NEW YORK, NY.- Mendelssohn’s music for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is full of sweet thunder and other wonderful noises. A cartoon sound effect for jumping isn’t among them. Yet when American Ballet Theater performed Frederick Ashton’s ballet “The Dream” last Saturday, every time Jake Roxander’s Puck took to the air, I could swear I heard one: “boing!”
Roxander is a corps de ballet member who burst into prominence during Ballet’s Theater’s summer season, and his debut as Puck was the most thrilling highlight of the final two programs of the company’s fall season at the David H. Koch Theater.
Roxander’s shot-from-a-bow leaps had arrow-like definition. His turns were cyclonic yet controlled. Recalling Puck’s boast in Shakespeare’s play, he looked like he really could circle the Earth in 40 minutes. In truth, his performance was more puppyish than puckish. But what’s thrilling about Roxander is technique yoked to eagerness. The guy goes for it. The role of Puck, which has belonged to Herman Cornejo for 20 years, is now his.
Roxander’s rocketing ascent is a hopeful sign for the future of Ballet Theater. Not that the company’s first New York season programmed by Susan Jaffe, its new artistic director, felt like a forward-looking turn of the page. It seemed more like a stock taking: solid performances in mostly quality material, a bit staid but not without sparkle.
Where “The Dream,” a Ballet Theater staple in recent decades, is a reliable showcase for the company’s theatricality, George Balanchine’s “Ballet Imperial,” on the same program, is good for displaying the troupe’s classical chops across its ranks. Unlike New York City Ballet, which has called the work “Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2” since the 1970s, Ballet Theater doesn’t downplay the imperial Russian associations, using a backdrop of St. Petersburg. That’s a choice that might disturb some viewers, but Ballet Theater’s rendition also had aesthetic problems. It pursued grandeur at the price of momentum, stifling one of Balanchine’s great contraptions for ratcheting up excitement.
While Skylar Brandt, as the second ballerina, was both clean and properly headlong, Isabella Boylston sailed through the notoriously taxing first-ballerina role with little difficulty but also little sense of risk. Her pas de deux with the gallant James Whiteside was fraternal in feeling, the tragic “Swan Lake” colorings rather faint.
That program of 20th-century classics was followed by the 21st-century pairing of Alonzo King’s “Single Eye” (2022) and Alexei Ratmansky’s “On the Dnipro” (2009). “Single Eye” is intelligent, intricate and acceptably inscrutable. The choreography bends in unusual places, and the women push the men around uncommonly often. The work has an agitated calm and a spiritual shimmer, thanks in part to a score by jazz pianist Jason Moran that challenges the ear, but not too much; papery scrims by Robert Rosenwasser; and subtle lighting by Jim French.
It isn’t a work in which casting matters a great deal. But in the two performances I saw, Brandt and Calvin Royal III brought out its beauty especially well. Members of the corps, whom King gives his densest and busiest stuff, sometimes got messy, but they also burst through the calm, as when Michael de la Nuez, doing pirouettes à la seconde, swung his free leg not just around and around but also up and down. De la Nuez goes for it, too.
The more meaningful return was “Dnipro,” the first work that Ratmansky made for Ballet Theater as its artist in residence. Back then, it was called “On the Dnieper,” and the switch to the Ukrainian spelling of the river can be read as part of Ratmansky’s recent war-shocked embrace of his Ukrainian identity. “Dnipro” itself isn’t political, but its story of a soldier returning home from war takes on new resonances in the current context.
Simon Pastukh’s scenery still charms: a huge moon, movable cherry trees whose blossoms litter the ground and get kicked up by the dancing. Although the Prokofiev score, heavy and grinding, taxes Ratmansky’s ample skills as a storyteller and denies him lightness, the ballet is absorbing in how the central drama — the soldier immediately gets involved with a woman betrothed to someone else — is situated in the public confines of a village. And it’s typical of Ratmansky that there are no good guys or bad guys, only mixed motives and emotions.
(“Depuis le Jour,” a gala-style duet by Gemma Bond needlessly added to the program, served mainly as a contrast to Ratmansky’s shading. Set to a Charpentier aria, well-sung by Maria Brea, it was all one-note romantic bliss.)
“Dnipro” is affected by casting. In one of the two casts I saw, Thomas Forster as the soldier was boyish and softly lyrical, a good match for the innocent life force of Catherine Hurlin as his new love, Olga, and the thoughtful SunMi Park as his old one, Natalia. De la Nuez, as Olga’s fiance, had the technique to handle his I-can’t-take-it-anymore solo, but his acting was blank.
The other cast was older, both more intense and more cuttingly ambiguous in tone. Cory Stearns was a more dashing soldier, more unconcerned about the pain he doesn’t mean to cause. Christine Shevchenko, as Olga, was more of flirt, and Devon Teuscher gave Natalia a tragic grandeur all the way through. Most remarkable was Whiteside as Olga’s fiance, hiding his leading-man charm in a dullard who doesn’t deserve his blindsiding fate.
The new resonances and new poignancies of “Dnipro” don’t stem only from the war in Ukraine. At the end, the self-sacrificing Natalia sends the soldier and Olga off to a future somewhere else. Ratmansky has also moved on, to a new home at City Ballet. What will Ballet Theater do without him?
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
