Robert Fairchild in Justin Peck’s 'In Creases.' (Photo by Paul Kolnik/City Ballet)

City Ballet’s schizophrenic spring season has packed up its wares and gone away, leaving some of us (well, me) exhilarated, bewildered, and depressed. Maybe we’re the ones who are schizophrenic. The idea, which dominated the repertory almost until the end, was to revive the American Music Festival of 1988—an odd idea, considering how disappointing that festival turned out to be. Alas, good music doesn’t necessarily guarantee good ballets.

What guarantees—or at least semi-guarantees—good ballets is good choreographers, and they are thin on the ground. In the 30 years since Balanchine’s death, only two names have been taken seriously by most serious ballet-lovers: Wheeldon and Ratmansky. Everyone’s looking for the next major talent; the problem is to keep oneself from jumping on a bandwagon prematurely. At City Ballet, there’s only one candidate—Justin Peck, recently made a soloist, three of whose works have been presented by the company in the past year. That’s the fast lane, and he deserves it. Other companies are already jumping on the bandwagon, and I suppose Peck is in danger of the too-much-too-soon syndrome, but somehow I doubt it. His work never seems forced or willed; it seems to come easily, naturally, from a quick and brimming intelligence rather than a drive to succeed.

The piece we’ve seen most recently, In Creases, is actually the earliest of the three: it was first shown last summer during the company’s Saratoga season. It reveals the same qualities Peck has demonstrated in his other work: fluency, originality, energy, dash and wit—the last of which has not been much in evidence in the choreography of recent years. Suddenly there’s a new grouping, a new conformation of forces; how did we get there? It’s all so fast, yet never blurred. The four men and four women are equal—until suddenly they’re not: Christian Tworzyanski and Sara Adams step out as a couple, both of them suddenly revealed to us as potentially important dancers. Who knew? And then Robert Fairchild, who this year has confirmed his place as the company’s essential male dancer, is soloing, eating up the territory, fully charged at every moment without ever hogging attention. He’s a lovable, modest dynamo. But Peck always brings out the best in dancers. His pals in the company obviously like dancing what he gives them, and so they give him everything they’ve got. Maybe there’s a future after all.

Fairchild also turned in the best performance I’ve seen in years of the male lead in Balanchine’s Who Cares? The guy in this role needs to be charming (it was originally made for that shameless charmer Jacques d’Amboise). He needs to be a terrific partner—he has three ballerinas to look after. He needs to have explosive energy for the finale. And he needs to hold the whole thing together without detracting from his ladies, and in a black costume that at times just doesn’t read against the black of the background. (They keep changing all the other costumes, for the worse: the poisonous cerise and turquoise for the corps girls of the opening sections are astonishingly vulgar.) Fairchild doesn’t lose his concentration for a moment, and whatever he’s in, the audience loves him.

I wish I could be as enthusiastic about the three ballerinas. Sterling Hyltin in the Patricia McBride role (“The Man I Love,” “Fascinatin’ Rhythm”) is very lovely, both romantic and high-spirited. She just doesn’t take the final step of letting loose. The extensions could be more extended. The leaps onto the guy’s shoulder could be more daring. What she needs is an hour’s coaching from McBride, but that’s not the way City Ballet works. Ana Sophia Scheller has learned to smile, but her strong dancing remains characterless. The disaster was Abi Stafford—stiff, dull, out of place. This level of miscasting constitutes cruelty to a dancer. What’s Gershwin without swing?

Hyltin shone throughout the rest of the season. Her debut as the central girl in Serenade was convincing and moving, even though we associate the role with dancers less ethereal. She was enchanting in Western Symphony, poignant in Stravinsky Violin Concerto. She doesn’t have the brio, the supreme musicality of Tiler Peck (who does?) or the plangency and inner life of Sara Mearns when Mearns is at her best (at the moment, she’s just too heavy). But Hyltin has a unique and appealing quality that connects with the audience, and she grows in her roles. Example: contrast the misguided performance both she and Fairchild gave in Peter Martins’ Calcium Night Light a couple of weeks earlier with their final performance of it. Something went right. This was now a contest, not a date.

A number of other things have gone right. Richard Tanner’s interesting Sonatas and Interludes, to fascinating music for prepared piano by John Cage, was danced by both Mearns and Peck (Tiler, not Justin; they’re not related). But the hero of the occasion was Amar Ramasar, who has finally graduated into the responsibilities of a committed male principal. This was a beautifully judged performance; he’s finally focused. The orchestra has been sounding worthy of the theater’s vastly improved acoustics—particularly strong was Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3 (a favorite of Balanchine’s) under the leadership of Daniel Capps. Teresa Reichlen and an up-and-coming boy from the corps, Zachary Catazaro, made the best argument I’ve seen in years for the schmaltzy “Elegie” movement of the Suite by utterly believing in it and going full throttle.

It was wonderful to have Ivesiana back, that obscure and powerful Balanchine ballet that has been in and out of the repertory since 1954. It was in “The Unanswered Question” section that we first saw Allegra Kent, beautiful and mysterious, held aloft by three men, never touching the ground, while Todd Bolender, below, vainly tried to capture her. The girl today is Janie Taylor, who would be ideal if she didn’t have all that yellow hair gushing down her back; in role after role, it distracts us from her dancing. The “In the Inn” section has gotten cuter over the years; the lighting has gotten darker.

Perhaps most rewarding of all was the command, the sheer beauty of Wendy Whelan in Ratmansky’s Concerto DSCH. Her long and valiant career is drawing to a close, yet here, in a role created on her, she was at her finest. And superbly partnered by Tyler Angle, a mainstay of the company, as is his brother Jared.

But even apart from the uneven nature of the season’s repertory due to the American Music gimmick, there were disappointments. Megan Fairchild should not be dancing pure classical roles—her unclassical body and limbs and her minimal feet sabotage her strong allegro technique. Her Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux was not a pretty sight. But she redeemed herself in Martins’ Barber Violin Concerto, not only in the final movement, when she swarms around and over her partner like a drunken hornet, but in the opening romantic movement, where, in a flowing dress, she was expressive and persuasive. Finally, there is the mixed blessing of Ashley Bouder, undoubtedly the strongest of the classicists. She nails the “Theme and Variations” section of Suite No. 3 with no effort at all. So why is she punctuating more and more, exaggerating effect after effect, undercutting the purity of this glorious role? Why doesn’t someone stop her? Why doesn’t she stop herself? She appears to have everything—except taste.

And speaking of taste, what about the trendy junkiness of the bits of décor by the FAILE art collective that litter the theater? Well, we can comfort ourselves by thinking that they’re more appropriate defiling a theater named for David H. Koch than one simply known as the State.

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David Hallberg in Ratmansky’s 'Chamber Symphony.' (Photo by Marty Sohl)

Why, when writing about a week that included the long-awaited Ratmansky/Shostakovich trilogy at ABT and a new ballet by Justin Peck at City Ballet, begin with the annual School of American Ballet workshop performance? Because in the long run, the health of the school and its relationship to its parent company are of greater importance than any individual ballet, however good (or disappointing). And because this year’s workshop was so heartening, so satisfying.

To begin with, the entire program was Balanchine, whose work, despite the relentless proliferation of inferior ballets within the repertory, remains the bedrock of New York City Ballet and its chief raison d’être: if the school fails here, there’s no hope for the future. (Sometimes the powers that be at S.A.B. forget that—there was a year without any Balanchine at all.) In the past, there have been workshops dominated by a young dancer everyone was already talking about—Darci Kistler, for instance; within a year, Balanchine had her dancing leading roles in the company. Then there have been workshops that lacked even a consistently high level of achievement, as if the ballet gods were sitting back, taking a well-earned break. What made this year so happy was the overall level of excellence, and one’s sense that every one of the kids up there was excited and raring to go—some of the seniors directly into the company, others dispersed around the country, but all of them secure in the knowledge that they were accomplished dancers, ready to dance, their technique solidly in place.

