The Times doesn't claim to have any Natalie-related "scoops," though, as Millepied seems content to not discuss his Black Swan dance partner (he did the choreography and danced the lead male part in the film's production of Swan Lake). Instead, we get a fun look at the world of wooing high-minded ballet patrons, another stage where Millepied excels. It seems those funding the shows just think he's the prettiest, and loosen their purses accordingly.

“It doesn’t hurt that he has a French accent," admitted School of American Ballet board member and Chanel heiress Coco (!) Kopelman. 

Someone's got to fund the sets and tutus, and other "serious" ballet artists seem a wee bit jealous at Millepied's golden-boy status. What's his real import here -- the dancing or the dollars?

But some go further and cattily whisper that Mr. Millepied’s charisma makes up for his shortcomings as a choreographer, and is the real reason for his numerous commissions. For instance, when the Pacific Northwest Ballet tapped him to choreograph an original work in 2008, it did so knowing that the work would be underwritten by an endowment from the Joyce Theater, the Stephen and Cathy Weinroth Fund for New Works.

Not that any of this matters. Once he Portman have a perfect and beautiful little kid to trot out at fundraisers, no Millepied production will ever have to beg for funding again.

Click for What Twitter Taught Us: Anderson Cooper Gets Clocked in the Face, Egypt-Style

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

The announcement shouldn't come as much of a surprise. We witnessed them together at Black Swan's premiere, at the Ziegfeld, and noted in a Scandal Report that on set, they were insufferably cuddly. Page Six noted that Millepied was the needy one of the two. Well, not much of a shocker there.

So, dancers everywhere: put yourselves on the market to work as a film's ballet trainer. You too can wed a famous starlet! 

Click for Scandal Report: With Natalie and Mila in Town, New York Goes Swan-Crazy

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

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

But he had a lot else on his mind, too: reshooting a dance film he made for Mikhail Baryshnikov, currently touring in theaters; training Natalie Portman for her role in Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky’s upcoming movie about ballerinas; and, at a pivotal point in his career, creating a lengthy new work for American Ballet Theater, Everything Doesn’t Happen at Once, which premieres Oct. 7 at Avery Fisher Hall. It will be his second commission for the company and a big opportunity to prove his critics wrong: No, he is not just a trendy item, stylish but insubstantial. He is for real.

“I haven’t even started rehearsing it yet,” he said about the ABT ballet back in August. “But I’ve been thinking about it for months.” He turned back to the smoke. “Do you smell that?” He stood up, tracing the odor to a room where a few dancers had recently left—Hurricane Bill was approaching that weekend, forcing several dancers to leave the island early (and Mr. Obama to arrive late). He jumped on a bed, pushing open the window behind its backboard. Exhausted, he collapsed then threw back his head: “It’s been a long summer; long, long, long, long …”

Mr. Millepied seemed under pressure much of the past few months, and not just to prove his own worth. His ABT piece will appear alongside another newly commissioned work, Seven Sonatas, by Alexei Ratmansky, who, along with Christopher Wheeldon, is the greatest hope for ballet’s artistic evolution. The two biggest names in ballet choreography today, they are entrusted not so much with the genre’s survival as with its future.

Mr. Millepied, 32, is on the brink of that renown, too. In a genre split between upholding tradition and attracting new audiences, Millepied is the rare talent attuned to both needs. He has complete command of the classical vocabulary, having danced with the New York City Ballet since he was 15. And he has that gift of personality—charisma, charm, humility—allowing him to enlist collaborators that bring in fashionable crowds. Marc Jacobs, Nico Muhly and Philip Glass have all worked closely with Mr. Millepied, to say nothing of Mr. Baryshnikov and Ms. Portman.

“He’s not just living in the ballet world,” said Ashley Melone, the director of the Vineyard Arts Project, who invited Mr. Millepied to the summer residency. “He knows what’s going on in other parts of the art world, too. He definitely knows how to market himself.”

