Another triumph at the Ballet

Patrick Yocum, Bradley Schlagheck, Whitney Jensen and Lawrence Rines in Symphony in C. Photos by Gene Schiavone.

At 49 years of age (yes, next season marks their big 5-0), Boston Ballet has become the most reliable arts organization in the city - hands down. I go there with more confidence than I bring to any other local venue, in any art form. When my partner looks at me and says, "What are we seeing tonight?" and I say, "The Ballet," he always just says, "Oh, good." (Well, sometimes in a rough week, he says "Thank God.") Indeed, among Boston's "Big Culture" behemoths, the Ballet's consistency leaves the BSO, the MFA, the BLO, and the Huntington (great as they often are) in the dust. At the Ballet, a reviewer never has to separate the wheat from the chaff - it's all wheat; one merely teases the tastiest grains from the rest.  It's the easiest critical gig in town. (In fact it's not really a "critical" gig at all.)

Right now the troupe is in the midst of a suite of performances that by its close will have stretched several weeks. Tonight wraps their startling pairing of Balanchine classics with Chroma, by edgy new talent Wayne McGregor; next Thursday brings more Balanchine (the master's luminous Coppélia). In between we were blessed with a treat from the Ballet's "Next Generation," which included a delightful version of Jerome Robbins' Fanfare.  And all this came after a sumptuous Sleeping Beauty last month. Needless to say, dance fans have been happy campers this spring.

But back to Chroma, which couldn't be more opposed in spirit to Balanchine's Serenade and Symphony in C - and so showcases the expressive range available to the Ballet today. Balanchine is ballet's Shakespeare, and like the Bard, he is enraptured by the feminine.  Indeed, often when the boy (sometimes a single boy) does show up in a Balanchine ballet, he's an obvious factotum for Mr. B himself - as is the case in the luminous Serenade, which opens (see masthead) as a kind of apotheosis of ballet class (it was actually written for all the girls in training with Mr. B at the time). They might be a choir of angels, but these maidens are in an attitude of chaste denial, until Balanchine begins to work elegant variations on their solitude (complicated here and there by an apparently disposable boyish partner) led by Ashley Ellis and Misa Kuranaga, and set to Tchaikovsky's famous Serenade for Strings.  

A story of sorts takes shape (abstracted from standard ballet tragedy, like the choreography itself) as a mature danseur finally arrives (Nelson Madrigal), led blindly by a seeming angel of death (Dusty Button). It's easy (as it is in the case of Apollo) to equate this figure with Mr. B himself, but perhaps this nameless male is meant instead as a kind of embodiment of the masculine principle. At any rate, after a series of piercing duets with "the Waltz Girl," as she has come to be known (Ellis), he abandons her - led off again, blindly, by that dark personification of Terpsichore. Devastated - but supported, and perhaps mourned, by her bevy of vestals - she dances her own poignant apotheosis.

It is among the most haunting works in the canon, and the Ballet performed it all but flawlessly (and with a noticeably higher finish than they managed some five years ago). Kuranaga was, needless to say, exquisite, although Ellis seemed to me a bit too sturdy in her opening variations to hint at the ruin to come. Still, she seemed to mature emotionally as the dance progressed; Madrigal wasn't as technically dazzling as some of the Ballet's men now are, but he can cast a palpable romantic spell - and in her brief, stalking appearances, Button suggested a spooky alienation. The corps, however, outshone all the soloists, I think - which is a good thing, because Balanchine always makes intense, complex demands on his corps; here they were beautifully synchronous, technically pure, and superb in attitude - all but perfect.

It was a bracing plunge, however, from this elevated pathos to the harsh beauty of Chroma. Angular, jarring, knotty, almost painful in its extremity - yet set in a pure, pale box - Wayne McGregor's choreography seems to be about romantic partners who yearn for freedom more than each other. Thus it's worth mentioning, I think, that the sexual frame of Balanchine is here long gone; men and women are both in unisex costumes (at one point there's a same-sex variation), and the girls aren't emotional victims anymore (although sometimes they look like physical ones). Tragedy isn't an option, even though there's still a chorus - but it hangs back from getting involved, preferring to wait in judgment, peering at the combat from the back of the stage (below), or simply waiting for it to finish, with backs turned. 

The cold struggles of Chroma: Lasha Khozashvili and Lia Cirio.

