Natalia Osipova in Alexei Ratmansky’s "The Firebird."

This last week brought us, by coincidence, new versions—new concepts—of two of the canon’s most famous ballets: The Firebird and Swan Lake. One was wonderful, the other unwonderful. So it goes.

Alexei Ratmansky is generally considered today’s most talented classical choreographer. Within the last weeks we’ve seen his moving Russian Seasons at City Ballet and his entrancing The Bright Stream at ABT. His new work is everywhere—Paris, Toronto, Amsterdam, Miami, as well as New York. And what he does is extremely various. All you can be sure of with him is unremitting invention, garnished by respect and generosity to his dancers—they’re constantly being stretched but never being pushed.

Now he’s stretched Firebird—and maybe pushed it a little, too. When in 1910 Diaghilev introduced it to Paris, it was a sensation: Fokine’s exciting choreography, Karsavina’s brilliant performance, and most of all, Stravinsky’s thrilling score. (It was his first ballet.) That version, more or less undiluted, is still performed in England, where it was revitalized when the title role was assumed by Margot Fonteyn, coached by Karsavina herself. Her performance was fierce, dazzling, moving—escaping the young Prince, Ivan, was a matter of life and death to her; somehow she combined flashing speed and attack with an inner humanity. Meanwhile, in 1949 the success of City Ballet was assured when Balanchine created his own Firebird for Maria Tallchief, with her revelatory demonstration of dance amplitude and power.

Ratmansky has turned his back on the Firebird’s humanity and individuality, her complicated mix of dominance and sympathy. He gives us a quick, darting creature in skin-tight fire-engine red, and she’s only one of 17 such creatures—there’s nothing to distinguish her from the rest of the flock except that she takes center stage. If you’re one of 17 birds, there’s not much humanity left to you. First-cast Natalia Osipova, she of the famous jump, surged back and forth across the stage, always in command; even when in Ivan’s grip she was in charge, as if she were toying with him rather than trapped by him. Osipova was totally effective, but she wasn’t really challenged as a dancer.

Her Ivan was the naïve yet manly Marcelo Gomes, as always completely invested in his role; you’re rooting for him from the start when you see him bursting out through a door in a bare room (a nod to Petrouchka) to search the forest for his lost love. When he finds her—in a bunchy green get-up—she, like the Firebird, is indistinguishable from her companions, except for the wit and intelligence that Simone Messmer brings to the role. (It’s been clear for some time that Messmer is one of the most interesting women at ABT. Who else could have looked so right a few seasons ago not only as one of Twyla Tharp’s Baker’s Dozen but as Giselle’s Myrthe as well?)

Ratmansky and Messmer liberate the Maiden from her usual bland persona, making her one of the two most engaging characters on the stage, the other being David Hallberg as the evil sorcerer Kaschei (a role performed in their dancing days by both Balanchine and Ashton). Hallberg’s Kaschei is both a menace and a hoot. He’s got up in glittery black, with emerald-green touches—his headdress, his gloves—looking a little like an Action Comics villain: The Green Spike. But there’s nothing comical about the way he controls and abuses the ensorcelled girls. When he’s overthrown by the Firebird, we’re both happy to see him defeated and sad to see him go.

Given the oddity of certain of Ratmansky’s choices, what makes this Firebird so joyous, so gratifying? As always in his work, there’s endlessly ingenious contrivance. Who else today deploys groups of dancers so clearly and tellingly? There are magical forest sets (by Simon Pastukh)—sometimes grotesque, sometimes beautiful. There are powerful and judiciously handled projections. The just-Russian-enough costumes (by Galina Solovyeva) are appealing. But most crucial is the way the action plunges propulsively ahead, with the struggle between good and evil hanging in the balance, until at the end the Firebird prevails, the girls emerge from their captivity with long golden tresses and long white dresses, and in a coup de théâtre, the captive boys are freed from the gnarled trees that have confined them. Stravinsky’s glorious climax ignites in Ratmansky a stirring affirmation of humanity and a vision of happiness restored.

How to describe the Australian Ballet’s Swan Lake? (Sorry: Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake, as it’s modestly named.) Here’s the idea. We’re at some Edwardian resort where Prince Siegfried, who’s in love with his mistress, Baroness von Rothbart, has just been married off to a somewhat unstable ingénue named Odette. Everyone is horrible to her, for no discernible reason, and she takes it amiss when her bridegroom brutally ignores her for the Baroness—in fact, she lashes out, breaks down, and the Royals bundle her off to a sanatorium where we watch her receiving hydrotherapy. (Is this a first?) At this point, something like an hour has passed, and no swans.

But Odette has a dream or vision in which she’s at a frozen lake (a huge round tilted disk) with plenty of sympathizing swans swanning around her. Siegfried turns up, but things don’t work out. Back in the sanatorium she’s further oppressed by him and the Baroness until somehow she gets away, apparently cured, and in a svelte white evening dress crashes the Baroness’s ball. (It’s a reverse of the traditional Swan Lake, in which it’s the wicked Odile who crashes the ball. Clever, huh?) The two women are locked in a contest for the feckless and characterless Siegfried. Odette apparently prevails—yet, as we’re closing in on three hours, we’re back at the lake and she opts to disappear forever into its dark waters.

All this is carefully worked out, with lots of subsidiary characters whose identity is clarified only in the program notes. The dance vocabulary is vulgarized and distorted classical, but you can say for Graeme Murphy that he knows what he’s vulgarizing. (Does that make it better or worse?) This work has been a hit for the Australian Ballet since its premiere 10 years ago, and has been a calling card for them ever since—undoubtedly because of the pointed echo of the Charles-Di-Camilla debacle. Another tasteful touch.

The Australian company, celebrating its 50th anniversary, also brought with it a mixed bill mysteriously titled “Infinity.” It began with an unfortunate show-and-tell of bits and pieces it performs combined with a mini-documentary about its history that might have been interesting if the spoken narrative hadn’t been battling to be heard over crashing music. There were a number of pas de deux (yes, the Don Quixote was one of them, the tempo so sluggish it felt like a train slowing down to let passengers off) and an excerpt from the second act of Giselle—a truly dreadful idea, not unknown to ABT galas. These were all performed with solemn correctness—the company’s strong training shone through all too clearly, as at a school graduation performance. (If only all these capable dancers could open up!) Nothing shone through Stanton Welch’s terrible Divergence except one’s relief that the Welch wavelet of a few years ago had passed on to Houston, where he’s now the resident choreographer.

Wayne McGregor’s Dyad 1929 is a good example of this capable British choreographer’s work. It’s highly energized and relentless—the music is Steve Reich’s “Double Sextet”—making its dancers work hard (and actually loosening them up). There’s excitement in McGregor’s work, but what’s it all about, Alfie? Better, however, this kind of assured competence than no competence, and Dyad 1929 is a step up from the Millepied and Martins pieces City Ballet served up this season. But like them, it’s more an exhibition of proficiency than a meaningful statement. (You only have to spot the references to The Four Temperaments to realize how deeply, perhaps unconsciously, Balanchine’s innovations have penetrated contemporary ballet.)

