New York in June means only one thing to me: dance, dance and more dance. I cannot resist the lure of New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre with their rival seasons at Lincoln Center, or the joy of those unexpected treats in unexpected places. This time, though, it’s Alexei Ratmansky who brought me to New York.
Ratmansky is a Russian choreographer with a considerable reputation around the world. But nowhere is he more sought after than in New York, where both of the big ballet companies were courting him earlier this year. In the end, much to everyone’s surprise, it was American Ballet Theatre who secured his services as resident choreographer.
Ratmansky may find Manhattan a far more sympathetic environment than Moscow, where he spent three years as director of the Bolshoi Ballet, a company famous for its volatile politics and fraught temperaments. But his first piece for ABT (part of an all-Prokofiev evening at the Met) feels as if it could have been made in Russia. On the Dnieper is a one-act ballet set on the banks of the titular Ukrainian river. It tells of Sergei, a soldier who betrays his fiancee by falling in love with another woman, the beauteous Olga.
As a ballet, it’s both accomplished and fairly indifferent. Yes, it’s seamlessly executed and adorned with some lovely classical constructions, but its emotions seem cast in grey and its drama almost incidental. If you don’t care about dancers as terrific as Jose Manuel Carreno (as Sergei), Diana Vishneva (Olga) or Hee Seo (as the jilted girlfriend) then something is surely awry.
As a mission statement, however, On the Dnieper is puzzling. It seems to have nothing to do with the dancers at its disposal, nor does it deliver a sense of exciting new beginnings. Ratmansky is a choreographer of huge talent (witness his sensational work at the Bolshoi), but at this stage it’s not clear what special quality he is going to bring to American Ballet Theatre. Still, with some of the best dancers in the world available to him, and the goodwill of the New York dance community behind him, hopes must be high.
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Meanwhile, across the plaza at the David H. Koch Theater (the new name for State Theater), City Ballet was offering something I have always wanted to see: Les Noces, Jerome Robbins’s 1965 staging of Stravinsky’s Russian peasant wedding. The Robbins is less monumental than Nijinska’s for Covent Garden - it feels chunkier, somehow - but it packs its own blunt power and sense of overwhelming duty. And Robbins’s Bride is less of a cipher, a fact that Tiler Peck seized on wonderfully in her touching portrayal of a young woman led inevitably into an arranged marriage.
Of course with City Ballet it’s always the women who seize the attention, and this visit was no exception. Wendy Whelan was striking and mesmeric in Concerto Barocco (though she looked uncomfortable in Liebeslieder Walzer, but then who wouldn’t?). Megan Fairchild knocked me out in the Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux - charming and a real show-off - while Maria Kowroski, she of the stunning legs, danced like a sexy minx in Stravinsky Violin Concerto.
ABT, which boasts a stronger lineup of male dancers than its rival, is heavily promoting a new recruit. He’s Daniil Simkin, Russian-born but German-raised, who joined ABT last year and comes equipped with a full arsenal of tricks and some incredibly neat placements. I saw him take the lead in Balanchine’s Prodigal Son, and his performance was indeed affecting, though his extreme boyishness is something that will limit his dramatic possibilities for now.
Did I mention unexpected treats? I found those courtesy of Mikhail Baryshnikov, whose impressive custom-built arts center was the venue for a fascinating afternoon of outre, oddball and off-the-wall modern dance offerings. Polly Motley and Diane Madden balanced in a trance on ladders. Kota Yamazaki performed in a red frock and pink fright wig, oblivious to everything but his own image. Sardono W. Kusumo placed his dancers in giant bowls from which they were unable to escape. And the inestimable Steve Paxton, now 70, delivered a star solo that seemed to measure his life in inches.
There was something of the Judson spirit about the entire enterprise, a throwback to the radical and carefree experimentation of the 1960s. Baryshnikov, who couldn’t be there (he was on tour in Europe), would surely have approved.