than about responding to Bizet. It’s showing us a great deal, but what is it telling us? There’s a precedent for a work featuring five ballerinas—Balanchine’s gem of a Mozart ballet, Divertimento No. 15. But it’s unfair to compare Mr. Wheeldon’s new piece to one of Balanchine’s greatest—his talent is not on that level (nor is anyone else’s). What he might have learned from Balanchine, however, is how to knit a ballet composed in sections into a seamless whole, leading to a finale that resolves everything harmoniously instead of just stopping. But this is the very area in which Mr. Wheeldon has always been weakest: deploying a large number of dancers in an effective finale. His finales just look muddled—like what Balanchine used to call “spaghetti.” (This is a failing that he shares with his coeval choreographer Benjamin Millepied.) Where he’s strongest is at identifying the particular skills of his women and revealing them in solos and duets. In Les Carillons he has superb talents to work with. It was he who first grasped the special qualities of Wendy Whelan, in such works as Morphoses and Polyphonia, and they have remained loyal to each other. Here he shows her in an unusually lyrical light—more elegant, less clenched, but effective. And he has recognized and exploited (in the most positive sense of the word) Tiler Peck’s uncanny musicality, giving her a solo of both delicacy and complexity that she sails through as if there were no difficulties, as if she were discovering each ingenious moment as it arrives. This is invention on a high level. And he has encouraged Maria Kowroski along the path to greater expansiveness. She may not be the strongest dancer in the company—far from it—but she’s the most gorgeous, and she’s taken her time to acknowledge how gorgeous she is. When Mr. Wheeldon has her up in the air, those long legs soaring, she’s everything we always thought she could be. With the tremendously talented Sara Mearns he’s less effective—no one has yet shown us who she really is beyond her rushing, thrilling way of moving. Les Carillons is far from a total success, but it’s also far from a failure. What a relief after the fiascoes of Seven Deadly Sins and Ocean’s Kingdom! It was followed on the program by Polyphonia, to me Mr. Wheeldon’s finest ballet. Yes, it’s Balanchine-inflected—that upside-downsy moment from Episodes—but it has its own artistic unity and it gives us Ms. Whelan at her most extraordinary. Talk about signature roles! And although she may be winding down, you wouldn’t know it from this performance. (The beautiful piano score by Ligeti doesn’t hurt.) Alas, the event was blighted by the injury Jennie Somogyi sustained on stage; as she hobbled off, it looked serious. We can only hope it wasn’t a snapped Achilles tendon. Ms. Peck rushed on in her place, revealing yet again that she can dance anything. But that was little solace: Ms. Somogyi has had an injury-ridden career; she should have been one of the great ones. Unfortunately, circumstances kept me from seeing the final ballet of the triple bill—DGV: Danse à Grande Vitesse, which Mr. Wheeldon made for the Royal Ballet in 2006 and which was received with great enthusiasm there. I’m particularly sorry to have missed it because I’m always hoping to find him fulfilling the great promise we all saw in him when he arrived on the scene. He’s occasionally astounding, always capable, sometimes slick, never stupid or vulgar. What’s missing? Some inner necessity to make this ballet to this music? Even so, we’re lucky to have him.

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"The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess."

Porgy and Bess has never been thought of as a dance show, and yet it’s filled with dance. It uses dance to punctuate the action, or as background, or as atmosphere; even when it’s front and center it isn’t crucial. Back in 1935 when it opened (at the Alvin Theater, on Broadway), it was reviewed by both the New York Times’s theater critic, Brooks Atkinson, and its music critic, Olin Downes. Atkinson never mentions the show’s dance component, and Downes has only this to say: “Admitted the instinct of Negroes to dance, did the inhabitants of Catfish Row set themselves in centrifugal patterns along the floor and wiggle hands and toes like the ladies who are auxiliary to a soloist’s performance in a revue? Of course this was amusing. So was the clogging of Sportin’ Life in the forest scene.”