To wind things up, choreographer Stephen Page and some of his dancers from the Bangarra Dance Theatre joined in with one of his faux-primitive jamborees, Warumuk—in the dark night. It was dark night up on the stage of the Koch theater, all right; apparently the aborigine population never gets to see the light of day. It was all so carefully engineered, so handsomely accoutered, so passionately performed—so empty.

editorial@observer.com

Diana Vishneva and Marcelo Gomes in "Onegin." (Courtesy ABT)

ABT has completed the first half of its spring season at the Met. We’ve had the Giselles (and their sister Wilis), Bayadére’s Nikiyas (and their sister Shades). We’ve been lucky enough to have the population of the Bright Stream collective farm and the visiting artists who come to cheer them up—though they’re pretty cheerful already. And we’ve had a brand new production of John Cranko’s Onegin. Did we need it? Did we need Onegin at all? No, but ABT needed it. How can the company fill the huge Met without the full-evening costume dramas that keep the tourists coming?

It was in 1965 that Cranko created Onegin for the Stuttgart Ballet and its highly regarded (though not by me) dramatic star Marcia Haydée, and it was in 2001 that ABT took it on. Ballerinas like to dance its heroine, Tatiana, and why not? She loves, she suffers, she has her revenge on the man who spurned her when she was a shy and sensitive girl, and she gets to glitter as Queen of the Ballroom after she marries the rich, older general who’s at the heart of Petersburg society. What she doesn’t get to do is any interesting dancing, but you can’t have everything. It’s waltz, waltz, waltz in the group scenes and lifts, lifts, lifts in the duets. The characterization comes from the emoting, not the steps.

For Russians, to whom Pushkin’s poem Eugene Onegin is sacred text, the ballet’s story and personae are as familiar and filled with meaning as, for instance, Romeo and Hamlet, are for us. Russians know whole stretches of it by heart, the way we know Shakespeare and Italians know Dante. We Westerners who don’t speak Russian know it best from Tchaikovsky’s glorious opera. (One of the peculiarities of Cranko’s effort is that although he uses Tchaikovsky music, it’s not music from the opera.) For us, Onegin isn’t part of the cultural consciousness; it’s just another story line.

Star performances can partly redeem it, and ABT is star-studded again, thanks to its recent influx of superb ballerinas from Eastern Europe. The Kirov’s Diana Vishneva, a paragon of strength, beauty and dramatic power, was the first-cast Tatiana—it’s a natural role for her. To cast the wonderful Natalia Osipova, now a major attraction here, as Olga was luxury casting; this isn’t a role that demands her exceptional speed and brilliance. Perhaps the most gratifying performance of all came from ABT’s own Marcelo Gomes as Onegin, that callow Byronic figure whose careless pride leads to the fatal duel that destroys three lives, including his own. Gomes is handsome, impudent, haughty yet sympathetic—a riveting figure with nothing riveting to dance. Does it matter? He’s as real a star as his colleague David Hallberg, and as appealing a personality.

The new production is by the estimable Santo Loquasto. It doesn’t help, it doesn’t hurt; it’s pretty, conventional, unexciting, like the ballet itself. No treatment of the décor could turn Cranko’s Onegin into a classic. And yet for all its vacuity as a dance event, Onegin has the virtues of lucidity and cohesion. It’s certainly an improvement over such recent other ABT attempts as The Lady of the Camellias.

Osipova’s Giselle was the same girl she first stunned us with several years ago—amazingly buoyant and secure. Her dancing is faultless, her interpretation more open to question. For me, her mad scene and death lack the ultimate pathos we’ve seen in Ulanova, Fonteyn, Makarova and others, including that other current European wonder, Alina Cojocaru. Osipova at the end of Act One leaves me grateful for her ability, not wounded to the heart. Hallberg, her Albrecht, is consistently thrilling. Those legs, that stretch, that grandeur, that radiance. A few mannerisms are creeping in—no doubt picked up at the Bolshoi, for whom he now also dances. The head is flung back just a little too melodramatically as he exits, flying; too much is made of the cape; even the famous hair looks a touch Sovietized. But he’s America’s finest homegrown danseur noble, and he’s entitled.

And then we see him in Ratmansky’s Bright Stream, in full Les Sylphides drag—good-natured, enjoying the joke, part of the fun. And (a quality he shares with Gomes) essentially modest. Bright Stream, with its nonstop energy and endless invention—the big black dog on the bicycle, the human tractor—delights the audience, although the house isn’t as full as it should be: no swans, no Wilis, no Shades. Just about everyone looks terrific in it, maybe because just about everyone, including the happily deployed corps, has something meaningful to do. And, maybe because it’s a ballet about a community, ABT looks like a community when dancing it. Its one weakness is the underdeveloped lead female role; Zina has lots to do, but a good deal of it is generic—we never really know who she is. Even so, Paloma Herrera brings some life to her. Sadly, Julie Kent is too wan, her technique too eroded, to do the same, nor should a woman of her years have to lie on her tummy on the ground, friskily kicking up her heels.

As for the sillinesses of Bayadère, they fade in the light of the great “Kingdom of the Shades” act. ABT’s corps descends the ramp with precision and dignity; the genius of Petipa has supplied the rest. Yes, we have to survive the Orientalia—the Rajah, the High Priest, the stuffed tiger, the ecstatic fakirs, the Bronze Idol, the fatal snake buried in the posy of flowers, the swaying harem-y dancers—but it’s all worth it for the Shades. And some of the nonsense can be fun.

Nikiya is one of the touchstone roles in classical ballet, and perfect for Cojocaru—tender, delicate, passionate, true. She and her superb partner, Herman Cornejo, convince us of their ardor and their doleful fate. Another new Russian import, Polina Semionova, seems twice Cojocaru’s size and was half as effective. The production, by Makarova, is handsome and coherent, but Bayadére is heavy, heavy, and long, long.

City Ballet wound up its spring season with a one-week run of Balanchine’s sublime A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Who can resist it? Shakespeare’s vision is irresistible, Mendelssohn’s music is irresistible. And Balanchine’s genius for narrative is beyond praise. The fluttering fairies and butterflies and bugs, the angry, disputatious Titania and Oberon, the endearing Puck, the two mixed-up sets of lovers, the wooing King Theseus (of Athens) and Hippolyta (Queen of the Amazons), Bottom and his rowdy artisan gang—they stride and scamper over the stage with absolutely clarity and perfect timing; there’s not a moment of confusion or blur.

Dream is now 50 years old. Happy golden anniversary!

This year some of the casting, at least of the two performances I saw, was questionable. Maria Kowroski is at her most gorgeous as Titania. She’s both soft and commanding, delicate and imperious, girlish and grand, innocent and sensual. Alas, Teresa Reichlen is short on these qualities. She’s an astonishing physical specimen, almost extraterrestrial—extremely tall with a small head and thin gangly arms. She has remarkable technique, but it’s dissipated as, flinging her limbs around, apparently uncentered, she unleashes a series of startling separate effects that don’t add up to a convincing character or a convincing style of classical dancing. Her one great role is as the big girl in “Rubies”; in ballets like Concerto Barocco and Dream she’s like Alice after drinking from the bottle she finds at the bottom of the rabbit hole.