The first ballet was Balanchine’s great Divertimento No. 15, to Mozart, from 1956. Everything is exposed classicism, elegant, demanding—it has to look smooth and fluent and joyous, and it’s hard. It also has a central ballerina role that demands extraordinary allegro technique. The girl who performed it, Daniela Aldrich, carried it easily before her, stitching the floor so swiftly and precisely that she gave the impression of having more time than she needed. The girls who performed the four other Variations were also steady, polished and agreeable—not a clinker among them. (This, take it from me, is rare in performances of Divertimento.) The three boys not only handled their jobs proficiently but demonstrated an effortless style. And the eight girls in the corps—clearly the cream of this year’s crop—had the Balanchine spirit, the Mozart spirit. What more could you ask?

The credit for all this goes, of course, to the school itself, but more particularly to Suki Schorer, its senior teacher (she’s been a member of the faculty since 1972), whose 47 stagings for the workshop include four earlier Divertimentos. She brings a refinement to the dancers, an esprit, that was a hallmark of her own dancing back in the day. It’s easy to compare her stagings favorably with a lot of what we see at the company, so we have to bear in mind that the workshops have far more time to rehearse than the company does. Even so, it’s hard not to speculate on what City Ballet’s Balanchine would have been if Schorer had been a leading ballet mistress there through the last decades.

Tombeau de Couperin, which Balanchine created for the 1975 Ravel Festival, is like no other of his works: 16 corps dancers, no principals. It, too, is a joyous work, a young work, and like Jerome Robbins’s Interplay, it only really looks right when danced by kids, or the next best thing. Were all 16 of the workshop kids finished dancers? Hardly—some of the boys looked so young you were startled to see them partnering girls. But all of them had the bounce, the ease, that Tombeau demands. This was a moving performance of a work that can sometimes seem dry.

Finally, Walpurgisnacht Ballet, a wild romp that Balanchine created for a 1975 Paris Opéra production of Gounod’s Faust. Twenty-four (tall) girls fling themselves across the stage, purple tulle skirts billowing, hair streaming. Is it elevated? Is it elegant? Is it essential? No, no and no. But it can be fun, and Susan Pilarre, another senior teacher and stager, brought out the best of it—or the worst, depending on how you look at it. Her girls held nothing back—a restrained Walpugisnacht would be a contradiction in terms. The ballerina role was for Farrell, and Isabelle LaFreniere is no Farrell. But then no else is either. She danced strongly and confidently; she pulled it off. The crucial thing is that in this ballet, as in the other two, the students were dancing the right way, with the right spirit. The School of American Ballet is doing its job.

Alexander Ratmansky has seven times choreographed to the music of Shostakovich. New York’s first real view of him came in 2005 with the Bolshoi production of the composer’s The Bright Stream, a ballet Stalin had shut down after the premiere of its original version in 1935. It was a revelation—who expected that a Soviet story about a collective farm, some touring ballet dancers and a cast of assorted workers (plus a bicycle and a dog) could be so charming and so deft? Since then, Ratmansky has worked tirelessly around the world, restaging classics and creating new work for just about any company that has invited him, but especially for City Ballet and ABT, whose artist in residence he became several years ago. He has used the music of other Russians—Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky (his Nutcracker for ABT)—but he returns almost obsessively to Shostakovich, with whom he obviously has a close personal affinity. Now he has presented a bill of three strongly emotional works to the music of this composer—a daring idea, and one that clearly has special meaning for him: this is no programming gimmick.

The first piece, Symphony No. 9, was shown last October at the City Center. Now, with the same cast but on the larger Met stage and with costumes changed significantly for the better, it has a grander, less intimate effect. Although it shares a near-oppressive darkness with the other two, it contains a beautiful lyric duet for Polina Semionova and Marcelo Gomes, some breathtaking moves for Craig Salstein and Simone Messmer, and crowd-pleasing pyrotechnics for Herman Cornejo. (Well, if you have a Cornejo, you flaunt him.) This is the most conventionally constructed ballet of the three, propelling you forward, its excitements somehow at home with its forebodings.

Chamber Symphony, set to an orchestral arrangement of String Quartet No. 8, is the most anguished of the three ballets, its protagonist—David Hallberg, bare-chested under a black velvet suit—representing the suffering artist, the suffering Shostakovich, but one hopes not the suffering Ratmansky (who, as it happens, gives every sign of being remarkably composed, sensible, practical—not unlike Balanchine). Hallberg weaves through a corps of 12 aggressive dancers while engaging in fraught encounters with three muses (the composer had three wives). Ratmansky always gets the best out of his dancers, and Isabella Boylston, Paloma Herrera and Julie Kent make the most of roles that are not strikingly individual. There’s an impressive, ominous backdrop (by George Tsypin) of severe large-scale drawings of gray masks, and the lighting, by Jennifer Tipton, deepens the general atmosphere of threat. Suffering artists are not my thing, and there’s a touch of oy-veyness about this piece that at times comes close to the edge, but Ratmansky is so sure-handed (sure-footed?), so fluent, so inventive and so sincere that it convinces.

The final piece—Piano Concerto No. 1—is the most edgy and quirky, at times light-hearted, yet always with the tragic Russian sense of danger looming. Think of those two superb Russian ballerinas Diana Vishneva and Natalia Osipova—both in brightest red unitards—huddling together, as if against a storm. The backdrop, again by Tsypin, scatters Soviet detritus across the sky: red planes, red stars, red hammers. Ratmansky has left Russia behind—quitting his job as head of the Bolshoi, moving to New York—but it’s always with him. It will be fascinating to see how American he becomes. Certainly he admires our dancers, and not just the Russians among them: the entire company responds to his gifts. He makes ABT look like the company it should always look like.

The big question is whether these three ballets should necessarily be performed together. Do they detract from each other? To my mind, although they have a very strong impact shoulder to shoulder, they ultimately would benefit from being seen separately. There’s just too much going on—by the third ballet you’re exhausted, and your attention wanders. So how would they fare embedded in mixed bills? Certainly, last season, Symphony No. 9 stood potently on its own.

(Next week: Justin Peck and New York City Ballet.)

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Sterling Hyltin and Gonzalo Garcia in 'Hallelujah Junction.' (© Paul Kolnik)

Peter Martins has been making ballets for 36 years now, ever since Calcium Night Light, in 1977. As I remember it, City Ballet’s orchestra was on strike, the company was shut down, and somewhere in Brooklyn Martins previewed this startling duet (to Ives) for Heather Watts and Daniel Duell. Everyone trooped out to see it, everyone was knocked out by it, and soon it was in the company’s repertory. Arlene Croce described its climax as “a staccato, nonstop, seriocomic pas de deux in which limbs become hinges and handles, bodies are clamped together, then slid part. The choreography,” she went on, “makes not one superfluous gesture, everything stands out with bright-edged clarity, and the flatly factual tone communicates an instantaneous emotion.” Balanchine liked it enough to insert it into his own Ivesiana, where it didn’t belong, but the compliment to Martins was immense.

Calcium was a fortuitous debut, and Martins’ ballets through the next several years confirmed this happy first impression: Sonate di Scarlatti, Eight Easy Pieces, Lille Suite were less personal statements than serious attempts to master his craft, under the eye and influence of the greatest of all teachers and exemplars. These works were all fluent and pleasing, and they added up to a convincing apprenticeship. When Balanchine chose Martins as his successor, he knew he was getting a hard-working, competent, and eager dance-maker.