Everything Doesn’t Happen at Once features music by David Lang, the co-founder of Bang on a Can who won a Pulitzer Prize for music last year. Mr. Millepied approached him about using his music months ago, and after meeting Mr. Millepied, Mr. Lang was eager to help. “He’s incredibly friendly, a pleasure to be around,” Mr. Lang said. “And he’s beautiful.” Mr. Millepied has a soccer player’s lean, compact body, a finely chiseled jaw and large, blue eyes, bearing a faint resemblance to Jude Law. An abstract tattoo runs up the left side of his stomach, inspired by the Bauhaus painter Oskar Schlemmer. When he smiles, which is often, you get the sense that he is confiding in you—a secret maybe, an insider’s joke.

ABT couldn’t afford to commission a new score, so Mr. Millepied chose three works Mr. Lang had already composed—“Cheating, Lying, Stealing,” “Stick Figure” and “Short Fall.” Taken together, the music balances a wintery, emotional tenderness with heavy propulsive rhythms. Urban and modern, it is a strange if entirely welcome choice for ABT, often criticized for its focus on fusty period fairy tales.

“I think Ben’s being courageous, bringing my music into the ballet,” Mr. Lang said. Kevin McKenzie, the artistic director of ABT who commissioned Mr. Millepied, agreed: “I’ve been following him for a while now and I thought that, if nothing else, this guy is daring.”

For Mr. Millepied, though, the music is perfectly fitting. He may not have honed a signature style yet, but he does have certain identifiable strengths. One is his musicality—letting the music drive the movement. His mother was a modern dancer and his father a decathlete, and for a brief period the family moved from France to Senegal, so his father could train Olympic athletes.

Their neighbors were constantly playing drums, a hobby Mr. Millepied picked up himself, and the rhythmic sensibility comes through in much of his work. Well before he puts a dance together, Mr. Millepied spends months listening to music, imagining the right turns, twists and leaps. (He recently took his girlfriend, Isabella Boylston, a dancer with ABT, on a vacation to the Caribbean and, she said, “He had his head sets on at the beach the whole time.”)

After six years dancing professionally with New York City Ballet, where he is still a principal dancer, Mr. Millepied decided to try choreography, in 2001. It was not an easy choice. “It’s almost like an old-fashioned thing,” Mr. Millepied said. “It’s really up to us, to you, to figure it out.” He lamented the limited time ballet schools give for choreography instruction, a commonly heard complaint.

“It’s true, in ballet schools [choreography instruction] is definitely lacking,” said Ethan Stiefel, a principal dancer at ABT who recently became dean of the dance department at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. Beginning this year, Mr. Stiefel made choreography a requirement for all ballet concentrators.

At a rehearsal this summer, Mr. Millepied watched the dancers in his company, Danses Concertantes, move low to the ground, their heels digging down—not the typical perked-up postures of traditional ballets. “Really relaxed in the legs, low to the floor,” he said, coaching his dancers as they moved. If he was sure what he wanted for the overall tenor and structure of the ballet, he let the dancers work with him on their own pas de deux, the heart of any work. The small but critical gestures—where to put the arms, how to position the head—help convey the personality of a dancer. And his encouraging of their involvement helps explain why many dancers want to work with him.

Much like Mr. Wheeldon—who has danced with Mr. Millepied at City Ballet and brought his company, Morphoses, to the Vineyard Arts Project after Mr. Millepied left—Mr. Millepied emphasizes individuality and intimacy in his work. For many City Ballet–trained dancers, this legacy comes from Jerome Robbins, who took over the company, along with Peter Martins, after George Balanchine’s death, in 1983. “Dancing in Jerry’s ballets, it’s a very specific thing,” Mr. Millepied said. “It’s about being natural, being yourself onstage, reacting with other dancers.”