Downes doesn’t bother mentioning that Sportin’ Life was played by John W. Bubbles, one of the great tappers—Astaire thought he was the finest of his generation and took lessons from him. He and his partner in their famous act “Buck & Bubbles” had a triumph in the 1931 edition of the Ziegfeld Follies and were the first black performers to play Radio City Music Hall. George Gershwin chose him for Sportin’ Life although he couldn’t read music and had to be taught “It Ain’t Necessarily So” and “There’s a Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New York” work by word and note by note. Yet he doesn’t rate a mention in The Times, nor is the choreographer identified. So much for dance.

There’s always been controversy about this opera, Broadway show, folk opera, work of musical theater. And of course there’s already been a ton of controversy about the new version starring Audra McDonald and Norm Lewis and irritatingly renamed The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess; Stephen Sondheim, as we all know, blasted it before it opened in Boston, and the artistic crew who reconceived it at least stepped back from the brink of giving it a happy ending. The issue, at least for me, isn’t “What category does it belong to?” but “How good is the dance element and how does it affect the show as a whole?”

The choreographer is the well-known Ronald K. Brown, who founded his own admired company in 1985 and has provided the Alvin Ailey company with Grace, the best new work in its recent history: his credentials are impeccable. His work here, too, is impeccable—sensible, coherent, tasteful—but unmemorable. There’s a picnic number—flouncy dresses, wriggly hips, bulging picnic baskets—that’s in the direct line of such scenes going back to Agnes de Mille’s clambake in Carousel; this is generic stuff. There’s a busy ensemble number in the first act that’s pure Ailey. There’s a solemn mourning number that seems to reflect the original stage production. See for yourself: on YouTube there’s a minute and a half showing Rouben Mamoulian, the original director, rehearsing the company back in 1935. This silent clip includes a few seconds of the scene that are more spontaneous and exciting than Brown’s somewhat stylized interpretation. The bonus here is watching how Bubbles walks and struts as Sportin’ Life; you don’t need sound to realize what his performance must have been—and to wish he were up there on the stage of the Richard Rodgers Theatre right now in place of the pallid David Alan Grier. (There were giants in those days.)

That the dance numbers are presented as numbers is what’s significant about what Brown and Diane Paulus, the director, are up to. The relative independence of the dances from the overall flow of the show turns them into individual items, the way dance figured in most old-fashioned musicals, and helps tilt Porgy and Bess further from Gershwin’s operatic intentions toward scoring as a Broadway hit. That’s certainly not a crime against humanity, if you’re happy with a version that’s thinner rather than fuller, but it emphasizes how far from essential dance is to The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess.

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The New York City Ballet's "Nutcracker." (NYC Ballet)

It’s been a week of Nutcrackers—Nutcrackers to the left of us, Nutcrackers to the right of us, Nutcrackers wherever you look. And it’s been a mixed bag of nuts. Now it’s time to roll over, Tchaikovsky, and tell Beethoven the news.

But first, a dash through the four Nutcrackers I recently saw within two long days.

For most of us, it’s the Balanchine version that reigns supreme, not only because we’ve grown up on it (and so have our children and our grandchildren), but because it’s a great work of art as well. No matter how many times you see it, which in my case is scores of times, there’s always something more to be discovered in it; another perfect detail of narrative or musicality or profound subtext. It understands children, it understands Christmas and it understands life. It’s magic.

Last week brought us a “Live From Lincoln Center” broadcast of the City Ballet production—the Balanchine production. How did it look? Not so bad. But it could have looked a good deal better. The problems weren’t with the dancers, although the casting was less than perfect, but with the near-demented deployment of the cameras. We’ve been told that there were eight of them in eight different positions in the theater, and I believe it—the point of view never stopped shifting: move in for a close-up, pull back; swing to one side, swing to the other. Why not a reaction shot here, just when we’re watching an important dance moment? How about a long shot here, a short shot there, now a medium shot? Why not break up this other passage by changing the point of view? Why trust the ballet?

That’s the crime of so much televised dance (you get the same thing with Dance in America): bring culture to the masses, but dilute it for them. It’s as if the directors don’t believe an audience can focus on anything for more than 10 seconds without getting bored—sometimes five seconds is too long for them. There were moments when I was almost dizzy from having my eyes pulled here, then there, then somewhere else.