Another of Peter Martins’s current favorites is pint-size Megan Fairchild. Unsuited as she was to the first movement of Symphony in C and the “Theme and Variations” section of Tchaikovsky Suite No. 3, she was even less satisfactory in the exquisite and subtle pas de deux that Balanchine created for Violette Verdy in the second act of Dream. Fairchild was nervous, and she faltered, but that’s not the basic problem; she’ll improve. What’s unfixable is that she will never be a paradigm of classicism, and she’s being given the big classical roles for which she doesn’t have the power, the amplitude or, for that matter, the essential articulation in her feet. We’re getting a replay of the Yvonne Borrée story. (On the other hand, she has real comic talent; she was the best thing going in the current revival of Susan Stroman’s Double Feature, a Broadway show masquerading as a ballet. Stroman has musical-comedy smarts, but she has no ballet vocabulary.)

At one Dream performance we had the tallest Butterfly (Brittany Pollack) and the shortest Hippolyta (Ana Sophia Scheller) I’ve ever seen. It was cuckoo. When Savannah Lowery thundered on as the Amazon Queen things were restored to normal: Get out of her way! There were charming performances from Taylor Stanley as Bottom and Chase Finlay as Lysander. from Rebecca Krohn and Sterling Hyltin as Helena and Hermia. The single finest performance of the season, not surprisingly, came from Tiler Peck in the Dream pas de deux—she’s so musically intelligent, so secure, so effortless, so fluent that the Fairchild version vanished like a … dream. But Peck has been these things in every role this season.

Dream is so rich that each time you see it you fall in love with something you hadn’t focused on before. This year, for me, the most moving moment lasted less than a dozen seconds. Bottom has served his purpose as the donkey, and when his worried pals come looking for him, there he is, restored, the donkey’s head vanished. Bottom’s himself again, and the five men hug and prance offstage, the goodness and health of their humanity revealed in a flash. Yes, Balanchine (and Shakespeare and Mendelssohn) are telling us what fools these mortals be. But they also know what mortals these fools be.

editorial@observer.com

"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

Adrienne Schulte and Sean Stewart in Merce Cunningham’s "Duets." (Photo by Gene Schiavone)

ABT nailed its contemporary colors to the mast for its recent one-week season at the City Center—no imported stars, no full-evening classics or faux-classics. Instead, Tharp (three pieces), Taylor (two), Cunningham, Ratmansky, Clarke (Martha) and Volpi (one each). Volpi? He’s the 25-year-old dancer from the Stuttgart Ballet, originally from Argentina, who was commissioned to create a new piece for the occasion.

Let’s start with it. Private Light features 10 dancers and an onstage guitarist (Christian Kiss) playing a variety of solos, ranging from Villa-Lobos and Albeniz to Prairie Home Companion’s Pat Donohue. Ten dancers—but more to the point, five couples. At the start, in near-dark, the men and the women are lined up opposite each other, pecking and patting. This is a piece about getting it on. There will be kissing passim, moving from the peck to the passionate, as the various relationships grow more and more vexed—or at least the girls ought to be vexed, since they are not treated nicely: they’re lugged on and off stage like mannequins (shades of Robbins’s The Concert) and hauled around by their necks. Still, they seem to be enjoying the guys’ bare chests.

Private Light indulges in some of today’s more irritating choreographic tics. Everything is too dark (almost impossible to identify the dancers and the steps) and everything goes on too long. This piece would have been far more effective if it had been 10 minutes shorter—I’d start by whacking out of it the numbing routine for the five bare chests. On the other hand, it gives opportunities for at least two wonderful performers. No one in the company is more interesting than Simone Messmer, and here she’s handed an edgy, exacting solo—spiky, angular, provocative; she’s different from everyone else and you can’t take your eyes off her. Impressive in another way is the young Joseph Goreck—slight, light, musical, secure and no showboat. (Not that I have anything against ABT’s swarm of them, but we don’t need another.) Good for Demis Volpi for identifying his special talent.

Look—this isn’t a major work, but it’s respectable, something I’m grateful for these days. And let’s hand it to ABT for taking the chance.

Easiest to dismiss: Martha Clarke’s Garden of Villandry, a short, three-character drama set to a gorgeous Schubert trio. (A romantic triangle set to a trio—get it?) Take Julie Kent in a pretty period dress, toss in two guys in cutaway coats, sample Lilac Garden (Tudor) and Enigma Variations (Ashton), and there you are—nowhere. The only excuse for this throwaway was that it fit in with the company’s decision (very sensible) not to hire an orchestra for the week; at most there were a few onstage musicians—the rest was tape.

The Tharps were a mixed blessing. ABT’s In the Upper Room lacks punch, and Tharp without punch is like a home without love. This time around the piece was even more lackluster than it was last time. Sascha Radetsky threw himself into it with his usual no-holds-barred enthusiasm, almost looking out of place amid the general tameness. These dancers do their best, but they’re not trained in the fierce energies and attack that characterize Tharp; she just isn’t second nature to them.

Her Sinatra Suite—the forerunner of Nine Sinatra Songs—was better, though not ideal. Everyone’s favorite, Herman Cornejo, is everything terrific—except as the embittered, drunk, self-pitying but macho Sinatra of “One for My Baby.” And he’s up against our memories of Baryshnikov, the original. The 1998 Known by Heart (“Junk”) Duet was given an extraordinary performance by Marcelo Gomes, one of ABT’s superheroes. (The other, David Hallberg, is guesting with the Bolshoi.) Mr. Gomes is imposing, macho, tender, sexy, funny—just what Dr. Tharp ordered. His partner, Maria Ricetto, was just miscast. On the other hand, in a second cast, Gillian Murphy was the dominant partner; she has the strength to represent the essential Tharp woman. Known by Heart is canny, slick and lots of fun. It starts off with a bang and goes on banging. Boy and girl are at each other, tooth and nail (and fist), but it’s all a game—and a shrewd variation on the classical duet form. This is a piece that should be in more repertories.

Mr. Ratmansky’s Seven Sonatas (Scarlatti sonatas) looked just right on the City Center stage. It’s a lovely piece, filled with absorbing detail that doesn’t get in the way of the overall flow and harmony. Three couples eventually come together for a muted finale. In many ways it’s reminiscent of Robbins’s Dances at a Gathering, though it’s less ambitious. Here Mr. Cornejo was at his most buoyant, boyish, ravishing best—everything so easy and clear and yet so strong. And for once Xiomara Reyes looked like a principal, suppressing her maddening smile and dancing fully, not coyly—yet another demonstration of what a magician Mr. Ratmansky is.

The two Paul Taylor works are both favorites. Black Tuesday, that Depression-era medley, was made for the company, and it knows what to do with it. The excellent character dancer Julio Bragado-Young put across the jaunty “Underneath the Arches”; Misty Copeland filled “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams” with the right pathos and emotional power. Only Daniil Simkin was out of his depth with the climactic “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”—the greatest of all Depression songs, heard here in Bing Crosby’s sublime recording. Mr. Simkin is a technical whiz and sometimes an appealing boyish presence, but he never went slogging through hell, and they never called him Al.

Company B just wasn’t strong enough. Everyone was valiant, no one was bad, but the performances on the whole didn’t have enough individuality and spark. The piece is so brilliantly conceived and executed that it can’t really fail, but it deserves better than this.

