AMERICAN Ballet The atre is devoting its current fall season at City Center to the great English choreographer, Antony Tudor, who was the architect of ABTs early success, and remained, as Baryshnikov once put it, the conscience of the company.
This Tudor retrospective reaches its climax Friday, with a special Tudor program for a 100th birthday tribute – meanwhile, Tudor works are scattered throughout the season, starting during the past week with the revival of his essay in nostalgia, “The Leaves Are Fading.”
A woman (Karen Uphoff) is wandering through the sunlit landscape of her carefree youth, catching the past in half-remembered vignettes of golden girls and boys.
The ballet is beautifully danced as duets are effortlessly interwoven with ensembles, the leading roles here taken with simple innocence by a delicately charming Xiomara Reyes and Gennadi Saveliev.
On Saturday Tudor’s masterpiece was matched by the companys premiere of Jiri Kylian’s 1981 journey into the inner mind, “Overgrown Path,” a work Kylian originally dedicated to Tudor.
“Overgrown Path” is governed by the score, a piano cycle Janacek called “On the Overgrown Path,” which is a poetic musing on the death of the composer’s young daughter Olga. Kylian has followed Janacek’s despairing journey through love in a bleak climate with dances of an eerie grace and whirling pain.
Like Tudor, Kylian nearly always provides his simple, flowing choreography with a subtext of drama, and here his whirling skirts and taut passion make this a ballet of the utmost interest.
ABT has cast this new acquisition with immaculate care, a dozen of the company’s finest dancers, all dancing in a way that displays not only the free-flowing style of Kylian’s choreography, but also their inner journey into some kind of serenity.
The evening ended with a fresh revival, cannily staged by Patrick Corbin, of Paul Taylor’s riotous rag on the music of the Andrews Sisters, “Company B,” far too long out of the repertory.
It is one of those whiz-bang ballets that always deliver: sunny, brilliant and chock full of the most amazing invention.
ABT is in first-rate form this season and has some superb male dancing from Carlos Lopez and Joseph Philips.
But the sensation was the company debut of new soloist Danil Simkin in “Tico Tico.” The youngster has a glow about him – you spot him immediately out of the ensemble – and a technique of which Baryshnikov would not be ashamed.
Watch for him. Danil Simkin looks headed for the top.
AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE
City Center, 131 W. 55th St.; 212-581-581-12120. Season ends Sunday.