American Ballet Theatre

Dance Magazine, Feb, 2004 by Clive Barnes

CITY CENTER NEW YORK, NEW YORK OCTOBER 22-NOVEMBER 9, 2003

ABT is splitting into two. Well, not actually, but programming between its New York fall season at City Center (this year for the first time extended to a welcome three weeks) and its eight-week spring season at the Metropolitan Opera House is virtually polarized. While the Met's season is devoted in general to full-evening works, mostly time-honored, and occasionally time-worn, classics, City Center's is given over to a more varied, and potentially more adventurous, repertoire. This gives ABT a chance to show some of its own indigenous ballets that have been created or nurtured over the past half century or so, and an opportunity to introduce brand-new works together with interesting company premieres. It thus diversifies the repertoire. These works can be, and obviously are, planned to give some junior members of the company a chance to shine.

Since Kevin McKenzie's shrewd curatorship of ABT as the fifth artistic director in its history, few could dispute that the accent has been more on the dancer than the dance--and currently the company boasts the best troupe of male dancers in the world. So, not unexpectedly, the 2003 fall season was a showcase for some magnificent dancing. The other, more creative, side of the coin proved less engaging.

The only world premiere was Robert Hill's Dorian, based on Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, with a dull, patchwork score arranged by Jon Magnussen (based on music by Ernest Chausson, Robert Schumann, and Frederic Chopin), and stylish, largely monochromatic, scenery and costumes by Zack Brown that were cleverly suggestive of Aubrey Beardsley and The Yellow Book. Unfortunately, this adaptation of Dorian proved dramatically fuzzy and choreographically mundane. Unadorned classical steps given little character focus were used to tell this story of a beautiful young man who seems unaffected by excess, depravity, or age, although a portrait of his youthful self at home shows all that awesome wear and tear. It was nearly saved, or at least made nearly bearable, by the virtuosic dancing, with a first cast including David Hallberg, suavely brilliant in his first created role, as Dorian; Marcelo Gomes as The Picture; and Julie Kent as the betrayed actress Sibyl Vane. Its second cast was virtually its match, with fascinatingly intense company newcomer Jesus Pastor, Carlos Lopez, and Xiomara Reyes.

The company premieres fared better. William Forsythe's 1998 workwithinwork, to Luciano Berio music, suffers, as does much of Forsythe's recent choreography, from a linear rather than spatial structure. There is confusion between squiggling (especially squiggling with hand movements) and real invention. Yet it had a certain dynamic interest, and was sensationally well danced, particularly by first Lopez and later by Ethan Stiefel as, as it were, the squiggler-in-chief.

Less pretentious but a good deal more interesting were the two vignettes by Jig Kylian, the stylish and lightly humorous Petite Mort (1991), and the more boisterous Sechs Tanze (1986), both linked by Mozart music and a joint, vaguely surrealistic sensibility. They were fun, and both were beautifully danced by their various and varying ensemble casts.

Also new was a cheerful burlesque duet (think Tudor's 1938 Gala Performance and then downscale the quality), Le Grand Pas de Deux (1999), choreographed by Stuttgart's Christian Spuck and set to Gioacchino Rossini's Overture to the Thieving Magpie. This was first danced at the opening night gala by a charmingly flustered Vladimir Malakhov and an equally charmingly nutsy Reyes, and later, to much the same comic effect, by a fantastically virtuosic Herman Cornejo, again with Reyes, and Maxim Beloserkovsky and Irina Dvorovenko.

ABT has a long past with a huge ballet warehouse--and this season a number of works were pulled out for examination. These ranged from Balanchine's magisterial Theme and Variations--in which Hallberg, in a debut, and Michele Wiles proved especially notable--and Agnes de Mille's totally trivial revue skit Three Virgins and a Devil (does no one remember her more impressive Tally Ho from about the same period?), in which Carlos Molina and Craig Salstein both did neat comic turns as the Devil, a role once amusingly danced by Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Martha Graham's sinuously enchanting Diversion of Angels was lit by luminous performances from its various casts, but two works longer out of the repertoire--Sir Frederick Ashton's exquisite masterpiece Symphonic Variations, staged by Wendy Ellis Somes, and Antony Tudor's Pillar of Fire, staged by Donald Mahler--had the special interest of rarity. Both stagings could have been better. Symphonic Variations, cursed by sluggish music (ABT really does need to pull up the socks of its musical collaborators), was welcome but not quite in pristine condition, although the second cast of Stella Abrera (who had a great season) and Gomes, with Yena Kang, Zhong-Jing Fang (an apprentice!), Hallberg, and Jared Matthews, produced a markedly purer Ashtonian style than the first cast of Ashley Tuttle and Beloserkovsky, with Marian Butler, Maria Ricceto, Lopez, and Salstein.