Who knows why Megan Fair-child was the Sugarplum of choice. She’s a greatly improved dancer—she’s worked hard and intelligently—but she’s essentially a soubrette, sweetly pretty. That’s fine for Sugarplum up to a point—but then comes the great second act pas de deux—the glorious climax to the music and the choreography. It isn’t sweetly pretty; it’s grand, on the largest scale. Fairchild simply lacks the amplitude. (For one thing, she isn’t supple enough to carry off the wonderful and essential swooning back-bends.) Still, she did an honorable job. Ashley Bouder as Dewdrop gave her usual powerful stirring performance. Tiler Peck as Marzipan gave her usual superbly musical performance, but then she’s also a wonderful Sugarplum and an extraordinary Dewdrop. When is she not a paragon? Now, roll over, Nutcracker, and let the winter repertory begin.

Oddly, the single best thing about the broadcast of the Bolshoi’s Nutcracker, seen at the Big Cinemas Theater, was the camera work. Every moment was right, every camera angle, every shift in point of view; there wasn’t a hitch; the flow was perfection. And to be fair to the company, the orchestra was terrific too—full, vibrant, exciting, moving. That’s it. Everything else was unspeakable—no surprise, since it’s the Yuri Grigorovich version. In the entire two acts there isn’t a single moment of distinguished or even interesting choreography.

To begin with, who can tell where it’s set, or why? This is surely not the bourgeois home of the Stahlbaums—people are got up in fancy gowns, with 18^th-century wigs. Since little Marie is played by a grown-up ballerina (Nina Kaptsova) and her younger brother, Fritz, by a small boy, confusion prevails from the start. The mice are defeated in the first act—and then again in the second. The Nutcracker himself is a thin, thin blond fellow with a bright red costume—he does lots of jetés in circles around the stage, but mostly he carries Marie aloft in those Soviet lifts that come in three sizes: fairly high, very high, over the head and often upside down. (Cheers!) Billowing skirts, rhapsodic glances. Every effect repeated again and again. Drosselmeyer was danced by the most effective dancer on view, the elegant Denis Savin, who actually seemed to have an idea about what he was doing, but there was too much of him.

Such a production is a throwback to the bad old days, like Putin. No wonder Alexei Ratmansky quit the Bolshoi. (Luckily for them, they retain his Bright Stream.) Nothing will be possible there until the Grigorovich repertory and everything it represents are dead with a stake through the heart.

As for the Royal Ballet’s Nutcracker, seen in a back-to-back marathon with the Bolshoi’s, it was a film from 2009 of Peter Wright’s two-decade-old version, full of invention and charm, its backbone Drosselmeyer as the magician who conjures up the characters and events. There’s nothing sinister or ambivalent about him, unless you count his addiction to swirling his big blue cape around him. The problem, if you think it is one, is that, as in the Bolshoi version, the Marie character (called Clara here) is a ballerina from the start: the tree grows, but she doesn’t. She and her prince are the whole story; they’re active throughout, even in the divertissement where Clara, for instance, becomes a secondary Dewdrop (sorry, Rose Fairy). In other words, the “children” aren’t observers, they’re grown-ups right in the midst of things, changing the entire balance of the second act and—again as in the Bolshoi—robbing the ballet of its sense of wonder.

Mr. Wright’s Nutcracker becomes a colorful excuse for a conventional love story, turning its back on what we love so much in Balanchine: Christmas as seen and felt by children, for whom Sugarplum and her cavalier are ideal adult versions of themselves. There’s no subtext here, no universality. And unfortunately, the Sugarplum is danced by Miyako Yoshida, giving a dance-by-numbers performance with confident technique and no resonance. (Her partner is the estimable Steven McRae, appealing if half-hidden under his powdered wig.)

There are many other versions, of course. Mr. Ratmansky’s for ABT, now playing at BAM, makes big mistakes but has tremendous virtues, in particular its thrilling Snowflake scene, turned into an unsettling pas d’action. Mark Morris’s The Hard Nut is not to my taste in its bad-boy affect, but it’s original, and many love it. Mr. Wright, for all his ability, gives us a pretty and well-managed standard ballet that has everything but the imagination that Tchaikovsky provides and demands.