In the immediate years after Balanchine’s death, with the entire responsibility for the company on his shoulders, Martins focused more on that responsibility than on his own creative ambitions, but he went on developing new works—eventually, scores of them. Who can remember them all? Who would want to? Far too many seemed to be by the numbers, and the numbers weren’t distinctive. Can we really distinguish one of his ballets set to the music of Michael Torke from the next? They all seemed flashy, trendy, empty. He made works to offer opportunities to his younger dancers; he made works to explore the limits of partnering; he made works for his ballerinas, in particular his wife, Darci Kistler, at first to rejoice in her glorious talents, later to veil her diminishing powers. He made his versions of the classics. He mounted Festivals, Homages, Projects. He went in for desperate, gimmicky collaborations—with Paul McCartney, the architect Calatrava, the designer Valentino. He raised money.

Now he’s been in charge for 30 years, and the company is securely afloat—his single greatest achievement. And he’s celebrating with a new version of his 1988 American Music Festival, which had been a good idea that unfortunately led to paltry results. He’s also celebrating by putting forward his own work with uncustomary boldness—Martins has always been modest. This past week, however, was notable for two things: an all-Martins evening, and a total absence of Balanchine. In all the years going back to 1948, I can’t remember a week in which not a single Balanchine ballet was performed, apart from those week-long runs of Martins’ Swan Lakes, Romeos, etc. An accident of scheduling? Perhaps.

The focus on Martins’ ballets has been instructive, occasionally gratifying, and ultimately saddening. His Rodgers and Hart pastiche, Thou Swell, shows him at his exploitative worst. (On second thought, the mercifully brief Sophisticated Lady, to Ellington, may be even worse.) His Fearful Symmetries, to John Adams, is sound and fury signifying nothing—and signifying it for a long time. Barber Violin Concerto is a valiant but unsatisfactory response to that overwrought piece of music (it was more interesting when, originally, the second couple was performed by two Paul Taylor dancers).

But. River of Light, to a dense but powerful score commissioned from Charles Wuorinen and with ravishing lighting by Mark Stanley, has depth and resonance. I can’t remember having seen it before, and would happily see it again. The duet The Infernal Machine, to Christopher Rouse, is a fascination of gnarly partnering (it was good to see Ashley Laracey in a prominent role), and another duet, Purple, to Torke, at least gave us a chance to watch the enigmatic, elusive Janie Taylor.

The oddest Martins event was the return of Calcium Night Light. This piece has never lost its provocative appeal, but it came close the other night, due to suicidal miscasting. Martins is relentlessly pushing Sterling Hyltin, and she’s a lovely dancer. But Calcium isn’t lovely; it’s feisty and abrasive. Her silky smoothness is antithetical to the thorny nature of the piece, just as Robert Fairchild’s wholesomeness is; there are half a dozen women in the company more suitable for the role. Only Peter Martins’ psychiatrist, if he has one, could explain why he would sabotage one of his best ballets this way. Even so, the originality and cheekiness of Calcium could be detected through the pallid miscasting. We were right back in 1977—this guy had talent.

It comes through most powerfully in Hallelujah Junction, a really exciting work made a dozen years ago and set to a really exciting two-piano score by John Adams. (Its title refers to a truck stop near the California-Nevada border.) The two grand pianos, beautifully lit, are raised high above and behind the dance area; we can see the two excellent pianists, Cameron Grant and Susan Walters, preside unobtrusively over the dancing. There’s a couple in white—Hyltin and Gonzalo Garcia—and a man in black, Daniel Ulbricht. There are four couples in black. Hyltin is lithe and sinuous—not as expansive as Kistler, the original, but radiant. Garcia is stalwart and gracious. Ulbricht shows us his formidable technique without showboating. What’s so remarkable about the piece is the superb sense of structure: The principles, the four couples, come and go in a rapid and inevitable flow, everything exhilarating and natural, everything stimulating, in contrast to the febrile hokeyness of Fearful Symmetries. Hallelujah Junction is Martins’ finest ballet, and why it isn’t in the repertory of more companies is one of the great mysteries. But the greatest mystery—the sad mystery—is why, if he could make this good a piece, he hasn’t made more on its level. Like Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, he coulda been a contender.

We’re in the midst of a two-week season at the Joyce of the highly successful Hubbard Street: Dance Chicago. Why this success? I’d like to ascribe it to the company, 19 strong, who are so hard-working, so devoted. But they’re not charismatic enough to explain it, and there are no stars. It has—sigh!—to be the nature of the repertory: tons of propulsion, a gallon of angst, too often a very dark stage (to show how serious things are), uninteresting music (to which no one pays much attention), and a whole lot of conviction. These people really think they’re doing something important.

There’s a piece, Untouched, by the respected (though not by me) Aszure Barton, who, the program notes tell us, developed the choreography before selecting the (sentimental) music, which, it turned out, would be by Njo Kong Kie, Curtis Macdonald, and “Ljova.” The women made the most of their slit skirts. There was sliding, squatting, fluttering of hands. Lots of intense contortion. Ana Lopez was Spanishy leading the concluding section. What’s it all about, Aszure?

There’s a nice piece by an ex-Hubbard dancer, Robyn Mineko Williams, that shows a flair for invention and a becoming modesty. And a piece by Alejandro Cerrudo, a current dancer, also the resident choreographer, in which three men in flesh-colored unitards, looking naked in the semi-dark, do solos to Dean Martin versions of “Memories are Made of This,” “In the Chapel in the Moonlight,” and “That’s Amore”—the point, presumably, the contrast between the sexiness of the dancers and the corniness of the music.

Following the three dancers in flesh-colored unitards came 16 dancers in flesh-colored unitards in something called Too Beaucoup by the Israeli couple Sharon Eyal and Gaï Behar. The dancers also sported tight platinum blond wigs and white contact lenses. Defying the gloom, they marched, they strutted, they jogged—nothing could stop them. This went on so long that I might have lost consciousness if I hadn’t been so pissed off at the arrogance of these people thinking they had anything at all to say, let alone this much. Too Beaucoup may not be the worst ballet of the year, but it’s hands down the most boring.

The two longest works, together on Program B, are by the well-known choreographers Ohad Naharin and Mats Ek. The Naharin is called Three to Max because it’s a blend of two of his previous works, Three and Max, one of which I’ve seen at Fall for Dance, though I can’t remember which one. The whole thing is a jumble of earnest energy. Naharin can be interesting, but not this time out.

The Ek has at least the advantage of novelty. How many ballets have you seen in which five women dance with vacuum cleaners? Or in which a baby doll is extracted by its mother from a smoking oven? Of course, this raises the question of how many such novelties you want to see. Casi-Casa, also apparently two different ballets at one time, is a series of surreal episodes. But here the disjointedness doesn’t matter. Do we care in what order we watch the smoking oven, the door that separates a tormented couple who climb all over each other until they decide not to, and the chaise longue, in and out of which slithers a guy on whose head a lady places a brown bowler? Some of all this is fun, some of it irritating, some of it just silly, but it has one advantage—it’s brightly lit.

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Irina Dvorovenko as Vera Dvorovenko and Shonn Wiley as Junior. (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Of all the hit Rodgers and Hart shows, only Pal Joey and On Your Toes—well, maybe A Connecticut Yankee—seem to be revivable. We know dozens of the songs from Jumbo, Babes in Arms, The Boys from Syracuse, By Jupiter and the rest, but we don’t know the shows, unless we think we can infer Babes in Arms from the Mickey and Judy movie version (which—thank you, M-G-M—managed to omit most of the sublime score, including “My Funny Valentine”).

