NEW YORK, NY.- The choreographer Alexei Ratmansky sat, looking intent but a bit glassy eyed, at the front of a studio at American Ballet Theater’s headquarters near Union Square. He had arrived in New York just a few days earlier from Australia, where he was setting another ballet — one more stop in a busy schedule that, since the coronavirus pandemic began to loosen its grip, has returned to its usual hectic pace.
Now he was rehearsing his evening-length ballet “Of Love and Rage,” which is finally making its long-deferred New York premiere at the Metropolitan Opera House on June 20. Back in March 2020, in what seems like a different age, it opened, for just a few performances, at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, California, days before the country more or less shut down because of COVID-19.
“It almost feels as if the California premiere never really happened,” Ratmansky, Ballet Theater’s artist in residence, said in a recent interview. “It is like a mirage.”
So much has happened in the intervening time. Not only a pandemic, but the invasion of Ukraine — the country where Ratmansky grew up and where many in his family still live — by Russia, where he studied ballet and, for five years, was director of the Bolshoi Ballet. When the invasion began, he was in Moscow, creating a new work, which he immediately abandoned to return home to New York. He has been vocal about his horror at Russia’s actions and has promised not to return while President Vladimir Putin is in power.
And, he said, the war has changed him. “The creation, especially of a big ballet, somehow represents who you are at a certain time, at a certain place,” he said. “But it is definitely not me at the moment.”
In this sense, “Of Love and Rage” is like a time capsule from a more carefree period, in the world, and in his life. But one thing hasn’t changed. Work keeps him occupied. In rehearsal, he seemed as concentrated as ever. Every few minutes, he got up to demonstrate something, and his suggestions to the dancers came out in a polite but near-constant stream.
“When I am in the studio,” he said, “I am fully focused on the dancers and the ballet. I can still do that. But I have not choreographed since the war started.”
“Of Love and Rage” is a grand affair, an epic with a cast of nearly 50. Based on one of the first novels written in Europe, it's a love story, packed with dramatic twists of fate, including a false death, kidnapping by pirates and a trial.
And also a war, though a highly choreographed one.
“I worried that the war scene would look too fake for me now,” Ratmansky said, “but in the context of the ballet it works OK. It is real for the characters onstage.”
Such epic drama is new territory for Ratmansky, better known for ballets that tend toward implied, fragmented narratives rather than explicit, action-filled ones. “I wanted to challenge myself,” he said in an interview in 2020 when he was making the ballet. “This big, dramatic music forces me to find a bigger vocabulary than I have used in the past.”
“Of Love and Rage” is also something of a throwback to the epics Ratmansky grew up watching at the Bolshoi and performing in as a young dancer with the Ukrainian National Ballet. The roiling score is drawn mostly from the music for “Gayané,” a forgotten ballet by Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian that was shown in Perm, Russia, during World War II. (The quieter moments are from Khachaturian’s piano works.) “Spartacus,” a Bolshoi staple about a Roman slave rebellion, is also set to music by Khachaturian.
Two sections of the “Gayané” score, a sinuous melody for strings known as the “Gayané Adagio” and the fiery “Sabre Dance,” may sound familiar. They have entered the popular imagination, the adagio through Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and the sabre dance through its use in everything from ice skating routines to “The Simpsons.”
The choreography Ratmansky has made in response to this music is fleet, full-bodied and muscular, with a special emphasis on male bravura. In a recent rehearsal, two dancers squared off, exchanging phrases of movement as if engaged in a debate, each “speaking” in a different voice, one light and fast, the other grounded and sharp. As the exchange became more heated, the size and emphasis of the movements grew and the phrases began to overlap, like raised voices in an argument.
Besides Ratmansky’s urge to challenge himself by creating a large-scale dramatic work, he was also moved by a more private passion — his fascination with classical art.
“When I see Greek or Roman art, my heart starts beating,” said Ratmansky, who is a frequent visitor to Greco-Roman art collections around the world, an enthusiasm chronicled in a dedicated Instagram account, @grecoratmansky. “I’m very interested in finding the connections between classical ballet coordination and Greek aesthetics.”