An appealing surprise turned up at the small but always intelligent and attractive New York Theatre Ballet at the Florence Gould Auditorium. Keith Michael has replaced his own Nutcracker, performed from 1985 to 2010, with a new version, and it’s a honey. On a tiny stage with a limited number of dancers—the Snowflakes, for instance, are just four girls and two boys—he has made an hour-plus mini-ballet intended primarily for little kids but equally enchanting for ancients like me. It’s completely ingenious the way he deploys the pretty cut-out scenery (by Gillian Bradshaw-Smith) and the equally charming costumes (by Sylvia Taalson Nolan), and it’s extraordinary the way he achieves so much with so small an ensemble. What’s more, the choreography is musical and inventive—and fun. These are committed dancers, as much at home in this classic as they were in Tudor, Cunningham and Alston the last time I saw the company.

The atmosphere is relaxed and rowdy, the experience a happy one. Don’t forget this one at Nutcracker time next year!

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The Merce Cunningham Dance Company performing "Biped" (1999). (Stephanie Berger/BAM)

This past week marked a unique circumstance in the history of dance in America—the first time I can think of when a major figure took a last (posthumous) bow and shut up shop. The Merce Cunningham Dance Company gave four performances at BAM, featuring six of Cunningham’s major works, and apart from several Events—pieces being performed simultaneously on three stages (the audience wanders from one to another for 45 minutes) later in the month at the Park Avenue Armory—it has only a two-week season in Paris remaining before it permanently disbands.

Mind you, this all comes at the end of a two-year farewell world tour in accordance with Cunningham’s plan, but it’s still a defining goodbye. The school will continue, and the works will be available to other companies to be staged by ex-Cunningham dancers, but a season of his work presented by a formal Cunningham company, like the one we’ve just experienced, is a thing of the past.

Ballet choreographers have it easier. The language of ballet is universal and can be handily transplanted—works by Balanchine, Ashton, Robbins, MacMillan are on view everywhere. Earlier masters have slowly gone out of fashion, but there are still Fokine and Lifar and Nijinska spottings—the Paris Opéra Ballet, for instance, continues to pretend that Lifar matters—and of course the 19th-century classics endure. But each modern master creates his or her own language, so that when he or she is gone, the work is dangerously vulnerable. Certain modern masters like Doris Humphrey have essentially vanished. The Martha Graham company keeps coming back to greater or lesser effect, but the repertory exists and the performance tradition exists—sort of. The José Limon company is still valid, with some of his repertory intact. Paul Taylor works are performed everywhere, though rarely as wonderfully as his own company performs them; they’re not an endangered species, and—thank God—Mr. Taylor is still here to protect them and add to them, and to arrange a sensible future for them. But what will happen to the Cunningham rep? And does it matter?

There are many people for whom it matters more than anything else, who see him as the overwhelming dance genius of our time. (It’s the way I see Balanchine.) I’ve always been ambivalent about him. The absolute mastery is always evident—no one understands movement better than he does, and if he’s ever had a foolish or vulgar moment, I’ve missed it; there’s clearly meaning behind everything he’s ever done. And of course he was a great dancer—one of America’s greatest. For me, though, the disconnect between dance and music as well as between dance and narrative too often leaves me floundering, unsure of what I’m seeing when I see movement bare. I feel fortunate that in these final few days at BAM I was able to respond so positively to so much—for me, a last moment reprieve, even though for the company it was only a stay of execution.

There were three programs. My heart sank with the first, an hour-long work from 1983 called Roaratorio with a challenging score by John Cage that announces itself as “An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake.” It’s a tumult of sounds, from the roar of trains and the cries of babies to animal noises and weather effects, plus Cage himself reading aloud the 2,462 place names to be found in Joyce’s novel, most of them unintelligible as they come pounding at the audience from the surround-sound system. I don’t  appreciate Irish jiggy or folky inflected dance, I don’t get Finnegans Wake, and I dislike the circus, so there were three strikes against me from the start.