Meanwhile, center stage, both sexes struggle, they writhe; they climb over, grapple, and all but attack each other, before suddenly drooping in exhaustion (above), or freezing in odd stand-offs. The men attempt to manipulate the women, and other times punish them; the women respond with oddly predatory japes and threats. McGregor is ceaselessly inventive, but almost cruel himself in his demands on the dancers' bodies.

So Chroma is not a pretty picture, but it's a fascinating one nonetheless, and set to one of the most arresting dance scores I've heard in years, by Joby Talbot and Jack White of The White Stripes. I know what you're thinking, but rest assured, this isn't the kind of ambience-driven simplistic pop one usually gets from rock musicians gone high-cult. Instead, it's more like Stravinsky gone bossa nova; the score calls for literally four kitchens' worth of percussion, as well as beefed-up brass and winds in the pit; but for once the point isn't just volume (although there's plenty of that).  The timbres are haunting, the motifs sophisticated; passion seems to fight it out with alienation as we listen - the score alone all but blew the roof off the Opera House (the ballet orchestra kicks *ss too, btw).

The dancers did as well - indeed, they received the longest, loudest ovation I've ever heard at the Ballet, or maybe anywhere; the audience wouldn't stop clapping, and wouldn't sit down. This was, to put it simply, because the performers were all brilliant across the board.  One expected superbly crisp work from Paulo Arrais, Lia Cirio, John Lam, Jeffrey Cirio, and particularly the coolly virtuosic Kathleen Breen Combes, who always excel in postmodern attack.  The surprising news was that more classic specialists like Misa Kuranaga, Whitney Jensen, and Lasha Khozashvili had the same relentless edge, and younger dancers Isaac Akiba and Bradley Schlagheck likewise seemed as strong or stronger than I've ever seen them.   

It's true that Chroma seems to just stop rather than end; it lacks the structural development of Serenade. But to be honest, it also leaves you with a haunting question: with the emotional underpinnings of classic ballet stripped away, is that kind of structure even possible?  Or has the frustrating "freedom" of postmodern life rendered the grand statement obsolete?

Such fraught doubts were banished, however, as the curtain rose on Balanchine's ravishing Symphony in C (at top) which arrived like the most powerful palate-cleanser ever devised.  It's set to Bizet's symphony of the same name, and of course key (written with sparkling exuberance when the composer was all of 17); and it is, I think, the divertissement to end all divertissements; Balanchine, who devised it at age 43 as Le Palais de Cristal (which gives you some hint of its thematic links to the later Jewels), seems to be able to tap into Bizet's youthful invention while retaining some deeper atmosphere of worldly experience.  The variations keep coming, the scheme keeps growing in size (by the finale there are some 50 dancers onstage), and yet the work never loses its butterfly-lightness, its knowing brilliance.

And amazingly, many of the dancers who had powered through Chroma came back and triumphed again without missing a beat. This time it was Jeffrey Cirio, Whitney Jensen, Misa Kuranaga, and Lasha Khozashvili who were in their element; but they were dazzlingly matched by Paulo Arrais, Lia Cirio, Kathleen Breen Combes, and Bradley Schlagheck (who this year seems to be coming into his own in a general way).  It was the kind of performance you never want to end, the kind that (like some negative twin of Chroma) really can't end until the curtain falls.  Indeed, I'm sure for many in the audience, it's still lighting up their dreams.

The two must-sees this weekend: BLO's Flying Dutchman and Boston Ballet's Chroma

Chroma at the Royal Ballet - the Boston version may actually be a bit better danced!

The two current "must-sees" of the Boston cultural scene are The Flying Dutchman (at Boston Lyric Opera, see review below), and Wayne McGregor's Chroma (above) at Boston Ballet.  Chroma is all jagged, up-to-the-minute postmodern viscera, set to a strikingly sophisticated (though pounding) score by Joby Talbot and Jack White of the White Stripes (with orchestrations by Christopher Austin).   I promise you it will be the most-discussed dance of the season; and what's more, it's set in a program of Balanchine classics (Serenade and Symphony in C) whose austere lyricism somehow brilliantly sets off McGregor's extremities.  Full review to follow - but don't wait.

A beauty of a Beauty from Boston Ballet

Jeffrey Cirio and Misa Kuranaga, the perfect couple.

To turn from Boston Ballet's "All Kylián" program of two weeks ago to the lush embrace of Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty is to experience a dizzying kind of high-cultural whiplash.  For while the Kylián program tiptoed up to (and perhaps over) the cutting edge of modern dance, Beauty conjures a retro-classic version of a ballet classic. Actually, make that a classic retro-classic ballet classic - for you'd need an archeologist to fully excavate all the layers of dance development embedded in this sumptuous production. The choreographers listed on the program tell the story all by themselves - Petipa; de Valois; Ashton; the sobriquets of a full century of ballet aristocracy. No wonder watching this dance is like peering through the pentimento of one genius to the portrait of another, etched on the palimpsest of a third; the very history of ballet seems to sleep within this Beauty.

