Three exceptional things about American Ballet Theatre’s autumn season this year: it is short, over by Sunday; it takes place at the Avery Fisher concert hall, where the acoustics are great and the sightlines terrible; and – to compensate – it consists almost entirely of premieres.
In his second work as ABT’s resident choreographer, Alexei Ratmansky knew what to do with the shallow stage: create an intimate piano ballet. That was the speciality of Jerome Robbins, whom the former Bolshoi director resembles in treating the stage as a real place, and people with all their idiosyncrasies as the drama. Robbins used Chopin for his character gems; Ratmansky makes the inspired choice of Scarlatti – less moody than Chopin, more mercurial (and pearly) than the composer’s contemporary, Bach.
Seven Sonatas begins by acknowledging the music’s Baroque purity. The six dancers, in Holly Hynes’s all-white riffs on courtliness, behave. The three men kneel before the three women; the women do not tease, disappear or collapse in despair. Not for now.
But once each couple is alone, with a sonata to itself, it becomes irrepressibly itself. Stella Abrera wreathes Gennadi Saveliev in a fog of terror that will only lift, she fears, if she reaches beyond the circumference of their love. Herman Cornejo and Xiomara Reyes happily subsist on flutter and flirt, buoyancy and braggadocio. David Hallberg – in whom the choreographer has cultivated a nuanced and demonic fervour – is in love with love; Julie Kent feeds his fire by making herself scarce.
To create these complex characters, Ratmansky tweaks the classical vocabulary. Faced with his lover’s imminent dissolution, a kneeling Saveliev grimly lifts an imaginary sun from one side of his body to the other, from sunrise to sunset. His situation has come to feel as impossible as carrying the sun – but also honourable, since this sun takes after fifth position, a planet in the ballet universe.
As a necklace of miniatures, Seven Sonatas can treat us only briefly to the simultaneous long and short view that Ratmansky, alone among choreographers, offers us. He has this trick of depicting characters both lost in their own world and partaking witlessly in others’. For the last sonata, the six dancers move – all at once and every which way, in a goofy ecstasy – as their characters have dictated until a looming threat overwhelms them. The women lie down and the men kneel behind them, bowing their heads as if over a grave.
After Ratmansky, the evening barrels downhill. Choreographer Aszure Barton, whom Baryshnikov has long championed, adores eccentricity but can only imagine it in libidinal terms. Unavoidable urges spout from the dancers’ bellies and shoulders, and erupt from their toes. The theme favours men (for some reason) and so, in One of Three, we get them. In suits, to reinforce the idea that they didn’t mean to let it all hang out. For double reinforcement, Gillian Murphy plays a mystery lady, with a finger to her lips. But the secret has already been blown.
Today’s ballet choreographers don’t always know what to do with women, but that is the least of Benjamin Millepied’s problems. Prestigious European and American troupes have commissioned work from this New York City Ballet principal for several years now, and a recent ballet for his home company was magical. But Everything Doesn’t Happen at Once looks clueless – and makes me feel that way. Is it a tone poem or a drama? Are the dancers characters or figures in a moving landscape? I couldn’t tell. ★★★☆☆