If Balanchine focused on abstraction and purity of form, Robbins reintroduced personality into dance. Sailors, soldiers and fauns fill Robbins’ works, but for young choreographers, those personas can feel contrived and dated. “They just get older in a way that Balanchine’s dances don’t,” Mr. Millepied said, comparing Robbins to Balanchine, founder of the New York City Ballet. “It’s not something you’re going to see again”—Balanchine’s talent—“let’s make that clear. He was at ease in the 19th and 20th century, he was timeless. Robbins was very much of his time.”

The challenge for Mr. Wheeldon and Mr. Millepied is to retain the technical precision and classicism of Balanchine while conveying the emotional directness derived from Robbins. “That’s the common bond between Benjamin and I,” Mr. Wheeldon said. “We’re always trying to find ways to have the abstract have emotions.” He went on: “We were really the last group of dancers to work with Jerry”—Robbins was active with City Ballet almost till his death, in 1998—“We were really influenced by him. Jerry wanted people in the room; he wanted those personalities to really come through.”

For most dancers, mastering the technical skills is difficult enough. Developing a personality onstage comes over time, if at all. That makes it particularly demanding to work for Mr. Millepied, who is not only asking dancers to find their voice, but is himself searching for one. “It doesn’t always come naturally,” said Cory Stearns, who, at 23, is a rising star at American Ballet Theatre and will dance in Everything Doesn’t Happen at Once. Mr. Millepied “will ask us to be lulled to the floor, or he’ll say ‘do something short,’ and we’ll look around and not know what he means.”

Mr. Stearns and others say that because Mr. Millepied still dances, though, he can demonstrate what he wants. In addition, Mr. Millepied is from the same generation as his dancers—raised on video games and the Internet—which makes cultural references easy. “I don’t know if you ever played the game Tekken,” said Mr. Stearns, referring to a martial arts video game, “but [his movements] are kind of like that.”

Mr. Millepied has been making dances for eight years—a half-decade less than Mr. Wheeldon—and still dances with City Ballet. But despite early praise, he has had no major breakthroughs. There is a sense that if Mr. Millepied does not score a big success soon, his stock will be depleted: fewer commissions by major companies, less work with star designers and musicians, no more movie-star training. “His name is in the air; there’s a feeling he’s hot property,” said Roslyn Sulcas, a dance critic for The Times who has written about Mr. Millepied, when asked if the choreographer is a bone fide great. “But I don’t think Benjamin has made enough work to know yet.”

A month before Everything Doesn’t Happen at Once was set to debut, Mr. Millepied was back in New York, rehearsing. Like most artists, he says he does not let critics bother him, and when he is with his dancers, working, the pressure does seem to dissipate. He does not get distracted, he smells no smoke, he smiles, laughs. And then you will catch him talking to himself, just loud enough so you can hear. “I hope I like this when I’m done, ’cause if I don’t”—he turns to you, smiles, then continues—“it’ll be a shame.”

editorial@observer.com

Susan Marshall presented a 20th-anniversary season at the Dance Theater Workshop that confirmed her reputation as an inventive and persuasive dance maker. Her new extended piece, Cloudless, proceeds in 18 short takes, performed by five dancers, and it involves a number of tired devices that usually deflect my attention. At one point, for instance, a film running on a monitor shows, more or less, the very things that are taking place on the stage (in this case, all five dancers sardined into a small square space like a sandbox); and the music is a trendy mix, from Philip Glass to “Crimson and Clover” (remember Tommy James and his Shondells?), to the great duet “Au Fond du Temple Saint” from Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers performed by David Byrne and Rufus Wainwright. There are ladders, pulleys, chairs—props upon props.

But as the solos, duets and group sections parade by, they add up—if not to a coherent narrative, then to a coherent view of life, a highly personal view of how people relate to each other. Like very few other choreographers (Doug Varone is another), Marshall understands intimacy and is moved by it. For me, the most affecting section of Cloudless is the one called “Book.” Two men are seated at a table that’s holding a large book; another man and a woman are seated behind them. An electric fan riffles the book’s pages. The man behind leans over and gently kisses one of the men in front of him; later, the woman does the same thing. The specifics of the relationships don’t matter: These four people are in quiet, intense connection—and it’s beautiful.

