Saturday November 12, 2011 evening - ABT have been offering a week of mixed-bill programmes at the newly refurbished City Center. This was the only performance I could attend, though I regret missing Demis Volpi's new ballet. Photo above: principal artist Paloma Herrera, who bowled me over in the opening work, DUETS by Merce Cunningham.
Paloma was one of six excellent ABT ballerinas to appear in this work: she and Gillian Murphy, Xiomara Reyes, Isabella Boylston, Melanie Hamrick and Sarah Smith - having all left their toe shoes in the dressing room - each looked fabulous, as did their partners: Eric Tamm, Cory Stearns, Aaron Scott, Craig Salstein, Daniel Mantei and Daniil Simkin. Clad in bright colours, the six pairs dance on and off in a series of witty duets set to the tapping, pingy rhythms of John Cage's Improvisations III. The ballet, dating from 1980, seemed so fresh and appealing, and it was treat to see such a stellar line-up of dancers.
Martha Clarke's THE GARDEN OF VILLANDRY won my immediate admiration as the trio of onstage musicians (Roland Oakland, Jonathan Spitz and Barbara Balach) began to play the heart-filling Schubert Trio #1 in B-flat. In a white Edwardian gown and silk slippers, the glorious Veronika Part looked more sumptuously beautiful than ever, gently escorted in her garden stroll by Roddy Doble and Gennadi Saveliev. The men seem to vie for the ballerina's attention, but in a very subtle and gentlemanly way. The emotional under-currents are conveyed by the musicians while the dancers maintain a genteel attitude of social decorum that occasionally goes slightly off-kilter. This refined and poetic dancework is short on audience-pleasing virtuosity but wonderfully elegant in its depiction of a romantic triangle from which none of the threesome can hope to escape.
A little Scarlatti goes a long way; while the SEVEN SONATAS that Alexei Ratmansky chose for his ballet were impeccably played onstage by Barbara Balach, the music after a while becomes a bit too same-y. Perhaps THREE SONATAS would have been a better idea though then the alliteration of the ballet's title would have been sacrificed. The piece was expertly danced by Maria Riccetto, Sarah Lane, Christine Shevchenko, Blaine Hoven, Joseph Phillips and Jared Matthews, all clad in white. If Ms. Shevchenko and Mr. Phillips stood out slightly it was perhaps because the choreographer gave them the most interesting things to do.
It does seem to me that Mr. Ratmansky, in his admirable attempt to give freshness to the classical ballet vocabulary, has now made those very attempts a cliche in their own right. His inventiveness knows no bounds but it sometimes becomes predictable in its very lack of predictability. Does that make sense? Anyway, SEVEN SONATAS is an attractive work and affords the dancers many fine opportunities both of technique and expression. If it were half as long, it would be twice as appealing.
I'd never seen Twyla Tharp's IN THE UPPER ROOM and I hope to never see it again. It's RABBIT AND ROGUE in pajamas as one set of dancers after another materialize to dance endless physically demanding combinations in a smoke-filled space, all to no avail. There is no climax - or perhaps there are twenty climaxes - as the choreographer piles on the steps, has a few girls in red toe shoes to say 'ballet', takes the boys' shirts off, keeps people racing on and offstage as if to some purpose. The Philip Glass score is fantastic for dancing, but there's too much of it. A 12-minute ballet would have sufficed to show us everything Ms. Tharp has to say without repeating herself. How I long for those days at The Pillow when the choreographer did some of her most inventive work for Hubbard Street. Now it all seems like a formula, endlessly applied in varied circumstances and to various music.
The dancing was excellent, with Simone Messmer simply breath-taking and Cory Stearns leaping upward several levels in my esteem with his dancing here (and in the Cunningham earlier). I felt the dancers were thoroughly committed technically but I wondered if their hearts were in it; they seemed often to just be going thru the motions, tiring as it must be to dance this piece. The audience of course screamed with collective delight as the curtain fell.