Finally: ABT’s stab at Merce Cunningham’s Duets, which the company first performed in 1982. I’m no expert on Cunningham—I’ve never really understood him—but this is a very pleasing work; even the John Cage score is audience-friendly. And it’s a work with obvious ballet connections, making it a potentially sympathetic match with ABT’s dancers, if a stretch. Veronika Part in Cunningham? Paloma Herrera? Cory Stearns? They did an admirable job. The structure of Duets is lucid and gripping, the vocabulary stimulating, the costumes colorful. It all added up. But what did it add up to? At its first showing, I saw a beautiful dance work, elegantly performed. But despite everybody’s best intentions and efforts, I never for a moment felt I was seeing Merce Cunningham. (A later, more rigorous performance showed glimmers of the real thing.) This all matters more than it might seem: what’s at stake is whether, with Cunningham gone and his company about to disband, his art can survive.

editorial@observer.com

"Roughcut" by Richard Alston. (Photo by Chris Nash)

This year the five Fall for Dance events—two performances each—sold out in five hours: a record. Hurrah for the series, hurrah for dance (sort of) and hurrah (definitely) for the immaculately refurbished City Center, which already looked scruffy when I started going there, in 1948. (I was pretty scruffy then, too, and no one has refurbished me.)

There was a lot to be grateful for this year, chiefly Richard Alston’s exuberant Roughcut and Ohad Naharin’s tonic Three to Max—but let’s get the junk out of the way first. In some ways, the Joffrey’s offering was the most disappointing—it’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to see this once-important company, and though the dancers looked strong and confident, what difference can they make to a piece as pretentious yet vapid as Edwaard Liang’s recent Woven Dreams? There’s an enormous web dominating the stage, descending and ascending to break the (overextended) piece into segments. There’s a wide spectrum of composers (very fashionable these days). There’s a lot of blue in the costumes. There are lifts, lifts, lifts. And there isn’t a single original idea. This is the work—and it’s been true of everything else I’ve ever seen of his—of someone who has willed himself to be a choreographer.

And did we need the return of Glen Tetley’s Gemini, with which A.B.T. used to torture us in the ’70s? We owe its reappearance to the Australian Ballet, for whom Tetley made it in 1973. Here is a case in which the music—Hans Werner Henze’s portentous and loud third symphony—seems to have nothing to do with the cool, lyrical movement style. Many lifts, of course, punctuated by Tetley’s signature V splits for the women—they’re a little Martha Graham-y. (No surprise, he worked with Graham when young.)

Some of the little stocking stuffers were acutely irritating, most of all Drew Jacoby—a usually trustworthy dancer—in an Andrea Miller solo (to Radiohead) in which she floats and skims and leaps in billowing fuchsia tulle while imagining herself transformed into wind; this followed by a Jessica Lang duet for Yuan Yuan Tan (San Francisco’s star ballerina) and Ailey’s Clifton Brown. The program notes explain that this piece “celebrates the meeting of Orihime (Vega) and Hikoboshi (Altair).” Alas, the Milky Way “separates these two stars, and they are allowed to meet only once a year on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month.” Who knew? What we see is two ultrasensitive dancers tangling with a very long piece of white cloth, emoting—them, not it.

Let us also pass quickly (which is more than it did) over the Tao Dance Theater, which showed us two disconnected pieces by Tao Ye called collectively Weight x 3, to repeated phrases by Steve Reich. In one, a dancer (who, at the curtain calls turned out to be female—it was too dark to tell during her performance) twirled a long rod or stick or sword around and around and around and around … you get the point. She was remarkable without being interesting. In the other, a couple in long comfortable white robes did a lot of semisynchronized moving about. Weight x 3 featured a couple of the salient themes of the festival (and of a lot of other things I’ve been seeing recently, including a black stage with spotlights).

The other solo acts were an improvement, beginning with a prodigy in sneakers called Lil Buck in his wow take on The Dying Swan, which marries Anna Pavlova to Memphis jookin’. He’s an amazement, using his sneaks as if they were toe shoes, and tying himself into impossible knots. (Hip-hop is another ubiquitous theme of the current dance scene.) The audience was in love—and why not? No doubt many people had already seen him on YouTube performing this Saint-Saëns cello number with Yo-Yo Ma.

From England’s Royal Ballet came a principal dancer, Steven McRae, in his own tap specialty Something Different, which begins with a silent extended solo in which he cutely flirts with the audience and then erupts to the sound of Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing.” The marriage this time around is between tap and ballet—Mr. McRae taps en pointe, for instance—and again the audience was besotted. (He seemed pretty pleased with himself too.)

There was a final tap event: Maurice Chestnut’s Floating, to an on-stage jazz group. Mr. Chestnut is a real virtuoso—from the waist down, a kind of Art Tatum of impossibly brilliant footwork. From the legs up, there’s nothing. And there was nothing from his two tap partners. The piece also featured a painfully shrill vocalist. She sang of what she wanted, and you’ll be stunned to hear that what she wanted most was to be … FREE!

We got to see two works well known in New York: Christopher Wheeldon’s Polyphonia (his finest, I think), with its superb City Ballet cast more or less intact—a striking example of how Mr. Wheeldon loves to fold Wendy Whelan in two, like a collapsible chair— and Ailey’s production of Mauro Bigonzetti’s colorful Festa Barocca.

Let’s all try to memorize the longest name of a dance company I know: CCN de Créteil et du Val-de-Marne/Compagnie Käfig. The 11 male dancers were the Brazilians we loved last year when they appeared as Companhia Urbana de Dança, and their offering was Agwa (water). Full of beans, they performed miracles pouring water from see-through plastic glasses into other plastic glasses; they were colorful and cheerful and did great backward summersaults. But they just didn’t know when to stop: there was a terrific climactic moment when their wildest hip-hopper stood motionless on his head—and then they started up again. The group was better last year in the hands of a really talented choreographer.

Also cheerful was the Lizt Alfonso Dance Cuba group with its Pa’ Cuba me voy, “a sensual combination of flamenco, ballet, Afro-Cuban, and Cuban rhythms.” Lots and lots of girls with flashing feet and eyes and smiles, drums, toreador movements, skirts twitching—it could have been an act in a pre-Castro Havana nightclub, and for all I know, it was. Hispanic members of the audience shouted out, “Olé!”

There was one story ballet, The Return of Ulysses, brought to us by the Royal Ballet of Flanders (choreograph by Christian Spuck). Penelope’s seven eager suitors prance and posture around her and at times on top of her to various musics, mostly Purcell—lots of Dido and Aeneas—but also songs like “J’Attendrai” (sung, I think, by Rina Ketty) and “These Magic Moments” (Perry Como). Penelope was Eva Dewaele, a beautiful redhead, who runs around a lot, suffering. And after waiting those 20 years, she doesn’t even recognize Odysseus when he turns up. That’s Flemish irony for you!

Two disappointments. Mark Morris’s All Fours, from 2003. This isn’t the first time Mr. Morris has made the mistake of using music so large and grand that dance seems irrelevant to it. Here it’s Bartok’s String Quartet No. 4 and it speaks for itself: the somewhat clinical dancing seems decorative. The dancers, of course, were impeccable. I also found Trisha Brown’s duet for two men, Rogues, less than groundbreaking. It’s another example of synchronized dancing, except that here the synchronization is often deliberately distorted. An elegant exercise, but hardly an important addition to the Brown canon.