A man clasps his hand over a woman’s mouth; again and again, when he takes it away, she screams, and so it goes on (“The Sound”). A woman lying on the ground blows tissues gently upward, and a man seated next to her snatches them out of the air and puts them in his pocket, then makes her a cup of tea, at one moment resting the cup on her upended bottom (“Cup”). A man’s solo is constantly interrupted by other dancers intruding on his space (“Solo”). The five performers have to be people as well as dancers, and they succeed. Cloudless reveals both a fertile mind and a convincing humanity.

Alas, Benjamin Millepied & Company reveals not much more than a large ambition and a shallow aesthetic. Millepied joined City Ballet in 1995, welcomed as a potential classicist in the tradition of Helgi Tomasson. But in the last half-dozen years, his dancing has thinned and weakened, and he’s been getting by on his good looks and assured manner. Now that he has a company of his own—actually, a group of pickup dancers, many of them from NYCB—we can see why he’s moved away from classicism: His real taste is for pseudo-Euro-trasho. The repertory he presented at the Joyce included three long—no, endless—pieces danced in darkness or semi-darkness, accompanied by clangorous noises or peculiar combinations of music: Short-Lived by Aszure Barton juxtaposes the Cracow Klezmer Band with the 18th-century Jean-Marie Leclair. (Twyla, you really started something when you married Joplin and Haydn in Push Comes to Shove.)

Why anatomize these pieces? The best of them was Silence Text by Luca Veggetti, which utilized a respectable vocabulary and had some effective moments but was solemn and portentous. The worst was Phrases, Now—a “world premiere” by the Greek Andonis Foniadakis in which five dancers fling themselves around interminably. Foniadakis has danced for Béjart, and it shows.

And then there was Millepied’s own world premiere, a duet called Closer made for those stars of A.B.T., Ethan Stiefel and Gillian Murphy. Stiefel, with his endangered knees, bowed out and Millepied replaced him, but so what? Any two capable dancers could have handled this smooth generic exercise. The score was by Philip Glass, and there was a lot of running around. Only the final moments were interesting, with the couple on the ground, tenderly discovering each other’s feelings and bodies. It was too little, too late.

I feel I should mention that overlooked area of dance, the opera ballet. At the Met, in Act I of the new production of Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa, a lot of dancers in a lot of cloth were crammed into a small space and faced with a violently raked stage. How sad I felt for them, coping with the hopeless conditions and the hopeless “choreography,” by Russia’s Sergei Gritsai. You could sense their grim yet plucky determination to survive with honor, though one boy was so young and so obviously excited at being on a stage that he actually looked happy. Luckily, your attention was distracted from the dancing by the glare from acres of gold lamé costuming the singers.

A signal event of the week was City Ballet’s announcement that it was promoting nine(!) corps dancers into the soloist ranks. I’ve never heard of such a wholesale promotion, but it makes some kind of sense. The company this past season featured 23 principals, at least a third of whom either weren’t dancing or shouldn’t have been dancing, and 11 soloists, only two or three of whom are ever likely to become principals. And there’s a lot of talent at the bottom—most of the newly minted soloists have real promise. But what’s to become of them? If we can extrapolate from the last dozen years, a few will be shot to the top too quickly and others will wither from lack of nurture. Where the company needs change most is in its ballet-master/ballet-mistress structure—and in its attitude toward staging and coaching. Very few dancers, however talented, can do it on their own.

A final note: The smart-ass question I recently raised about aphids has been answered definitively by Paul Taylor, who writes, “Aphids are insects—family aphididae, also disrespectfully known as ‘plant lice.’” Certainly the dancers in his sprightly Spring Rounds bore no relation to lice of any kind.