It must be admitted, however, that the weight of history can make the second, and most imperial, of Tchaikovsky's famous trio of ballets seem almost too stately - especially in the Prologue, in which for awhile it's the plot that slumbers.  Or maybe it was simply that at the performance I attended (for once I missed opening night), the divertissements by the various fairies who visit Princess Aurora's christening were essayed in a rather desultory manner by recent graduates of the corps.  But the production quickly came together with the entrance of star Erica Cornejo as the wicked Carabosse (below right) - you know, the one who lays down the curse that Aurora will someday prick her finger on a spindle and sleep forever. Zooming onstage in her badfairymobile, Cornejo hardly danced a step, but nevertheless all but smacked her lips as she chewed  on David Walker's opulent scenery.

In this version of the tale, the Lilac Fairy (no, I'd never heard of her either) somehow has the power to cut back Aurora's life sentence in dreamland to just twenty years - after that, she can be awakened by a kiss.  Luckily, of course, lonely Prince Désiré (hmmm), who's just the man for the job, happens to be wandering by with a hunting party at the right moment, and the rest is - well, ballet history.

Erica Cornejo vamps it up as Carabosse.

It's hard to believe, I grant, that real poignance could be wrung from such a libretto, but of course The Sleeping Beauty, like most fairy tales, taps into deep psychological tropes, and its basic theme - the destruction, then redemption, of feminine innocence - resonates through the culture.  And the Ballet has been lucky in its casting of Aurora -  indeed, there's a classic performance set within this classic production. Misa Kuranaga, a porcelain presence with one of the company's lightest, cleanest techniques, has danced Aurora before, and always to acclaim.  But now she seems to have reached some lustrous new identification with the role; she isn't "interpreting" Aurora, she simply is Aurora.  Kuranaga soars through the ballet's famous technical challenges (including the punishing "Rose Adagio," in which she must remain frozen on point for an eternity); but more importantly, whenever she is onstage, she awakens a kind of luminous joy in Th Sleeping Beauty that makes it transfixing.

And it's hard to imagine a more perfect partner than Jeffrey Cirio, who has always been adorable, but whose technique seems to have been building by leaps and bounds from year to year; you feel you can almost see him growing artistically, like some sprouting adolescent.  Now he has a technical sheen to match Kuranaga's, and has become quite the romantic lead, too - his sudden swoop into melancholy when left alone during his hunting party, for instance, was a triumph of subtle emotional suggestion. And there are few danseurs in the Ballet who can rival him as a responsive, supportive partner; indeed, his final swan-dive catches of an utterly trusting Kuranaga elicited gasps from the audience.

Misa Kuranaga and the corps in The Sleeping Beauty.  Photos: Rosalie O'Connor

Well, that right there is reason enough to see The Sleeping Beauty - if you have Aurora and Désiré, you are, as they say, in business.  But wait, there's more in this particular production; in the famous "garland dance" of the first act, for instance, the corps made up for its seeming indifference in the Prologue.  Meanwhile Lia Cirio made a sweetly determined Lilac Fairy - all motherly concern above, calm steel below - and in the triumphant third-act divertissements (in which characters from other fairy tales drop by to party down) there were impressive turns by John Lam, Adiarys Almeida, and Ashley Ellis in a courtly pas de trois, as well as an amusing double hissy-fit by Bradley Schlagheck and Kimberley Uphoff as Puss'n'Boots and the White Cat.  More striking still were Dalay Parrondo and new soloist Avetik Karapetyan as Princess Florine and the Blue Bird; Karapetyan made a pretty muscular avian, but he and Parrondo shared an intriguing, teasing vibe - she was seemingly all frail temptation, he all languid power.  Together they brought an intriguing note of exoticism to this grand paean to innocence regained.

Killer Kylián at Boston Ballet

Paulo Arrais and Lia Cirio in Wings of Wax. Photos: Rosalie O'Connor

"All Kylián," the current offering from Boston Ballet (at the Opera House through this weekend) may not tell the entire story of Jiří Kylián, one of the leading choreographic lights of the millennium. But it does convincingly chart the arc of his career, from the late apprenticeship of Symphony of Psalms (1978), to the glory days of Wings of Wax (1997), to such latter-day explorations as Tar and Feathers (2006).  