A different kind of disappointment: the Swedish Pontus Lidberg with his Faune, yet another take on the you-know-what Debussy-Nijinsky sensation. Four excellent dancers, including Adrian Danchig-Waring and Craig Hall from City Ballet and Drew Jacoby, freed from impersonating the wind, surround Mr. Lidberg himself, while they peel off their outer stretch costumes and exchange identities, trying not to be noticed as they do it. Yes, it’s about identity, and it’s fluent, but it’s more a concept than a ballet.

Oddly, there was only one example of what we broadly think of as “downtown” dance, a piece by the much admired Liz Gerring called Lichtung/Clearing. Do the City Center gang think that anything from south of 55th Street would jar our uptown sensibilities? Lichtung/Clearing is another Gerring work more dependent on lighting, video and sounds than on its very effective dancing (what you could see of it in the dark). Long white cloth hangings dominate the stage, and the dancers, in sexy white sports clothes by Deanna Berg, run through and around them, sometimes flinging themselves to the ground. The effects come from the video projections that paint the hangings and the dancers; the dancers seem to be there for the effects, not the other way round. But the result was sometimes beautiful. (Not so the crashing sounds by Michael J. Schumacher.)

A confusing effort from Israel’s strong Vertigo Dance Company had so many assets—particularly the superb Middle Eastern/North African costumes by Rakefet Levy, and the robust dancing of the eight performers—that it should have amounted to a first-rate experience. But its range of elements, from sacral/ritual to nightclubby, didn’t add up or settle down to a coherent statement. Even so, I’d like to see more of Noa Wertheim’s choreography.

And at last: the two most exciting moments of the season. To my surprise, having until now been able to take Ohad Naharin—but more often leave him—I was gripped by his long Three to Max, something apparently stitched together from earlier pieces. Seventeen dancers from the adventurous and energized Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, dressed in street clothes, are engaged in a series of disparate dance sequences, to disparate kinds of music. In one lengthy sequence, they step forward individually, with fascinating changes of detail, to the chant, in some strange language, of the numbers one to 10; at other times they claw at the air—Mr. Naharin’s use of hands is a wonder—or sway and turn on their bottoms. They raise their shirts to display sections of their torsos. There’s a popular Mexican song. They come together at the end to sing “Welcome” to us. Why isn’t it a mish-mash? Because the detail is so constantly riveting. Three to Max may not have a discernible structure, but you want it to keep going so you can see what comes next, which is a far and definitely welcome cry from so many of the festival works that are half as long and twice as pointless.

Finally, a work by the major English choreographer Richard Alston. It’s called Roughcut, and though it was created in 1990, this was its New York premiere. Where has it been all these years? There are nine dancers from his own company, plus a clarinetist and a guitarist. (The music: more Steve Reich—he’s as ubiquitous as synchronized dancing.) Mr. Alston was in New York in the late ’70s, and it shows—most obviously, to my eyes, in the influence of Jerome Robbins. But this is Robbins without his self-consciousness; no “Look, everyone, we’re showing our stuff.” Everything is light, breezy; nothing is forced or pretentious. The dancers fly across the stage. It’s boy-and-girlish. It’s alive, it’s American, it’s exhilarating—and there are no dizzying overhead lifts!

editorial@observer.com

Natalia Osipova and Daniil Simkin in Ratmansky’s 'The Bright Stream.'

A few years ago, the Bolshoi turned up in town with a program of four ballets, including the Stalin-approved (and ghastly) Spartacus, and something called The Bright Stream, which Stalin had banned in 1935, even punishing some of those responsible for it. Its entrancing Shostakovich score was buried in the Bolshoi archives until, in 2003, its then-artistic director, Alexei Ratmansky, disinterred it and choreographed the comic masterpiece we now have, and which A.B.T. has taken into its repertory. Let’s stop and congratulate all concerned!

Nothing is harder to create than brilliant comic ballets, except maybe brilliant full-evening comic ballets. After Ashton—most obviously La Fille Mal Gardée—what is there? Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, of course; I’m hard put to think of another from this century. And certainly no other one that’s set on a Soviet collective farm. Well, we all know that life down on the farm was no fun in Russia during the 1930s, but life was no fun here in the U.S.A. during the  ’30s, either, yet consider the great Hollywood romantic comedies of those years.

Here’s what happens: Two professional dancers are coming by train to entertain the workers during a harvest festival, and—wouldn’t you know it?—the ballerina turns out to be the old pal and one-time fellow-student of Zina, who’s now the collective’s amusements organizer. Zina’s married to the hunky Pyotr, who loves her, but one look at the ballerina and it’s Oh, you kid! Standard wifely jealousy is followed by the big dope’s standard comeuppance, with the ballerina and Zina plotting a midautumn night’s dream of confusion, cross-dressing, parodies of Les Sylphides and an unlikely sprawling cast including an ardent accordionist, a pert schoolgirl, a milkmaid, two old and very foolish dacha dwellers, a tractor driver, assorted fieldworkers and a big black dog on a bicycle. Needless to say, Pyotr learns his lesson.

It’s the same lesson naughty-boy Franz learns in Coppélia, it’s the lesson the young painter learns in Ashton’s ravishing The Two Pigeons, it’s the lesson the Count learns in Figaro—and in the way of those earlier masterpieces, once the guy shamefacedly comes to his senses, he’s forgiven in an instant and loving harmony is restored. Not only is there never a dull moment, but there’s never a clichéd step. Ratmansky is a master of both narrative and ensemble work. It’s all brisk, charming, lovable—just what the doctor ordered for the malaise of a collective farm or a jaded A.B.T. audience.

The wonderful first cast included Gillian Murphy as the ballerina, Paloma Herera as Zina, Marcelo Gomes as the errant Pyotr and the paragon David Hallberg as the visiting ballerino. Until you’ve seen Hallberg in full Sylphides drag, his bony knees poking through the tulle, you don’t know from drag. Standouts in this cast were Craig Salstein as the accordionist (it’s a role out of Massine, and he’s a Massine-type dancer. Time for A.B.T. to revive one of that neglected master’s comedies?); Misty Copeland as the milkmaid; and as the tractor driver, the flourishing Jared Matthews. (At one point, a bunch of men turn into a tractor, with Matthews atop them at the controls.)

The second cast was headed by Natalia Osipova, probably the most exciting ballerina in the world today (Alina Cojocaru is the loveliest). Osipova has a now-famous jump—thrilling in its drive, elevation and lightness. When she cannons across the stage, the audience gasps (I did too). And she’s got everything else as well, including a vivid star personality. (In the doll act of Coppélia, her wit, musicality, talent for comedy, attention to detail and subtle phrasing added up to as satisfying a Swanilda as I’ve ever seen, and that includes McBride, Kirkland and Makarova.) In The Bright Stream, her vis-à-vis ballerina (if you can call her that) was Xiomara Reyes. Murphy and Herera in the first cast, such totally different dancers, have equivalent stage presence: they’re well-matched. The second pairing made it all too painfully clear why Osipova plays the star ballerina from the big city while Reyes is an amusements director on an obscure collective farm. Come on, A.B.T., when are you going to acknowledge that at least four of your principal ladies just won’t do? Luckily, the two newest soloists, Simone Messmer and Isabella Boylston, together with Hee Seo, are very fine, in very different ways. Don’t keep them waiting in secondary roles too long.