Why has On Your Toes survived? Apart from the terrible movie from 1939, three years after the show, there was a Broadway revival in 1954 (a flop), and another one in 1983 (a hit, with Natalia Makarova as the Russian prima. Well, she was a Russian prima). And now the City Center’s Encores! series has unleashed it again, and we can confirm that it’s definitely not the dopey plot that keeps it turning up again and again—the backstage and on-stage antics of a Ballets Russes-like company don’t constitute a plot. Nor can the ups and downs of a pallid romance between an ex-Vaudeville hoofer and a sweet young thing of a wannabe songwriter hold your attention longer that it takes the two of them to sing the show’s biggest hit, “There’s a Small Hotel.”

No, the answer has to be the dance element. On Your Toes is famous for being the first Broadway musical not only filled with dance but centered on dance—for being about dance. And for being George Balanchine’s first show (there would be three more) with Rodgers and Hart, for which Rodgers wrote his finest orchestral piece, the climactic “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” ballet, on which everything hinges. In 1968, Balanchine revived it for City Ballet—with Suzanne Farrell as the stripper and Arthur Mitchell as the hoofer—and we think of it now as a stand-alone ballet. (In just the last two weeks, it’s been performed at City Ballet and Miami City Ballet.)

So although the dancing was hardly mentioned in Brooks Atkinson’s favorable Times review of the original (he was all about the songs and the singers), the Encores! staging is all about the dance—a far cry from the early Encores! productions, when a bunch of singers sat on stools reading their lines and once in a while got up and moved. This version is bustling, polished, ambitious—are the powers that be hoping for a move to Broadway? Their production of Chicago, transferred in 1996, is still running!

Here’s what worked. The casting of the ABT ballerina Irina Dvorovenko (who’s about to retire) as the campy-vampy Vera Baronova. Dvorovenko’s affectations and calculated mannerisms have made it almost impossible for me to watch her in classical roles, but here she was funny, charming, even sexy—and no more over-the-top than the role requires. Another real-life ballet star, Joaquin De Luz, gave us a convincingly preening and hammy danseur noble in the grip of murderous Slavic jealousy. Christine Baranski sang the clever “The Heart Is Quicker Than the Eye” with the vocal wit of a Broadway star of the period. The orchestra, under Rob Fisher, made hay out of Hans Spialek’s terrific 1936 orchestrations. And the director/choreographer Warren Carlyle scored a tremendous hit with his extended, exuberant, tumultuous setting of the title song, as the rush of ballet dancers and swing dancers, both competing and teaming up, peaked again and again. A real show-stopper—the audience was in bliss.

Alas, most of Carlyle’s choreography was not up to this level. His substitution for Balanchine’s first-act closer, the brilliant parody of Scheherazade known as the “Princess Zenobia” ballet, was thin and formulaic; surely he could have built on what the film shows us of Balanchine’s intentions. So we miss the wonderful moment when the five blacked-up slaves throw off their upper garments, and one of them (the hero, of course) reveals his assertively white chest. Did they think the original was politically incorrect? Carlyle’s stuff for the music school kids in “The Three B’s” and “It’s Got to Be Love” was sub-generic. Yet he performed something of a miracle getting this complicated and sometimes confusing mix of a musical into such smooth shape in so abbreviated a rehearsal period—while coming up with his thrilling “On Your Toes” number. Talk about grace under pressure!

Luckily, no one tampered with “Slaughter” itself. It was badly cramped on the City Center stage, half of which was occupied by the orchestra, but Susan Pilarre’s staging was accurate and honest, reflecting the show version rather than the 1968 ballet version. Alas, her hoofer, the very young Shonn Wiley—although he’s appealing, worked valiantly and has the moves—doesn’t as yet have the stage charisma of a star. And this was a Ray Bolger role! Dvorovenko let herself rip, but she couldn’t rip for two.

The oddest aspect of the production was to be found in the  opening credits. No mention of Balanchine; “Directed and Choreographed by Warren Carlyle.” So much for “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.” And yet, tucked away pages later, there’s the standard nod to the Balanchine Trust and a mention of Pilarre. It’s a puzzlement.

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The Mark Morris Dance Group performing 'Crosswalk.' (© Stephanie Berger/MMDC)

In the small theater on the fifth floor of his Dance Center across from BAM, Mark Morris is presenting a smorgasbord of four chamber pieces, three of them to live (and beautifully played) chamber music—and three of them new to New York.

The one we know, The Office, from 1994, is the most striking. Five plainly but handsomely dressed people are waiting in the anteroom of some bureaucratic office, waiting for ... for what? One by one, they’re summoned into an inner office by a stern functionary, not to be seen again. While the others wait their turns, they dance together in ingeniously differentiated stretches of Slavic-folk-inflected dance inspired by ravishing Dvorak bagatelles for two violins, cello and harmonium. Here Morris is totally at home, building suspense—Who will be summoned next?—while giving his dancers rich material to explore. The beautiful Maile Okamura dominates the scene with her lithe body and expansive movement. Faceless bureaucracy and anxious supplicants (or victims) are hardly original. (I kept thinking back to Gian-Carlo Menotti’s The Consul, an opera that ran for eight months on Broadway in 1950 and won a Pulitzer. The heroine confronts the bureaucratic process: “What is your name?” “Magda Sorel.” “Age?” “33.”) But the somewhat gimmicky premise doesn’t undercut the strength of what Morris shows us.

The second piece—the pièce de resistance, presumably—was A Wooden Tree, set to jaunty semi-cute snatches of song by the obscure (to us in Brooklyn) British songwriter Ivor Cutler. These are parodic ventures into a kind of folkiness very different from Dvorak’s—they’re a little Gertrude Stein, a little Edith Sitwell, a lot self-conscious: “Here’s a Health for Simon,” “Deedle, Deedle, I Pass,” “I Love You but I Don’t Know What I Mean,” “Cockledoodledon’t.” Eight performers dance and prance around in workaday clothes, making little whimsical gestures and having a bang-up time. Maybe you have to be a Brit. The kicker is that one of the eight is Mikhail Baryshnikov, at 65 just one of the kids. He’s hardly singled out, except by the eye of everyone in the theater—how can you not watch Baryshnikov as hard as you can, at any age and under any circumstances? He seemed to be having a good time—at moments you had the feeling that A Wooden Tree was just something Mark and Misha cooked up together as a lark. Morris throws in an energetic coda as an encore, and here’s where Baryshnikov erupts. I wish it had been used as the legitimate finale of the piece itself, instead of as an extra—it might have pulled the whole thing together.

Then came a strong, passionate duet for Jenn Weddel and Spencer Ramirez called, in fact, Jenn and Spencer. (If a different couple performs it, does the name change?) Here the music is a suite for violin and piano by one of Morris’s favorite composers, Henry Cowell, and it’s a beauty—strong, tumultuous, resonant. Jenn is in a floor-length russet/mauve gown (at times I was afraid she was going to trip on the hem of its skirt). Spencer is in black pants and a formal white shirt with its sleeves rolled up. Something charged is happening. Is it high romance? Is it violent antagonism? She slaps him hard—it’s antagonism, I guess—but it’s clear that all is not over between them. This adult man/woman stuff is rare in the Morris canon, but he handles it elegantly, and Jenn and Spencer bring Jenn and Spencer to emotional life.