Second Hand put me on the right path. It was originally meant to be danced to Satie’s Socrate, but a Cage score was substituted when the Satie estate denied Cunningham permission. The dance, nevertheless, reflects the life—and particularly the death—of Socrates. As he prepares to die, Socrates (originally danced by Cunningham himself, now by Robert Swinston) stands away from his disciples as he accepts, even welcomes, his fate. I also feel reverberations of The Tempest, with Cunningham as Prospero dismissing all those human spirits whom he has conjured up. I suspect that he was never really interested in people except as the equipment he needed to create movement. In that sense, he would not have been interested in dancers per se, unlike a Balanchine or Ashton (or Taylor or Tharp or Morris), for whom identifying, exploring and revealing individual dancers was of consummate interest. (Graham was first and foremost concerned with creating works which she herself could dance.)

Earlier in Cunningham’s career he associated himself with major contemporary artists—Rauschenberg, Johns, Warhol—to provide the visual counterpart to his dances. By the end of the last century he had engaged with computer art, and was committed to a kind of randomness—he was now at a further remove from collaboration with other artists, especially when in 1992 Cage, his lifelong partner, died. Yet for me, his BIPED, created in 1999, is his most beautiful and moving work. (He was approaching 80 when he made it.) Again and again the 13 dancers invade the stage and recede from it, alone or in what appear to be inevitable groupings. Their glistening costumes, the remarkable shifting lighting and the inspired projections of moving digital images that flash upon a scrim at the front of the stage give the entire work a cohesion that I don’t find in much of Cunningham. Most importantly, the pulsing score by Gavin Bryars supports and reinforces the rush of the dance. The ending is a dying fall—the fulfillment of a long and rich philosopher’s life.

The third of the BAM programs began with two well-known works, Pond Way (Brian Eno; Roy Lichtenstein) and RainForest (David Tudor and Warhol­—his famous silver helium balloons that occasionally float out over the audience). The first is calm, reflective, at times as if underwater—floating, diving and surfacing. The second is certainly grounded—as its title suggests, almost jungly in its feel; there are even ape-inflected moments. But whatever the basic metaphor in a Cunningham piece, the subject is always the same: basic dance movement. The long balance, the leg thrust outward, the tilt, the leap forward with one arm outstretched—and the way these dance phrases accumulate into something meaningful without benefit of music or narrative but instead by the way one dancer or group of dancers echoes or contrasts with another.

The final work at BAM, and the last intact piece we will have seen from the Cunningham Company, was Split Sides, from 2003, in which the decision as to which half of the piece, with which piece of music (Radiohead, Sigur Rós), which décor (Robert Heishman, Catherine Yass), which set of costumes (black-and-white, color; James Hall), and which lighting design (James F. Ingalls) will be used is made by rolling a die. This is a highly energized work, full of invention, and yet, as happens so often in Cunningham, punctuated by deep stillnesses. Its high point—the high point of the entire season—was a solo by a young dancer named Silas Riener, a solo so explosive, so risky, so convoluted, so thrilling that the entire theater burst into applause and gasps. Mr. Riener seems to move in many different directions at once, getting into and holding impossible balances while twisting his torso into impossible convolutions—yet everything composed and non-showoffy. No one can dance this way. How did Merce Cunningham know that someone could?

The company as a whole works superbly together, and it’s the nature of Cunningham’s procedure that everyone has much to do. The dancers call attention to the work rather than to themselves (the Riener solo is an exception). Robert Swinston, the senior dancer and director of choreography, has the impossible task of assuming Cunningham’s roles, and handles himself tactfully and with honor. (Being a generation or more older than the rest of the company, he looks less comfortable mixed in with the crowd.) But after this month it will all be history anyway. There are ample records of the dances and the dancers; of the way things were and have been for 60 years. But the experience itself is behind us.

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"Gossamer Gallants" by Paul Taylor.

Saturday
City Center
2:00 p.m.

The Encores! series and Jazz at Lincoln Center blasted off their new collaboration with a spectacular show called Cotton Club Parade—all-singing, all-dancing, all-Ellington. (Even the non-Ellington numbers sound like his.) Of course a big theater like the City Center can’t replicate the feeling of an intimate place like the Cotton Club—for one thing, they didn’t have miking back in the day. (Lucky them.) And presumably a show at the club was relaxed: pauses between numbers; waiters passing through with drinks clinking; customers coming and going. Whereas the Parade is a semi-Broadway show, and one of its strongest virtues is that it’s driven at breakneck speed through its 23 numbers—its energy is never allowed to falter; even segues are ultraminimal. And there’s no intermission. But authenticity of venue isn’t the point. You leave the performance with a real sense of the variety, the ingenuity, the sheer fun of what things must have been like up on 125th Street in the ’20s and ’30s.