All in all, this has been a good season for A.B.T., if you forget about Lady of the Camellias, Cinderella and the upcoming Swan Lake. Most important, with The Bright Stream A.B.T. has taken another step toward looking like a company rather than just a bunch of dancers. Ratmansky, who’s recently signed a new 10-year contract as Artist in Residence, is the best thing that’s happened to A.B.T. in decades. Please: Give him his head, give him everything he wants and needs and stand back. He’s not only the best ballet choreographer in the world, he’s a company man in every possible good way.

The Royal Danes, on their first visit to New York since 1988, managed to put their worst feet forward with their lugubrious first program. They brought their “modernized” new versions of two great Bournonville ballets—Napoli and A Folk Tale—to the Kennedy Center, but apparently the Koch stage isn’t large enough to accommodate them. Instead, they gave us an evening of such tedium and misjudgment that it’s hard to believe it was the brainchild of their new artistic director, Nikolaj Hübbe, who was a much-loved star at City Ballet for 15 years—and presumably knows New York.

Flemming Flindt’s tawdry The Lesson was already junk when it was created in 1964. Mad ballet teacher strangles pretty girl student, and then—guess!—after he and his stern lady assistant tidy things up, the doorbell rings again and another young girl starts down the stairs. (At that rate, Denmark would have lost its entire crop of ballet girls in a matter of weeks.) The Lesson is based on an Ionesco play, but it looks more like a fourth-rate Hitchcock imitation . It’s creepy without being interesting, and it’s staggeringly passé, so why inflict it on New York?

Worse, because less well constructed and more boring, was Bournonville Variations (“Idea, arrangement, and staging” by Hübbe himself, with one of his leading dancers, Thomas Lund), no doubt meant to reassure us of the company’s dedication to the great Danish master. Twelve dancers, all guys, do a lot of Bournonville steps, as if in a totally disorganized classroom. Every once in a while the lighting changes dramatically, for no discernible reason. The pumped up Bournonville music is as vulgar as the lighting. To those of us who love Stanley Williams’s Bournonville Divertissements, for City Ballet, this was an insult.

Then—things kept getting worse—a piece by Jorma Elo, the dread Finn, called Lost on Slow (don’t ask me why), to bits of Vivaldi. Elo is no longer quite the flavor of the week the way he was a few years ago, but he still reigns in Boston, and his work is as ugly and pointless as ever. Is this the kind of contemporary dance Hübbe really believes can give the Danes a fresh direction that the world will welcome?

Well, he’s stuck. What the world wants from his company is Bournonville, wonderfully danced. What the Danes apparently want is Modern. The last item on the program was the famous Act III of Napoli (from their old production)—an enchanting nonstop burst of invention, charm and tenderness, all the things we honor in Bournonville, along with the elegance of his style. The dancers did what they could, but everything seemed conscientious rather than felt, as if they think Bournonville is no longer relevant. Like Mozart, or Molière? I remember, decades ago, coming out of a performance of the full-evening Napoli almost weeping with joy. This time I was yawning with apathy.

But then came redemption. Everything absent from Napoli was present in Bournonville’s most famous work, La Sylphide, one of the half-dozen 19th-century ballets that are staples not only in Denmark but around the world. For years now the performances we’ve been seeing have been studious, dutiful and uninspiring. The company—at last dancing as a company—made it a thing of glory. The principals, particularly the lovely, sprightly Susanne Grinder as the doomed Sylph, revealed polished Bournonville technique while showing themselves to be deep into the spirit of the work, each of them grasping the crucial importance of his or her characterization. This was superb ensemble performing, yet it retained the individuality with which Bournonville invested each of his very human characters in a specific, recognizable and believable world, one that happens to include, in this case, sylphs and witches. Here was the Bournonville charm and here was the underlying Bournonville seriousness. Of the dozens of performances of La Sylphide that I’ve seen over more than half a century, this one gave the sharpest sense of the story and moved me the most. Hübbe’s Danes reminded us that, incontrovertibly, La Sylphide is not just a classic but a great work of art.

editorial@observer.com

There are many ways to be wonderful as Giselle. Diana Vishneva, for instance, is exemplary--technically formidable, highly dramatic, impeccably polished. When you watch her, you're watching a major dancer, a ballerina, a star performing Giselle. When you watch Cojocaru, you're watching Giselle herself, who happens also to be a great dancer. There she is, and you love her. This is what happens to her, and your heart goes out to her. You see how her absolute love for Albrecht purifies and redeems, a love that never wavers, starting with the innocent way her radiant face and her body tilt towards him in the first scene; the way her eyes never leave him. His betrayal, her madness and death, cannot affect that love. And her return to the grave is so moving not because she's gone forever but because she'll never be with him again.

And, oh yes--the perfect, flickering feet, the buoyancy of the jump, the fleetness of motion, the unaffected charm, the selflessness of performance; never a moment of showing off. She demonstrated all these qualities earlier in the week as Kitri in Don Quixote, a role less natural to her than Giselle but in which she also triumphed. In this romantic comedy, which defines the word "lightweight," with its lovable tum-ti-tum Minkus score and its colorfully nonsensical action, she was dancing with José Manuel Carreño, retiring this season (just in time). Her attentions to him were tuned differently from those she showed David Hallberg, her Albrecht, but reflected the same innate courtesy and generosity of spirit.

As for Hallberg, what can we say that we (and everyone else) haven't said countless times already? Here was an ideal Albrecht, from those uniquely arched feet to those extraordinarily delicate entrechats to that noble carriage and countenance. His careless charm at the start, his bewilderment and remorse, his anguished loss were all conveyed on the highest level of conviction and expressivity. He rose to Cojocaru's heights--and she to his. Can't we beg, borrow or steal her from the Royal for more than two or three performances a season? That's the way for ABT to fill the Met!

The Don Q's and Giselles were interrupted by the company's ambitious quadruple bill of three premieres and a major revival, Antony Tudor's puzzling and unappealing Shadowplay, which he made for Anthony Dowell in 1967 and in which Baryshnikov appeared for ABT in 1975. The action reflects elements of Kipling's Jungle Books, centering on a young boy trying to grapple with the world and himself in a jungle setting--banyan tree, vines--populated by monkeys and predators (male and female) who are wearing Cambodian-like tea cosies on their heads. This new revival was intended for ABT's incomparable Herman Cornejo who, alas, is injured. Second-cast Daniil Simkin is more Peter Pan than Mowgli but he made a game try at making sense out of this muddied concept ballet--at least he has star presence and the necessary virtuosity. Craig Salstein bravely acted rather than danced his way through the role, but he just doesn't command the technique it requires.

But why the empty, Buddhisty Shadowplay to begin with? Arlene Croce, referring to it as "this rusting hunk of junk jewelry," nailed it: "An enigma supposedly lies at the center of the ballet's events, but the events are manufactured with such coarse efficiency that long before you know you're not going to guess the secret you don't care what it is."

The new ballets included a brief (but not brief enough) Benjamin Millepied romp for three playful guys to decidedly unrompish unaccompanied Bach cello music. There's no governing idea--Troika was just another busy, empty Millepied exercise.