The only conceptual trouble with the evening is that its chronology is muddled (we get the earliest piece last, and the last in the middle). So for the uninitiated, the development of this remarkable artist may be a little hard to parse amid what amounts to artistic background noise. Symphony of Psalms, for instance, is too indebted to other choreographers, and the dance tradition of Stravinsky in general, to quite count as all Kylián. And Tar and Feathers more than meets Samuel Beckett half-way, in a daring attempt to meld dance with absurdist theatre. Only in Wings of Wax (at left), from roughly the mid-point of his achievement, does Kylián's unique style "come clear," if you will.

Thus I'll be treating this trio of dances in their historical (rather than programmatic) order.  Which means I'll begin with Symphony of Psalms, a sweeping, if slightly stiff, evocation of Stravinsky's late work of the same name (which was a BSO commission, btw, back in the days when the BSO commissioned important stuff).  This choral piece is, as you might guess from its title, vaguely liturgical in character, but somewhat restless in form; perhaps most striking is that Stravinsky dips into octatonic scales, the basis of Petrushka and The Rite of Spring; hence even though Psalms is grouped in the composer's "neoclassical" period, echoes of his early breakthroughs haunt it (and especially so in the forceful performance at the Ballet by the New World Chorale).

Kylián, for his part, conjures a complex ceremony that might be a courtship dance - or even a group marriage.  (Perhaps inspired by claims that octatonic scales are sourced in Persian music, the choreographer sets his couples before a cascade of carpets.)  Or is the action some kind of purge - as much of it takes the shape of combative duets alternating with exultant gestures - or perhaps even a form of funeral, as the entire community marches off into suicidal darkness at the finish (with one poor girl looking back)?  Whatever  Kylián may be aiming at precisely - and ambiguity became one of his signatures - the choreographer often echoes not only Rite of Spring but also Les Noces, so clearly the general idea is metaphoric extension of those works' cruel, communal religiosity.  In stylistic terms, this sometimes gives the piece the air of apprentice-work. Still, you can make out in its lineaments the beginnings of Kylián's mature style: couples tend to pivot against each other in what amount to choreographic co-shares; the stage is almost unconsciously laid out into a metaphoric grid, with dancers often obliquely plotted to the audience; and almost every gesture admits to at least two interpretations.
The ensemble the Ballet deployed against the work's substantial demands was heavy with established stars - Erica Cornejo, Jeffrey Cirio, Lasha Khozashvili, Sabi Varga, and Yury Yanowsky all had their moments as they mixed it up with (relative) newcomers like Adiarys Almeida, Emily Mistretta, Dalay Parrondo, and Patrick Yocum.  Thus, perhaps inevitably, the duets came off better than the patterned corps work.  I have to admit, though, that I was most struck by someone I'd never seen before - who turned out to be Avetik Karapetyan, a passionate soloist who joined the company only last year. When a new soloist steals the spotlight from half the Ballet's principal dancers, I'd say he's someone to watch.

Bright young lights likewise dominated Wings of Wax, the meditation on the myth of Icarus that showcased Kylián in mid-flight.  Here the complexities had if anything deepened, in a fluidly interlocking set of variations for eight couples (I believe there were 8 couples in Psalms, too); but the dance still felt accessible, interpretible.  A ghostly tree floated center-stage, but upside down - a resonant but ambiguous totem, orbited by a mechanical sun (a single spotlight).  Had it, like that wing-bound youth of legend, plummeted to earth from some unimaginable height?  Or were we actually looking at its fully-formed root system, while its branches were still mere stubs?  Or was the stage floor actually meant as stand-in for the sky, across which the dancers "flew"?



Whatever one made of the back-drop, the moves themselves were clearly about risk, both emotional and physical, and, yes, the inevitable falls to earth that result from taking chances.  To a mosaic of snippets from von Biber, Cage, Glass, and Bach, dancers raced ahead of each other, nearly "flew" away from each other, leaned on each other, connected and disconnected and connected again (more choreographic co-shares) in complex yet spontaneous patterns of dependency, restraint, and support (see Youtube of an earlier Nederlands Dans Theater performance, above).

And I'm happy to report that the Ballet sailed through this challenging piece with flying colors (even if it's in black and white).  By now the company boasts one of the most experienced Kylián ensembles in America, but even in this context there were startlingly electric turns from the reliable Paulo Arrais and Kathleen Breen Combes; meanwhile Lia Cirio and Whitney Jensen brought their usual grace and poise to everything they did.  Robert Kretz was more convincing when coupled than when solo - he needs  a partner to come life - but Bradley Schlagheck seemed more committed than I've remembered him in the past, and Emily Mistretta glowed with a kind of stricken glamor.