One difference is the absence of big star performers. It’s not that they weren’t cast; it’s that we don’t have them anymore. Apart from Wynton Marsalis, listed as “Music Director and Trumpet”—his jazz band is fabulous—there aren’t many names the average theater- or dancegoer is likely to recognize. The Cotton Club was home, on and off, not only to Ellington but to Fletcher Henderson, Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway and Fats Waller; to Ethel Waters, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the Nicholas Brothers and the young Lena Horne. There’s no one of their startling originality on the stage of the City Center. But there are performer after performer of total capability, and a few real standouts. The widely experienced tap dancer Jared Grimes comes on just before the end (excellent strategy) and steals the show with his “Goin’ Nuts,” choreographed by himself; with his brilliant technique and happy, generous nature he restores tap to itself after the gloomy, self-absorbed work of Savion Glover and his imitators. Jeremiah “Showtyme” Haynes also makes you happy with his rubbery legs and torso in the duet “Hottentot.” The whole company, led by the exemplary Brandon Victor Dixon, comes together in an old-time whoop-it-up number, “Freeze and Melt,” infectiously staged by the show’s director and choreographer, Warren Carlyle (currently responsible for Follies and Hugh Jackman: Back on Broadway). The one false note is Garth Fagan’s choreography to Ellington’s “Black and Tan Fantasy,” danced here by Nicolette DePass: it, and she, seem too balletic and soupy to have made it at the Cotton Club, and her technique isn’t what it might be.

One fascination was the reconstruction of a five-man group of tappers in a number called “Peckin.’” They’re lined up, one behind the other, in their tuxedos and black patent leather shoes; gravely they tap onto the stage; they kick out; they change direction; they tap off, still in lockstep. You can see the original Five Blazers on YouTube—and you should. That was real synchronicity: those five boys are one organism. The five guys who replicate this number in Cotton Club Parade do a fine job of imitation, but they’re five guys, not a quintipede. (Or for purists, a decapede.)

Saturday
Performing Arts Center, Purchase, N.Y.
8:00 p.m.

A program of Paul Taylor featuring the premiere of a new work. Since it’s called Gossamer Gallants we know beforehand it’s one of his light pieces. Sometimes these can be a tad cute, but not this one. (“The nocturnal radiance of the fire-fly is purposely intended as an attraction to the opposite sex … some insect Hero may show a torch to her gossamer gallant”—Herman Melville.) Taylor loves insects and bugs, and against a colorful flywheel rendition of a crazy castle (by Santo Loquasto) he gives us a sex comedy—or at least it’s a comedy if you’re female; men may find it a little uncomfortable.

Six male fireflies in shimmery black with capelets and winglets are having a fine old time cavorting around being guys when five seductive aphid-green bugs (mantises?), with avid antennae, flit and flirt across the stage, giving them the come-on. The boys are eager for the treat—until it turns out that the girls are a lot more eager, and not just for s-e-x. They’re on a rampage, and those poor fireflies are going to be pummeled, stomped and finally exterminated—yes, the female is deadlier than the male. This is the most aggressive bunch of lady insects since the Queen and her hive in Jerome Robbins’s The Cage, but they were dead serious; Taylor’s bugs are dead funny.

What makes this preposterous jape so satisfying is the dance vocabulary Taylor has invented for it—the boys’ darting hands, like tiny cobras; the girls’ outrageous vamping. The Loquasto costumes are wonderfully goofy, but, more important, the dance itself, stripped of its surface silliness, is strongly constructed and paced. This piece may be light but it’s not a throwaway; it’s a keeper. Its one flaw: the truly awful sound quality of the recorded music. (Dances from Smetana’s The Bartered Bride.) Let’s hope that by the time the Gallants, poor things, hit the State/Koch Theater in March, either the recording or the sound system will be cured.