Far more substantial were pieces by our two leading ballet choreographers. ABT's Artist in Residence, Alexei Ratmansky, delivered Dumbarton, a modest company piece for five non-star couples which once again revealed his unerring fluency and sense of structure. As with almost all his work, this piece invites repeated viewings, so subtle and original is his level of invention. The surprise here is that he ignores the pronounced jazzy elements of his music--Stravinsky's 1938 "Concerto for Chamber Orchestra" (the "Dumbarton Oaks Concerto")--in favor of an evocative lyricism. The jazzy approach paid off for Jerome Robbins in his long-vanished, amusing Dumbarton Oaks, created for the 1972 Stravinsky Festival. Ratmansky, however, has made a useful and appealing work--a gift to the company as a whole.

Finally, Wheeldon has come up with the ambitious and large-scale Thirteen Diversions, to Britten's "Diversions for Piano and Orchestra." The stars came out for this one: Gillian Murphy at her technically brilliant best (those lightning-tight turns!) with Hallberg; Marcelo Gomes, that beautiful partner and commanding presence, with the swiftly up-and-coming Isabella Boylston; and on, through both casts, down the ranks of the company's leading dancers. Plus a cherry-picked corps of sixteen, effectively used though sometimes nearly invisible in their black costumes against a dark background. Brad Fields' lighting, with its shifting panels of color, was bold, dramatic, and vexingly intrusive.

The heart of Diversions lies in the duets that dominate it. Here Wheeldon displays his largest talents in the sympathetic and diverse ways he shows us couples meeting, interacting, separating. The relationship between these duets and the constantly appearing and reappearing corps is a touch mechanical, but there are grand pleasures to be had from the piece. This is a return to form for Wheeldon. My only caveat: I don't feel it finally arrives anywhere. The parts are greater than the whole.

editorial@observer.com

Gossip Girl’s Joanna Garcia made her way down the line of photographers and reporters in a red Alberta Ferretti dress with a long train and a slit up the middle. No, she wasn’t with Chace Crawford, or her real boyfriend, Yankee Nick Swisher—he was off trying to win the first game of the playoffs—but an old friend. An assistant occasionally threw Ms. Garcia’s red train to the wind for a more dramatic snapshot.

“High maintenance,” the starlet laughed. Luckily, the outfit held up. “I’m highly tucked in,” she said.

Model Veronica Webb and actress Emmy Rossum arrived at the same time. Ms. Rossum, wearing a white Marchesa dress, skirted past the photographers and rushed inside.

“I love the ballet!” Ms. Webb said, looking elegant in a long blue Christian Siriano dress that poofed out at the bottom. “The Turning Point is one of my favorite movies.”

This was the ABT company’s first time performing at Avery Fisher Hall, and the evening featured the debut of three separate works, by choreographers Aszure Barton, Benjamin Millepied and Alexei Ratmansky, that will run until Oct. 10.

Outside, the wind howled.

“Can we go inside?” Iman, the model and wife of David Bowie, asked her publicist. She shivered in a dark purple Donna Karan dress that left her arms bare. The Transom took refuge with her in the lobby. Iman is no stranger to music, having done a few videos back in the ’80s—“I’m the only one that did both of the Jacksons, Jermaine and Michael,” she reflected—but the ballet is another thing entirely.

“I wish I was a dancer!” she said, and rushed to find her seat.

As the opening curtain bell began to clamor, the actress Natalie Portman arrived, posed briefly for a couple of pictures and then was whisked inside, past the corral of photographers. They let out a collective “Arggh!” followed by “Natalie, Natalie, wait, Natalie”—practically falling on top of each other to get a shot of the back of her pretty head.

The season was also reduced to six performances, no doubt a financial advantage to the company—not only no scenery to commission and build, but fewer ballets to rehearse. On the other hand, three new works were commissioned and premiered, of which one was remarkable and the other two bearable—a healthy batting average when it comes to new ballets.

The one that will last is—no surprise—Alexei Ratmansky’s Seven Sonatas. Again we see how fortunate ABT is to have secured him as Artist in Residence, and how fortunate we all are to have him in America. Seven Sonatas isn’t a wham-banger: It has no narrative, and doesn’t demand much virtuoso stuff. It’s a quintessential company piece, deploying six dancers in more or less equal roles, and showing them off to their great advantage. I saw it three times and liked it more each time; its subtleties reveal themselves slowly but indelibly.

For once not using Russian music, Ratmansky has chosen seven ravishing Scarlatti sonatas, played on a piano rather than a harpsichord, and so adding a slight romantic tinge to the occasion. The ballet appears to be a simple matter, most of it made up of a series of duets and solos, so that when well into the piece suddenly there’s a threesome, it comes as a shock. Then another threesome, and finally all six dancers—three couples—joining in a somber, grieving close. The structure is so clean, so scrupulous, that you’re startled at how many quiet surprises it contains. But then that’s like Scarlatti’s music. How does he deepen his strict formula with such diversity of invention and feeling?

Ratmansky employs surprising shifts of the head and sudden arrow-like thrusts of the arm to punctuate his vocabulary while requiring his dancers to keep their footwork brisk and precise. Meanwhile, the changing moods of the music lead him to alternate happy and dark encounters between his couples. There are hesitations, confrontations—whatever is happening is implied rather than stated. But that something is happening is never in doubt. Seven Sonatas, with its flowing series of meetings between men and women in an identifiable emotional world, is in the mould of Jerome Robbins’ glorious Dances at a Gathering.

Scarlatti has frequently been used to good effect by choreographers before, from Massine’s charming The Good-Humoured Ladies to Peter Martins’ early exercise in classicism, Sonate di Scarlatti. He is a very welcome alternative to his two exact contemporaries, Handel and Bach. (Note to Peter: Forget about that LP I loaned you back in 1979 of Clara Haskil’s wonderful performance of a group of the sonatas. I replaced it years ago with a CD.)

The first cast of Seven Sonatas included several company stars—David Hallberg, Herman Cornejo, Julie Kent—as well as the very welcome return of Stella Abrera, looking and dancing like a true ballerina. (Also on hand was the inevitable Xiomara Reyes—inevitable because she’s the only company principal short enough to dance with Cornejo. And with her comes her inevitable smirk: She can’t suppress it even in the more serious passages.)

What Ratmansky has done for these artists reveals once more his unerring understanding of individual performers. But in a way, his second cast, made up of six of the ABT’s most talented second-tier dancers, showed off the ballet even more persuasively: They gave it a greater sense of homogeneity and unity. Jared Matthews, Carlos Lopez and Yuriko Kajiya were all stronger than I’ve ever seen them. Joseph Phillips, still in the corps, is a changed dancer from the rather stolid young man who joined the company only a little more than a year ago.

THE SEASON'S TWO other new ballets were by relatively established dance-makers, Aszure Barton and Benjamin Millepied. Like all her work that I’ve seen, Barton’s One of Three, to Ravel’s Violin Sonata in G, is efficient and empty. A long solo by Gillian Murphy dressed in a clinging long white dress does nothing for the first scene of the ballet, for Murphy or for us. (Second-cast Michele Wiles seemed more at ease dressed like a long drink of milk.) As it happens, I also saw this piece three times, and each time it had less to say, rather than more.