Sandwiched between these two successes, however, was the mysterious Tar and Feathers (from 2006), in which Kylián often plays the sphinx, in an apparent attempt to conjure the haunting, gnomic absurdity of late-stage Beckett.  The piece is even partly set to a scrap of the great playwright's work - his last poem, in fact, "What is the Word?," read by none other than Kylián himself (so we know precisely where he's coming from, if not exactly what he's saying).  The poem in question was dedicated to the late Joseph Chaikin, the noted American director who at the time was suffering from aphasia as the result of a stroke (Chaikin spent his last years performing texts developed for him as a result of his affliction; one of his own last performances was of Beckett's poem).

Lia Cirio, John Lam and Robert Kretz in Tar and Feathers.

Now aphasia - a disruption in the ability to process language - is, even on the surface, a challenging topic for a dance (even for a straightforward choreographer). And with Kylián in charge, you also know the dance itself will be in some ways aphasic - that is, its inability to communicate its own theme will be part and parcel of its performance.

No wonder, then, many in the audience were puzzled by the strange spectacle of Tar and Feathers (the critics didn't do much better, btw).  The piece is certainly elegant, with talented pianist Tomoko Mukaiyama up near the rafters, tinkling away on a Steinway on stilts (perhaps to suggest the distance between the musings of the aphasic and the sparkling music of Mozart, among others).  Meanwhile, downstage left, a kind of crystal built of bubble wrap glows invitingly.  The dancers attempt to approach it - perhaps they intend to describe it - but their gestures are tortured, their faces torn into poignant grimaces (at right). Often they turn away from its luminous mystery, and grope for order among themselves - the performances here were all headlong - but little of this comes to much (and their struggles are interrupted by snarls on the soundtrack, anyway, as their communal efforts inevitably collapse).

So Tar and Feathers proves a frustrating, but somehow intriguing (perhaps even darkly charming) dance - and one that slips in an absurdist wink from tragedy to burlesque and back again.  Indeed, it closes on a wry note that's more than worthy of Beckett: the last dancer steps unthinkingly on a stray panel of bubble-wrap, which pops amusingly beneath her toes: the unnameable enigma she has been so desperately trying to explain at last begins to speak for itself, unbidden.

The Nutcracker re-booted, and re-born

Jeffrey Cirio gives his cadets their marching orders before the Ballet's spectacular new Christmas tree.

The Boston Ballet production of The Nutcracker has been oft been voted America's favorite - so you could argue that tinkering with it is a risk - and a wholesale re-boot, perhaps pure folly.

Yet the re-invention that premiered last weekend at the Opera House proved the nay-sayers wrong. Robert Perdziola’s dazzling sets and (literally) sparkling costumes bring a welcome sophistication to this beloved warhorse, and artistic director Mikko Nissinen has made sure the dancing is at as high a level as ever.  On opening night, the new stage configurations meant that some bits of blocking (particularly the opening moments) were vague - and a few funny tricks have gone missing (there's no tiny stretcher for wounded mice, alas - although something tells me this much-loved bit of business will come back). But there are moments of awe and wonder here that more than compensate for these occasional gaps.  It has been a long time since I've heard gasps from the adults at a Christmas show, but at Perdziola's best and grandest gambits, that's exactly what you heard from even grizzled ballet veterans.  Which may be why this Nutcracker felt like a big new Christmas gift to the city.

Designer Perdziola's basic impulse has been to pull this storybook ballet a little bit closer to the storybook; the spirit of children's illustration hovers over his intricately painted sets, which are heavy on panels that open like the leaves of an album.  His costumes, meanwhile, lean away from the heavily structured Victorian frou-frou of the last version toward the sleeker, draped look of the Empire period - which is closer to the timing of E.T.A. Hoffmann's original story; in essence, we feel we're looking at what might have been illustrations for it the year it was published (1816).  And for good measure Perdziola has thrillingly re-imagined a few "tent-pole" special effects: this production's Christmas tree, for instance, opened into an awesome, twinkling bower that covered the entire stage, and the Snow King and his Queen no longer caper through evergreens, but instead pirouette through a pristine grove of Russian birches.