The program included that perennial hit Piazzolla Caldera, brooding and sensual (its recorded music sounded fine), and a Taylor masterpiece we sometimes forget: Roses, mainly to Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll.” The first long section presents five couples, the women in gorgeous long black gowns by William Ivey Long. They dance together, they split into duets, the invention never flags; we are witnessing a series of profound human encounters—as in Balanchine’s Liebeslieder Walzer. Eventually a couple in white enters: the magnificent Michael Trusnovic and the less magnificent Eran Bugge. (She can be a terrific dancer, but she doesn’t yet have the depth—or the line—for this rhapsodic work.) Roses is a triumph on every level—not only moment by beautiful moment but structurally and compositionally. We’re in Taylor Heaven and all’s right with the world.

Sunday
Big Cinemas Theater, East 59th Street
10:00 a.m.

A couple of weeks ago, by virtue of the magic of this wonderful series of simulcasts, we got to watch the Grand Gala reopening of the Bolshoi Theater after years of repairs, and it was as tedious as all galas are. Today, we were there in Moscow for the nongala reopening, with a new production by Yuri Girgorovich (his third), of the Tchaikovsky-Petipa masterpiece The Sleeping Beauty. America’s ballet eyes, however, were on neither the Bolshoi nor the Beauty but on the hero of the most hyped dance story of the year: ABT’s superb David Hallberg joining the Russian company, the first time an American has been so “honored.”

Here’s what we learned: nothing. We’ve been seeing Hallberg’s Prince Désiré for years, and although he spoke before the performance of the challenge of adapting to the Bolshoi style, you could have fooled me. What Bolshoi style? Here was the same physical beauty, the amazing elegance of line and grandness of jump; the same modest and pleasing persona. Maybe he had a little more trouble with the partnering (never his strong point), but we can’t attribute that to a change in cultural climate.

The Prince’s role really doesn’t have a lot up for grabs. The hunting scene, which centers on Désiré, has been pruned of its interest; he makes his exciting entrance with a burst of turns and leaps and then we’re distracted by some romping peasants; the minidrama of his relationship with his aristocratic mistress is drained away; we don’t even get noble wolfhounds. And there’s no dramatic opportunity for him after the Vision Scene in his approach to the sleeping castle where Aurora awaits him. Finally, since, as Hallberg remarked in a backstage interview, the third act grand pas de deux—the climax of the ballet—is more or less sacrosanct, all he had to do was slip into it as into a familiar cherished glove.

His Aurora was the company’s leading ballerina, Svetlana Zakharova, and, let’s face it, she’s not a natural in the part. She’s too tall, she’s too devoted to her 180-degree extensions (particularly inappropriate to this essence of classical ballet), she tends to tilt in her supported turns, and she thinks that charm begins and ends with that smile. (Compare her to the radiant and enchanting Alina Cojocaru with whom ABT has recently blessed us.) I detect no inner life or understanding in her. But then the production as a whole has no inner life—no subtext, no dramatic or moral dimension. Instead, it’s about its opulent costumes and its streamlining—everything crammed into two long acts. It just rushes forward; even the well-conducted orchestra never lingers on the greatest of all ballet scores.

The wicked Carabosse does, however, linger, in the person of Devin Savin, who hams it up (even in his curtain calls) in the Bolshoi tradition of male Carabosses, whereas his/her nemesis, the Lilac Fairy, was underdanced and unacted by Maria Allash, who managed to be both heavy and weightless.

So what is Hallberg going to get from his Bolshoi experience, other than a ton of press? Surely he doesn’t want to dive deep into the Bolshoi repertory! Albrecht? Prince Siegfried? ABT supplies him with all the standard danseur noble roles. He can’t want to embarrass himself (and us) with Spartacus. Ratmansky’s The Bright Stream he already performs at ABT. Ashton? Balanchine? Not in Moscow. And the ballerina situation there, now that Osipova has skipped town, is as bleak as it is in New York. Well, he hasn’t quit ABT, and I suspect that he’ll soon be back with us on the same old terms, having enjoyed his big adventure.

editorial@observer.com