Finally: Crosswalk, a company piece—eight guys, three women. The engaging music is von Weber’s “Grand Duo Concertant, for Clarinet and Piano,” and the dance picks up on its rushing energy and high spirits. The three sporty gals are in orange—are they cheerleaders? The men are in white tee shirts. Are they athletes? They begin as if they’re running races—on your mark! get set! go!—yet they become a community, if an unorthodox one. A woman in orange replaces one of the bloc of eight men, and the odd man out is swept up by the other two women—none too comfortably. The color-swapping is both unsettling and stimulating: it keeps the piece as a whole from seeming too familiar in its pushing, running, somersaulting vocabulary. As always with Morris, everything in Crosswalk is perfectly organized and proceeds like clockwork. Maybe a little too much like clockwork. But in a world where most choreographers just don’t know how to put a piece together, we can only be grateful for his effortless mastery.

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Young in Taylor's 'Perpetual Dawn.' (Photo by Tom Caravaglia)

Bill T. Jones is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company with a two-week season at the Joyce. He’s been a MacArthur “Genius” and a Kennedy Center honoree. He’s won two Tonys—for Spring Awakening and FELA!—plus countless other awards and prizes and honorary degrees. He’s collaborated with Toni Morrison, Jessye Norman, Peter Hall. Most importantly, he knows how to put a dance together. So why, ultimately, is an evening of Bill T. Jones (let alone two evenings of Bill T. Jones) so depleting? Because despite the kinetic excitements he can provide and his sheer facility and the Big Ideas he sometimes unleashes, you don’t end up feeling his work is really about anything—certainly not the music he chooses to use for it.

The five dances currently on display deploy five musical big guns (all well served by the Orion String Quartet): Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Ravel and Schubert—these dances must be meaningful, right? You stake a large claim when you choreograph to Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” quartet, and it was predictable that the dance content couldn’t possibly rise to Schubert’s occasion—this is music too profound to be anything but diminished by a slick vocabulary like Jones’s. The piece is called Story/—don’t ask why—and Jones explains in a program note that it “employs a random menu of movement that meets the music thus crafting a lively conversation between Schubert’s quartet and the choreography.” Sorry, Bill T., but Story/ isn’t a conversation; it’s an exploitation, using this deep music to lend gravitas to dance that has no depth. There’s one beautiful passage—a slow duet, the man and woman (Jennifer Nugent and LaMichael Leonard Jr.) rolling and stepping over each other in a gripping and touching way—but the rest essentially is visual noise. And aural noise, too—what a terrible idea to have the dancers roar out or clap for emphasis at big moments! (It happens in other pieces too.) Well, Balanchine told us what to do in situations like this: close your eyes and listen to the music.

By far the most successful piece on display was the classic D-Man in the Waters, made in 1989. Mendelssohn’s glorious Octet for Strings is dancey, and Jones fills it with a rush of energy that reflects the music’s. Dancers throw themselves, sliding, across the stage and hurl themselves into each others’ arms or onto each others’ bodies—yes, Jones has clearly absorbed Paul Taylor’s Esplanade, and it’s had a commendable influence on him. He also employs a favorite effect of his—fluttering hands and lower arms—and there’s a semaphore-like arm movement he favors. He’s at his best maneuvering his dancers on and off stage and through intricate, pleasing patterns—the patterns seem inevitable, and the dancers have them down cold. I could have done without the pumped fists at the climax and a few other too-easy tropes, but I had a good time with D-Man, which is more than I usually have with the art of Bill T. Jones.

Alas, I didn’t have a good time with Continuous Replay, the only one of these pieces I’d seen before. This is the one in which little Erick Montes Chavero, with his black mustache and beard, enters naked from the stage-right wing and begins a series of athletic poses and postures that he constantly repeats, though with changes, while the other dancers follow him on, also naked, and walk, run and circle to Beethoven string quartets. The gimmick—sorry, the donnée—is that as the work progresses, they slowly don their clothes, until at the end only Chavero is still as nature made him. Continuous Replay proves, as so many other dance pieces have proved, that most people look better with their clothes on. To add to the fun, many Jones alumni join in, so that we end up with people of every age and shape on the stage. They seemed to be having a good time.

No need to walk you through the other dances, because ultimately all Bill T. Jones pieces are the same Bill T. Jones piece—only the music changes, and the number of lifts and throws. But his broad spectrum of dancers—the miniature Chavero, darting and whirling until at times you want to swat him; the flaming (and accomplished) redhead Jenna Riegel; the ardent Nugent with her shaved head; the beautiful I-Ling Liu; in fact, the entire gutsy troupe—are terrific to watch, and they occasionally convince you that what you’re watching is more than superficial. 

The second and third week of the Paul Taylor season at the Koch brought forth as many wonders as the first, not the least of them Esplanade. No matter how often one sees it, it reveals new riches—the sure sign of a genuine masterpiece. As new dancers slip into roles we associate with their predecessors, we’re forced to reconsider. No one can ever efface the memory of Annamaria Mazzini’s wild abandon as she crashed recklessly to the ground in the final section, but Parisa Khobdeh—a nonpareil beauty who can be glamorous, dramatic and funny—gives us a more lyrical abandon that subtly modifies the texture of the whole. Laura Halzack is less austere, more serene than the astounding original, Bettie de Jong, in the dominatrix role of the slow movement. Michelle Fleet, who used to be somewhat nervous in the brilliant role of the girl in pink who runs backward, has found her way and is now transcendent. Robert Kleinendorst, a company rock, now brings extra zest and all-out commitment to his performance. But these alterations or emendations only expand our sense of what Esplanade has to offer, the way new interpretations of Giselle can help us see the ballet in new ways.

The company goes from strength to strength. This season, Sean Mahoney reached a kind of stardom, his passionate energies fully let loose. James Samson has a new authority as he anchors ballet after ballet. As for Michael Trusnovec, now the company’s senior performer, what is there left to say? He is incontestably a great dancer, his blinding focus, artistic imagination and beautiful plastique never seeming to diminish—and his dedication and intensity almost religious in quality. He is equally compelling and moving as the terrifying Man of the Cloth in Speaking in Tongues, the tormented narcissist in Taylor’s darkest work, Last Look, and the spiritual poet, Whitman, dying in Beloved Renegade. He had no predecessor, unless it was Taylor himself, and I cannot imagine a successor. He has no equal among America’s male dancers.

Finally, another devastating departure from the company: the estimable Amy Young, whom we have watched evolve from a bland, almost invisible presence into a superb dancer—womanly, arresting, both gracious and powerful, and these recent years, central to Paul Taylor’s vision. Unlike dancers who leave when their powers erode, Young is leaving by choice, to start a family with her husband, Robert Kleinendorst, so her departure is far from a tragedy for her. It’s only a tragedy for us.

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Michelle Fleet and Michael Novak in 'Perpetual Dawn.' (Tom Caravaglia)

How gratifying that Paul Taylor’s current season—it runs until March 24—is packing them in at the Koch. I’ve never seen such large and enthusiastic audiences for his work, and I go back with him almost 50 years. It’s as if last year’s move from the City Center to Lincoln Center has woken people up to the fact that he’s not only startlingly original but that, apart from Balanchine’s, his is the largest and most important—and most enjoyable—dance repertory we have in this city. And that his company of 16 dancers is ravishing too.

He’s a quirky one. Who knows why some pieces reappear after many years, others are cold-storaged permanently, and still others subtly mutate? For instance, this season’s revival of his brilliant, cartoonish Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rehearsal)—in the year of Sacre’s centenary—projects a new atmosphere. Not because he’s changed the action or the steps, but because of casting. “The Girl,” whose baby is stolen and who emerges as the original Sacre’s “Chosen One,” has had three inspired interpreters since 1980, when the piece was new. Ruth Andrien, Kate Johnson and, most recently, Annamaria Mazzini were explosive, searing. With Mazzini, alas, retired, Taylor has handed the role to Laura Halzack—beautiful, lyrical, and here bland rather than blazing. The piece holds together, but it’s not as effective. Also less exhilarating than usual is that giant hit Company B. It’s casting again. Eran Bugge, for example, is a charming dancer, but “Rum and Coca-Cola” has to be more sexy and less cute. Or maybe Company B is getting a little tired. Or maybe I am.