It was this fascination that brought him to “Callirhoe,” a romance novel, written sometime between the first century B.C. and the second century A.D., and set even earlier, in the fourth century B.C., the time of Alexander the Great. (A few characters and events are loosely inspired by history.) The period is reflected in the ballet’s choreographic language.
Veiled figures, inspired by a Greek statuette of a veiled dancer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, perform a ceremonial dance; processionals evoke figures in profile on amphorae; men lunge forward in poses similar to those of the bronzes of young Greek athletes at the Archaeological Museum in Naples, or twist at the waist, like discus throwers. Bodies are arranged into friezes and formations that suggest the Elgin marbles and the figures on the Pergamon Altar.
The ballet’s flexible stage designs, by Jean-Marc Puissant, frame the action with architectural details, suggesting the story’s varied locations, from Syracuse, then a Greek city in southern Italy, to Babylon, once part of the Persian Empire but now part of Iraq, and beyond. At the end, a haunting face, based on a fourth-century B.C. Greek terra cotta head, floats above the stage. The face is cracked.
“In the story there is violence and wreckage,” Puissant said. “The ballet is about putting the pieces back together. But you have the scars.”
“Callirhoe” is one of five complete Greek prose novels that have survived from antiquity. They constituted a genre, with certain conventions: “Each centers on the trials and tribulations of a romantic couple,” Stephen M. Trzaskoma, director of the Center for the Humanities at the University of New Hampshire, wrote in the introduction to his translation of “Callirhoe.” “The general pattern involves separation of the lovers, adventures in faraway lands, and a reunion with a happy ending.” (The better known “Daphnis and Chloe,” used as the basis for ballets by both Michel Fokine and Frederick Ashton, is another example of the genre.)
Like the Greek tragedies and Homeric epics, these “adventures” are not for the faint of heart: the story has its fair share of brutality. Callirhoe’s great beauty, often compared to Aphrodite’s, makes her the target for the desire of practically every man she meets. “As the story progresses,” Ratmansky said, “the men have more and more power, but morally, they are lower and lower.”
One of the things Ratmansky had to contend with is the violent act that, in the novel, sets the story in motion. Soon after the young lovers, Callirhoe and Chaereas, are married, Chaereas is tricked into believing Callirhoe has been unfaithful. In a fit of jealous rage, he confronts her. In the novel, he kicks her, after which she appears to die. She has actually fallen into a kind of coma. (There is a similar plot point in Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale,” which British ancient historian Paul Cartledge said in an email was probably influenced by “Callirhoe.”)
In Ratmansky’s ballet, there is no kick. Instead, Chaereas confronts Callirhoe, who, finding herself accused, collapses in frustration. The confrontation happens offstage, as in a Greek tragedy. “There is a chorus, who comment on the action, letting the audience know that something terrible has occurred,” Ratmansky said.
Chaereas spends the rest of the ballet trying to find her to make amends for this moment of rage. In the end, Callirhoe forgives him. Catherine Hurlin, who will dance Callirhoe in one of three casts, said: “He has a lot to make up for, but by then, he has gone through so much, he’s not the same person he was at the beginning. In their last pas de deux, he’s very sorry, very apologetic, very attentive and careful.”
The plot has an archetypal structure — how well it resonates hinges less on the plot details than on how convincingly the drama comes through in the performances. Since the beginning of the year Nancy Raffa, Ballet Theater’s director of repertoire, has been painstakingly reconstructing the choreography from notes and videos of those few performances in California.
But in the last few weeks, Ratmansky’s focus in the studio has been on distilling the characters’ intentions. “You’re angry,” he explained to a dancer in that recent rehearsal. “We can see it in the way your weight falls. But then your mood shifts, and you become a little bit ironic.”
Ratmansky got up to show how this could be conveyed with the flourish of an arm and the angle of the chin. Mimicking him, the dancer’s attitude became clear. And with that clarity something else occurred: The dancer took on the stylized appearance of a Greek statue.
The fine tuning will continue until the ballet’s long-deferred New York premiere next week. After that, Ratmansky said, “I just want the dancers to really let loose and bring these characters and dances to life. And for the audience to enjoy a great evening of dancing.” Two years later, the mirage becomes reality.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