Millepied’s Everything Doesn’t Happen at Once is large-scale and propulsive, to a score by David Lang. It’s one of Millepied’s better pieces, maybe even his best—well organized, competently executed, with some exciting virtuoso moves for the company’s young hotshot Daniil Simkin and effective passages, mostly lifts, for Maria Riccetto and Kristi Boone. But the piece sinks itself with its central movement, an overextended and dull duet for Isabella Boylston and the heroically supportive Marcelo Gomes. She’s a pleasing dancer, but she’s not up to carrying a ballet—as Millepied should have realized after featuring her two years ago in From Here on Out. Clearly, he sees something in her that eludes me.

Each of the season’s six performances threw in an extra attraction. Robbins’ Other Dances was given several times by those superb dancers Gillian Murphy and David Hallberg. They’re new to it, and though they look beautiful, it doesn’t really suit them. Remember: Robbins created this coda to Dances at a Gathering for Baryshnikov and Makarova, and it took full advantage of their Slavic playfulness and charm. Neither Hallberg nor Murphy is naturally playful, and they miss many of the nuances; like Martins and Farrell before them, they’re physically imposing and handsome, but they’re more deliberate than lively.

Another extra was the beauteous Veronika Part as The Dying Swan. Talk about deliberate! I’ve seen serpentine swans, boneless swans, pathetic swans, scary swans, even moulting swans (the Trocks), but I’ve never seen a swan this bland. Far from seeming close to death, she didn’t even look sick—just tired, sinking to the ground for a little doze after a long hard day of flapping her arms.

rgottlieb@observer.com

Ananiashvili has never got by on mere virtuosity. She has an endearing personality, appealing looks and—most important—a profound musicality. In Act II, transformed into a Wili, her long legato phrasing was utterly ravishing. Yes, the technique was still intact—the hops on pointe, the balances, the arabesques—but you didn’t really notice it because you were so caught up in the exquisite flow as she moved in and out of every famous moment. Her dancing is seamless, subtle, almost low-key, perhaps at its most affecting in those great climactic pas de deux, like the one in the last act of Ashton’s La Fille Mal Gardée, in which she quietly projects the ecstatic fulfillment of romantic love.

Again and again, Ananiashvili has proven herself to be a delicate yet deep artist. She will be badly missed by the New York audience, who this season also had the pleasure of seeing her triumph in such diverse ballets as Balanchine’s Mozartiana and Swan Lake. And finally she is doing us (and herself) the favor of retiring while her dancing is still at, or close to, its peak: yet another demonstration of her intelligence, sensitivity and integrity.

Osipova is a very different kind of dance animal. On YouTube, you can catch her dazzling virtuosity in a variety of roles, most thrillingly as Kitri in Don Quixote. But YouTube is no substitute for the real thing. From her first steps in Act I of Giselle, it was overwhelmingly clear that here was an electrifying performer, with a lightness, a fleetness and an elevation that seem to stretch the limits of what a ballerina can achieve. Of medium height, with endless arms and legs, she has a piquant face and black hair (though in one interview, she confesses that she’s naturally blond, but aspires to the dark look of Plisetskaya and Fonteyn). Her jump is astounding, her fouettés irreproachable, the speed and accuracy of her footwork nonpareil. And she has charm. In the first act of Giselle, there were moments that seemed too studied, too charming, but the mad scene was convincing for a new Giselle, and the second act was so light, so airy and yet so solid that her success was complete. There hasn’t been an ABT debut performance this exciting since Baryshnikov’s decades ago; we can only hope that the company can enter into an extended relationship with her the way they have with Ananiashvili and Diana Vishneva.

Osipova’s La Sylphide was less impressive than her Giselle—Bournonville style is as yet alien to her, although her lovely dance qualities shone through. This famous ballet, in its Erik Bruhn version, didn’t really prevail this season; it needs to be rethought (but not, please, retired). And it was a good idea to pair it with Paul Taylor’s Airs, at which the ABT dancers made a gallant stab.

AS FOR OUR leading American ballerina, Gillian Murphy simply gets better and better. Her technique is impeccable—strong, secure, nuanced—and her acting has improved immeasurably. This season she was the most persuasive of the heroines in Ashton’s splendid Sylvia, with its glorious Delibes score and its predictable but engaging story: One of the goddess Diana’s virgin huntresses defies the god Eros, and (of course) is pierced with one of his arrows and surrenders to Love. Sylvia was one of the great Fonteyn roles, demanding robustness in the first act, pathos in the second (when Sylvia is kidnapped by an evil hunter) and triumphant bravura in the third, when Eros reunites her with the shepherd Aminta. Four years ago, when ABT first took on Sylvia, Murphy—with her superb athleticism—was already resplendent in Act I. Today she’s found a touching forlorn quality for the second act and a radiant splendor for the third.
Sylvia also proved to be a rewarding role for Vishneva. She’s such an exemplary dancer, so incapable of inferior work, that one almost starts to take her for granted. She isn’t really an Ashton dancer, but Sylvia is a gloss on 19th-century French ballet, and her classicism carries her through. She’s perhaps a little too much of a dominatrix in Act I—a little too bossy with her troop of huntresses and a touch too rude in her challenge to Eros—but it’s always wonderful to watch dancing on this elevated level.
Paloma Herrera, yet another Sylvia, conscientiously held things together in her pleasant, appealing way. Audiences like her, critics like her, even I like her. But in 15 years of watching her, I’ve never for a moment been excited by her; she seems to me the same nice, reliable executant in every role. I’d rather take my chances watching the far more uneven but always stimulating Michele Wiles.

AS FOR THE MEN what’s left to say about ABT’s amazing contingent of stars? There’s Marcelo Gomes—romantic, generous, commanding. There’s David Hallberg, he of the gorgeous line and astonishing jump. Herman Cornejo, Ethan Stiefel (out for too much of the season), Angel Corella, Jose Manuel Carreño—it’s a monopoly. And Cory Stearns, a new soloist, is coming up fast. Then there’s the unique Daniil Simkin, to me more of a specialty act than a normal dancer for a normal repertory. He whirls, he twirls, but, for instance, as the little goat in the finale of Sylvia, in his super-snug, form-fitting blue costume (with blue face and blue wig), he looked neither goatish nor human—not so much gender confusion as species confusion. In the same role, Carlos Lopez was appropriately goatish and ruttish.

Also impressive in Sylvia was Gennadi Saveliev as the wicked hunter Orion; he has the bulk, the strength, the brutishness. (Casting the more refined Jared Matthews both as Orion and Hilarion in Giselle was a less fortunate idea.) The important thing is that ABT is carefully bringing along its younger dancers, so that we’re beginning to enjoy the pleasures with which City Ballet has provided us for more than 50 years: tracking careers from the very start. Yes, the company imports an Osipova at the very top, but it’s also raising and grooming its own. Among the talented young who made themselves felt this season were Alexandre Hammoudi, Arron Scott, Blaine Hoven and two highly talented (and highly dissimilar) girls: the lyrical, enchanting Hee Seo and the provocative and fascinating Simone Messmer. Not only was Messmer the only one in the cast of Taylor’s Airs who really looked at home, but also—in a New York debut—she was a remarkably strong, self-assured and authoritative Queen of the Wilis. Now there’s a one-two punch.

rgottlieb@observer.com