On the other hand, two more recent pieces look better than ever. I was resistant to Eventide 15 years ago, partly because my musical taste doesn’t run to English Pastoral (in this case, Ralph Vaughan Williams). But it’s more strongly cast today, the melancholy atmosphere more convincing, the feeling more subtly conveyed. Or has my eye grown more subtle? Offenbach Overtures, always a diverting romp with its exaggerated parody of French 19th-century dance hall manners and traditions—talk about flouncing!—is still a hoot, but it’s a hootier hoot today, and not just because Taylor (and the costume designer, Santo Loquasto) have had the boys deck themselves out with perfect little mustaches to complement their bright red uniforms. The comic duel has always been the high point of the ballet (the two antagonists start out ready to kill each other and end up in each others’ arms), but with Michael Trusnovec and Sean Mahoney, it’s reached perfection. But then Trusnovec is always perfect, and Mahoney has unleashed himself this season: he’s become a major player. And then there’s the gorgeous Parisa Khobdeh, who’s as funny as she is beautiful, with her floppy hat and floppy hairdo and exquisite timing. Watch her in the background as she plucks at her skirt in bored irritation while her rival, Michelle Fleet, is strutting her stuff. If looks could kill! The whole piece came alive, its only flaw (and this has been the case from the start) being that there’s just too much of it. Why Taylor decided to take on this Frenchy froufrou stuff we’ll never know, but we’re lucky he did.

Just as we’re lucky to still have with us his oldest surviving piece, 3 Epitaphs from 1956, in which five humanoids, or ape-oids, concealed from head to foot in dark gray skintight costumes with some glittering reflectors attached, galumph around to early New Orleans jazz. There’s a central couple—the huge James Samson and the tiny Eran Bugge—and wherever he goeth, she followeth. Why is it so funny? Why is it so moving? Because to Paul Taylor, that’s what people are.

We’ve had three Bach pieces already this season, with more to come. The magnificent Promethean Fire has been with us almost annually since its post-9/11 premiere, but Junction came back into the repertory only last year, with its primary-color Alex Katz costumes and its unorthodox vocabulary (one woman standing casually on the back of a crouching man, another folded up into a package and handed from guy to guy) seemingly at odds with the Bach cello suites it’s set to. Historically, Junction is significant—this was Taylor’s first piece to Baroque music, a year before his 1962 breakthrough hit, Aureole, to Handel—and it has its charms, but you can see why it was Aureole that broke through. As for Cascade, to Bach piano concertos, it’s solid, it’s worthy, but for me it’s not on Taylor’s highest level, the level of Musical Offering, Brandenburgs and, of course, Esplanade, all Bach and all still to come. Each section of Cascade is effective, but they don’t really add up to a cohesive whole. (By the way, this is among the works that would most benefit from live music—can we dream that, with the company’s new box office success, live music may be a possibility?)

Finally we get to the two new pieces that Taylor offers us every year. One is called To Make Crops Grow, a bewildering title until you see what it’s about. In a way, it’s another take on Sacre—in an annual ritual, one member of the farming community is chosen by lottery to be sacrificed to the gods in order to fertilize the fields: there’s to be another “Chosen One.” The farmers seem agreeable enough, until the “Ritual Conductor” presents them with a box from which they each have to pluck a piece of paper and hope it isn’t the marked one. The characters are differentiated—The Young Wife and the Elderly Husband, the Newlyweds, the children—and Taylor has given them distinctive things to do on the way to the horrible denouement, when the Chosen One, after agonizingly trying to escape her fate, is crushed to death with stones. Khobdeh is superb in this dramatic role—she can do everything!—and the music, from Ferde Grofé’s famous Grand Canyon Suite, is a brilliant choice. The dance as a whole, though, isn’t as strong as the story on which it’s based; Shirley Jackson’s famously shocking “The Lottery,” which saw readers canceling their New Yorker subscriptions back in 1948, is a lot scarier. (I’m surprised that Taylor doesn’t acknowledge Jackson in his program notes.) But we can see why Taylor was drawn to it: violence beneath the surface is one of his most persistent themes.

The other new piece, Perpetual Dawn, made me totally happy. The music is once again Baroque ... but with a difference. Here we have neither the severity of Bach nor the grandeur of Handel, but the lively, almost jolly work of the obscure Johann David Heinichen, an almost exact contemporary of those two masters. The music is fresh and appealing, and it perfectly supports Taylor’s intentions: he’s showing us young people frolicking, chasing each other in innocent attraction, at the dawn of the day and of their lives. The set and costumes by Loquasto are charmingly pastoral, the girls in peasanty dresses, the boys in pants cut off at the knee. They could be Brueghel villagers. One of the girls, Michelle Fleet, is left out of the pairings—she wants a boy too. Though there’s a touch of melancholy in the setting and lighting, no one’s going to be left out in the end—this is an earthly paradise—and she finds her mate in a finale that’s not quite as strong as what’s come before. What’s particularly interesting is that this is Taylor’s first Baroque piece that isn’t abstract but is about individual guys and girls doing guyish and girlish things; the human-scale level of Heinichen’s music makes this possible—in fact, inevitable. How wonderful that at 82, Paul Taylor is still rejoicing.

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Lauren King and Robert Fairchild in George Balanchine’s 'The Nutcracker.' (Paul Kolnik)

For eight weeks, the only music heard at the Koch Theater has been Tchaikovsky. First, the annual six-week Nutcracker-fest; then, a fortnight of other Tchaikovsky-Balanchine masterpieces, disfigured only by Peter Martins’ Bal de Couture, which is about to make its return appearance after its unfortunate preview at last season’s gala—a glitzy tribute not to Tchaikovsky or Balanchine but to the fashion designer Valentino. It was the company’s dreariest attempt to juice up the box office since Martins’ equally ghastly collaboration with Paul McCartney.

But let us now praise famous men. That miracle of music and dramatic imagination, Nutcracker, was in really good shape when I saw it, twice, toward the end of its run—I had waited for the company’s two newest Sugar Plums. Both gave remarkably appealing performances, though in very different ways. Lauren King, a soft, pretty strawberry blonde, has been an eye-catching demi-soloist for some time now, always musical, always engaging—a charmer but not a dynamo, in a company of dynamos. Lauren Lovette is closer to the City Ballet norm: strong, clear, musical, succeeding through dance power and ballerina-like self-assurance. I’d probably take a small child to see King, who’s a more lovable and enchanting hostess in the Land of the Sweets, and a dance connoisseur to see Lovette sail through the gloriously expansive climactic duet.

Lovette’s Cavalier was Chase Finlay, who is turning himself into a true danseur noble, at least in look and manner; his partnering is getting there. Teresa Reichlen, with her natural big jump, was a pleasing Dewdrop, but in the same role, a newcomer, Mary Elizabeth Sell, was seriously irritating. She has the moves, but she’s selling herself at every moment, punctuating rather than phrasing. Calm down, girl. Claire Von Enck was a musical and pleasing Columbine. And let’s celebrate Robert La Fosse, back where we are always happy to see him as a subtle, compelling Drosselmeier. David Prottas made a good stab at the role, but his stance, his walk and his demeanor are just too young. Even so, one of the important things about Nutcracker is that it gives up-and-comers like him chances at arresting roles while providing audiences and critics with a look at the future. But the greatest thing about Nutcracker is, and will always be, the marriage of the greatest of ballet composers with the greatest of choreographers.

