NEW YORK CITY BALLET
New York State Theater, Lincoln Center. (212) 870-5570. Season runs through Feb. 25.
PETER Martins’ New York City Ballet is a stickler for starting its fall/winter season with a fund-raising gala before giving 45 performances of “The Nutcracker” until the end of the year.
But even tradition can benefit from a touch of novelty, and the company is careful to spice up the proceedings with a one-time-only special.
Tuesday night it was the American premiere of Alexei Ratmansky’s “Middle Duet,” created eight years ago for the Kirov Ballet.
Ratmansky, who had a smash hit with his “Russian Seasons” last season, is the artistic director of Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet, and NYC Ballet dancers Maria Kowroski and Albert Evans traveled to Moscow to learn this duet.
The journey proved worthwhile. Set to the middle section of a score by Russian composer Yuri Khanon, musically and choreographically it was an essay in monotony ascending to climax – similar to Ravel’s notorious “Bolero.”
On a darkened stage, the dancers are caught in a bright light shadowed as if it were a large window frame. Their movements, patterned to music that starts quietly with just piano and percussion, build up to an exceptionally performed dance of febrile tension and, finally, sensuous exhaustion.
The rest of the program was chiefly bits and pieces from the repertory, but opened with the major revival of Christopher Wheeldon’s “Carousel (A Dance),” created in 2002 in honor of composer Richard Rodgers’ centennial, and not seen for more than three years.
It’s one of Wheeldon’s best – extraordinarily imaginative, with its whirling inventions of fairground razzmatazz enveloping a dangerous love affair between an innocent girl and an attractive, older roustabout, powerfully danced by Seth Orza.
The girl – one of nature’s Juliets – was 18-year-old Kathryn Morgan, from the School of American Ballet. Although a standout at the school performance last June, she’s virtually unknown to the public, and Tuesday made a star-glazed debut.
If not pushed too far too soon, potentially she could be one of the most fascinating presences to emerge from the company school since the days of Gelsey Kirkland.
Watch out for her in the future, as I trust will New York City Ballet.