The first week of general repertory brought some surprises. In Mozartiana, Tchaikovsky’s tribute to Mozart, Sterling Hyltin made a highly persuasive debut. This was Balanchine’s last creation for Suzanne Farrell, and has been successfully performed by a range of large-scale dancers, including Maria Calegari, Kyra Nichols and Maria Kowroski. Hyltin bears no resemblance to any of them: she’s petite, delicate, quicksilver, with no grandeur about her—that’s why she’s at her least effective in the solemn opening “Preghiera.” But from then on, she danced with a lightness and playful brio that showed the ballet in a new way—perhaps more Mozart than Tchaikovsky. Chase Finlay nimbly traded tricky variations with her.

Teresa Reichlen’s relaxed technique carried her through the ultra-demanding ballerina role in Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2 (née Ballet Imperial). Tall, thin, with exaggeratedly long limbs, she doesn’t seem the type—she’s more willowy than imperial—but it worked. As the second ballerina, Ana Sophia Scheller was her usual efficient, uninteresting self. But nothing can seriously diminish this tremendous masterpiece.

The one disappointment on this opening program was Serenade, the quintessential Balanchine take on Tchaikovsky and perhaps his best-loved work. The corps—crucial to the ballet—was in good condition, if occasionally ragged, but the three ballerinas were ill-matched and subpar. In her first appearance after a long layoff due to injury, Sara Mearns, making her debut in the tragic central role, looked somewhat out of shape. She plunged in, though, as she always does, and no doubt will find her way. Ashley Bouder, that powerhouse, is really too assertive a dancer to fit easily into the high romanticism of Serenade. And Megan LeCrone made no impression at all as the Dark Angel. The three women didn’t seem to belong together on the stage. Surely, with its abundance of superb young women, City Ballet can do better than this.

At the Sunday matinee, everything came together. To begin with, Mearns was at her finest in Swan Lake. Too often she shows us what a wonderful dancer she is without revealing much about the specific role she’s dancing. But there’s a true and deep identification with Odette—her performance is one long concentrated phrase of hope, despair, transcendence. The turbulent Balanchine version exactly suits her turbulence as a dancer. The hunters rush rather than wander on, Odette and the full complement of 30 (black) swans are driven rather than drifting, and the orchestra, under guest conductor Gerry Cornelius, was excitingly propulsive—and sounded resplendent in the improved acoustics. Jared Angle has grown into a mature, responsive Prince. What a glory Balanchine’s Swan Lake is! It shames both ABT’s silly version and Peter Martins’ soulless one.

Then came one of the finest performances I’ve seen in years at City Ballet: Tiler Peck in Allegro Brillante. I was sitting with another old-time, somewhat jaded critic, and we were gasping in delight at Peck’s sublime command—the tossed-off triple pirouettes, the incredible tight corkscrew turns, the musicality so natural, so effortless, so secure that everything in this explosive ballet just flowed easily along with no hitch and no push. Here was Balanchine dancing at its pinnacle. If only he had been there to see it.

Finally, an exemplary presentation of Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3, with the three prequel movements that Balanchine added in 1970 to his thrilling Theme and Variations (1947). Many of us wouldn’t miss them if they vanished, but on this occasion they held our attention—partly, again, because of the effectiveness of the orchestra. Rebecca Krohn was glamorous and authoritative in the near-kitschy “Élégie,” with its flowing long gowns and flowing long hair. Abi Stafford and Ana Sophia Scheller were capable and bland as ever in, respectively, the “Valse Mélancolique” and “Scherzo.” And Ashley Bouder, back in her native territory of high-stakes technical demand, gleefully nailed Theme without a flicker of hesitation, abetted by Andrew Veyette, who managed the eight consecutive double-air turns with aplomb, landing flawlessly on his knee after the last one. All this, and then the triumphant glittering finale! Who could ask for anything more?

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Ida Nevasayneva (Paul Ghiselin) as 'The Dying Swan.' (Gene Schiavone)

The big event at the Trocks’ season at the Joyce (the Trocks, of course, are Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo), was a restaging of Laurencia. Well, not the entire Laurencia, which is a 1939 multi-act Soviet piece of what they used to call choreo-drama—all heroism and uplifting patriotism, the kind of thing that led to Spartacus and Stone Flower—but of its non-narrative finale, 17 minutes of classical dance with colorful Spanishy costumes and a strong infusion of Spanishy folkiness. Like most of the Trocks’ Russian repertory, it was staged by Elena Kunikova—exact in steps and style, so you know you’re getting the real thing, with the guys disciplined to the tips of their pointe shoes. They do a terrific job, but you can’t help wondering what they could do with the story itself—the peasant uprising that turns on an attempt by the local military Commander to snatch the passionate Laurencia from her boyfriend, Frondoso. (The tyrant, you’ll be stunned to learn, is done away with: The People triumph!)

What we have here is the celebration of that triumph, and it’s packed full of energetic classical dancing. But the material is more generic than original—the legendary Russian/Georgian dancer Vakhtang Chabukiani, who choreographed it, was no Petipa. Nonetheless, it proved an immensely popular vehicle for his over-the-top performance style and the brilliance of the renowned ballerina Natalia Dudinskaya, and it became a tempation for generations of future Russian dancers for whom he was a lodestar. (To see Chabukiani at his absolutely most extraordinary, watch him on YouTube as Othello—a wild, deranged savage. As Frondoso, seen in his later days, he’s chunky and less than polished, but still a hurricane.) Laurencia isn’t helped by its score;Alexander Krain’s music is of such lack of distinction that you forget it even while you’re hearing it. Where was Minkus when we needed him? Actually, he was right there at the Joyce, with his winning score to Petipa’s Paquita, also staged by Kunikova and perhaps the Trocks’ greatest current achievement. That formidable ballerina Yakatarina Verbosovich (Chase Johnsey) nails every arabesque and fouetté, and the company’s latest danseur noble, Marat Legupski (Giovanni Ravelo), is even dumber-seeming than his mentally challenged predecessors.

Legupski is also gloriously vacant as the Nijinsky figure in Les Sylphides and the Prince in Swan Lake, his Soviet-gold hair ablaze and his stare fixed on some ineffable vision up in the empyrean—no wonder he never seems to notice his ballerina. In fact, it’s not clear he’s aware that he himself is on the stage. His technique is not exactly top-drawer—the men dancing as men tend to be less strong than the men dancing as women. For real virtuosity, we have the immortal Olga Supphozova (Robert Carter) and the aforementioned Verbosovich, whose Black Swan Pas de Deux was frighteningly powerful and convincing. Here we approach the line between the real thing and the ... the what? This was a more exciting Black Swan than all too many I’ve seen in my (long) day. And to the roster of ballerina fame we can now add the up-and-coming Marina Plezegetovstageskaya (Roberto Forleo), who was our affecting Odette and an outrageous Taglioni in that battle of divas, Pas de Quatre.

The hardest thing for the Trocks to get right is the balance between authenticity and jokiness. Swan Lake seems too jokey today; Laurencia not jokey enough. The older repertory involves many too many pratfalls, many too many ballerinas knocking each other over, much too much spotlight hogging. The foibles of the old Ballets Russes aren’t relevant any more; the real nonsense of dance today is the pretentiousness of the concept-obsessed avant-garde. But this is a ballet company, comfortable in its après-garde genre and superb at what it does. And its best jokes are as good as ever. When Ida Nevasayneva (Paul Ghiselin) bourrées out from the wings as The Dying Swan, not just dying but seriously molting, it’s ridiculous, it’s hammy, we’ve seen it again and again—and it’s very, very funny.

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Liam Roddick in Alston's 'Unfinished Business.'

After all these years of saying the same thing about the Alvin Ailey company—terrific dancers, awful repertory—I’m finally accepting the inevitable: I’m not going to change my mind, and they’re not going to change their ways. And why should they, given their juggernaut success all over the world? Audiences just love them, the way they love Cirque du Soleil and Béjart and Riverdance (the latter recently deceased, and not a moment too soon).

You have to be optimistic to be a dance critic, and so I’ve never stopped hoping, particularly after Robert Battle replaced Judith Jamison as artistic director and for his first season imported Paul Taylor’s Arden Court to shake up the mix and give his dancers something beyond Ailey and faux-Ailey and faux-primitive and faux-spiritual to lean on. It looked pretty good last year, despite its basic incompatibility with the training and the practice and the sheer physicality of the Ailey dancers, but it was too good to be true. This year Arden Court wassadly coarsened; instead of the dancers stretching themselves to do justice to Taylor, the dancers are stretching Taylor to look like Ailey. Bringing in an alien piece of major choreography isn’t enough—it’s got to be maintained.

Without the Taylor police on their backs, the Aileys, like most performers when coping with something new and difficult, fall back on what they know they’re great at: athleticism, push, look-at-us-ism. The subtleties of Taylor, the wit, the ease, the human connection are gone. The brilliance of Arden Court’s structure and inventiveness manages to gleam through, but that’s a reflection of Paul Taylor’s talents, not of the Ailey treatment.

As for Battle’s other choices this season, my heart sinks as I report them. Jiří Kylián’s Petite Mort (1991) is just as reprehensibly manipulative and vulgar as it’s always been. It’s a bad off-pointe ballet exploiting Mozart and tarted up with cutenesses—much (nervous) male play with épées in its first section, and in the second, much female hilarity with constructions moving on rollers that have been made to look like 18th-century ball dresses. This kind of meretricious work often relies for its effects on extra-dance novelty rather than on steps, which is just as well, since Kyliàn’s quasi-balletic vocabulary is so minimal and derivative.

The company looked far more at home in Garth “Lion King” Fagan’s From Before (1978). Drums, colorful Caribbean costumes, much shaking of booty (a bonanza for pelvises, both male and female), tons of energy, happy dancers—and why not? A harmless piece of pastiche like this is right up Ailey’s alley.

Another Night is a new work by the latest flavor of the season, Kyle Abraham, who has been “Heralded by OUT magazine as one of the ‘best and brightest creative talents to emerge in New York City in the age of Obama.’” He’s certainly capable, agreeably feeding the Ailey appetite for high-energy, relentless action. We’re at a party, the 10 brightly dressed dancers flashing and splashing their moves almost nonstop—lots of flirting, lots of sex, lots of good-natured athleticism. We’ve seen it all. But that’s what Ailey feels most comfortable with—the mixture as before. Let’s hope that next time out, Abraham will take a few chances.

Battle’s own contributions were all too modest. There is a solo called In/Side, which I saw performed by Kirven James Boyd, whoflings himself to the ground in anguish, thrashes, rolls around, his mouth yawing open in soundless despair. The music is Nina Simone’s version of that diva vessel “Wild is the Wind.” I hereby present this year’s “Oy Vey” award to Battle, Simone and Boyd—and everyone else who dances this role. Boyd reappeared in a Battle duet called Strange Humors, partnered—or shadow-boxed—by Samuel Lee Roberts. This is a less agitated and therefore more bearable snippet, but it’s just another opportunity for Ailey exhibitionism.

The best revival—and the company’s only original work of quality from the last 15 years—was Ronald K. Brown’s Grace (1999). It’s framed by two versions of Duke Ellington’s famous “Come Sunday,” and includes other artfully selected music from spiritual to rock. Brown presents a convincing and moving struggle between pure forces in white led by Linda Celeste Sims (now the company’s senior ballerina, following the retirement of the wonderful Renee Robinson), and the devils in red, led by the matchless Matthew Rushing ... and purity prevails. (It’s a somewhat sexy purity, but who’s complaining?) Demetia Hopkins, a recent addition to the company, made a particularly strong impression.

The worst thing that’s happened to Ailey in the past few years is the vulgarization—the erosion—of its one undisputed masterpiece, Revelations. The company now performs it in several versions, including the one I was trapped at. The opening scene, the moving “I Been ’Buked,” is now swamped midway through by a swarm of extraneous dancers from the company itself, from Ailey II, and from the School—cute little persons indeed. The solemnity is gone, the atmosphere is destroyed, but the kids get a great big hand. A little later on,the deeply moving male solo “I Wanna Be Ready” is cheapened and undercut by the addition of two additional male dancers echoing the soloist. “We Wanna Be Ready”? (What next? The Dying Swans?) And the entire stirring finale is pumped up by the return of Ailey II and the kids, while down the aisles pour still more dancers rockin’ their souls in the Bosom of Abraham—and blocking the view of much of the audience. Because all these superfluous bodies are crowding the stage, we are denied the encore that has become an essential component of Revelations. And why this travesty? Revelations has been a surefire hit for more than half a century—maybe the chief reason for the company’s success. It’s artistic suicide to cute-ify it, and we can’t consider Mr. Battle a serious artistic director until he restores it to its wonderful self.

WHAT BALM TO FOLLOW THE FEBRILE AILEY performances with Richard Alston’s triple bill at the handsome Alexander Kasser Theater at Montclair State University in New Jersey. Alston was hailed last week by Alastair Macaulay in The New York Times as the most accomplished of all post-Ashton European choreographers, and he should know—he’s been watching Alston since 1978. I first saw and loved his work only a couple of years ago in a piece he made for the small and adventurous New York Theater Ballet (they’re planning another for the coming year). Then last year he brought to Fall for Dance what was by far its most distinguished presentation, Roughcut.

Roughcut was also the opening work in the Montclair triple bill. Again I was knocked out by the flow of invention, the unforced energy, the consummate musicality. Music: Steve Reich. Ten dancers, all of them steeped in Alston’s style and breezing through the complicated footwork that is his hallmark. Outstanding among the outstanding dancers was a young Frenchman named Pierre Tappon, the latest in a series of virtuosi Alston has discovered and nurtured. Slight in build, nimble, fearless and exact, Tappon is a riveting performer—yet without clamoring for attention. In other words, not an exhibitionist.

In the second piece, Unfinished Business, Tappon leads the concluding Gigue, but the finest moments come in the central duet (to the andante froma Mozart piano sonata, beautifully played on stage by Jason Ridgway). Ella Braund and James Pett are thrillingly lyrical, sculptural, emotional—and quiet. No one since Ashton and Balanchine has given us so perfect a passage for two dancers—not Wheeldon, not Ratmansky, not Morris.

The program concluded with the American premiere of Alston’s A Ceremony of Carols, to Benjamin Britten’s ravishing rendition of medieval Christmas music. This is another simple-seeming but deeply sophisticated work (it touches on the Virgin Birth and the Crucifixion), deploying not only Alston’s entire company of 12 but also the all-female Prima Voce singers. (In England, it was sung by the all-boys Canterbury Cathedral choir.) Here the singers are on stage, at times mingling with the dancers—their black robes setting off the striking scarlet of the dancers’ costumes. Everything is highly charged yet unforced. As in all Alston’s work, the foundation is the steps, not the concept, yet the concept is true, and achieved. This was the climax to a superb program—as I say, a balm to the soul.

editorial@observer.com