And if the venerable version that held the Ballet's stage for over two decades sometimes felt like a grab-bag of shifting stances, tricks, and even gimmicks, this one attempts a little more internal incoherence.  There's more real dancing for Clara, and what's more, it's dancing with a psychological dimension - she's not a little girl this time around, but clearly on the edge of adolescence (though not over it - her Christmas gift is a pair of pointe shoes, so she's about 12). Drosselmeier - and that romantic factotum, the Nutcracker Prince (at left) - play a subtler role in her fantasy life than usual, but the production reminds us that it is a fantasy life; in the poignant coda to this version, Clara awakens from the Kingdom of Sweets back in Kansas - or at least her parlor at home.

On opening night, our Clara was the charming young Chelsea Perry, who proved as gifted an actress as she is a dancer, and who was clearly completely "over" her tantrum-prone brother, Fritz (the feisty young Santiago Paniagua).  Many of the other characters in the familiar yarn were played by familiar faces - we were again lucky enough to see Isaac Akiba's amazing leaps in the Russian dance, and Joseph Gatti and Adiarys Almeida once more charmed in the Chinese dance.  In other cases, however, familiar roles weren't quite so familiar anymore; the dashing Sabi Varga, now the Ballet's most reliable romantic lead, was always compelling, but seemed to still be working through the new, slightly-spookier conception of Drosselmeier. Meanwhile the brilliant Kathleen Breen Combes had finally left the Arabian Dance behind; this year she dazzled as the Snow Queen (next to the electric Paulo Arrais as her King) in what was probably the most ravishingly synchronous duet of the night.

Elsewhere new faces took over, with solid if not stunning results - Brittany Summer impressed in the Arabian (although she was perhaps more aquiline than actually sinuous), and rising star Irlan Silva made a delicately alienated Harlequin (although he didn't quite nail his double tours).  The highlights of the Kingdom of Sweets divertissements were definitely the dazzling Lia Cirio and her waltzing flowers (unfortunately there was a slip in the Spanish dance, which seemed to have been tweaked a bit oddly, perhaps the one misstep in Nissinen's choreography).  And Misa Kuranaga was, of course, everything she should be as the Sugar Plum Fairy - in an inspired pairing with the ever-dreamy Jeffrey Cirio, who is the first Nutcracker Prince I think I've seen who brought truly romantic feeling to their gorgeous pas de deux.  For Cirio's Prince, this all seemed to be a delightful first date - and so it was for us, too.

Indeed, no higher compliment can be paid to this production, I think, than this: for the first time in I don't know how many years (and how many performances) I felt the stirrings of surprise and wonder again as I watched The Nutcracker. Particularly when the giant Christmas tree spread its mantle of glittering, mysterious promise over the stage, I felt that delicious seasonal thrill I perhaps haven't experienced since I was a child. Suddenly The Nutcracker was new again - and so was the magic of Christmas Eve.

The magic of Christmas in The Nutcracker.  Photos: Gene Schiavone.

Jorma Elo wakes up at Boston Ballet

Jeffrey Cirio takes flight in Awake Only.

Perhaps Boston Ballet's intriguing "Fall Program" (through this weekend at the Opera House) is title-free because the marketing department has finally run out of catchphrases they can work around the word "Elo."

As in "Jorma Elo."  For the evening is essentially a showcase for Awake Only, a fresh dance by the Ballet's resident choreographer, whom we've been watching develop for the past seven years (yes, it has been that long).  The piece has little connection to the other works on the program - Christopher Bruce's Rooster, set to hits by the Rolling Stones, and William Forsythe's The Second Detail.  So the evening is a bit of an omnibus affair.  But each dance is a worthy one (or, in the case of Rooster, at least a fun, popular one), and Awake Only - in my opinion - is particularly interesting in that it marks another breakthrough for Elo.  So the fact that the evening is untitled shouldn't give you the idea that its' unimportant - much less unrewarding.

Now as I've written before - I've considered Elo at length - this choreographer has long been obsessed with the problem of integrating street moves and dance pop into the rigors of ballet.  In fact in "The Elo Experience," from last year, dancers Jeffrey Cirio and Larissa Ponomarenko (who together had begun to seem like muses for this choreographer) were even dressed as a club boy and a damaged ballerina, wandering the landscape of clubland.

Larissa has since moved on, of course, but Cirio remains one of the company's leading young lights, and Awake Only seems to signal that Elo's identification with this talented dancer is, if anything, becoming more intense.  But having gone solo, as it were, the choreographer seems to also have turned inward, and produced a dance unlike any we've seen so far from him - one in which he has begun to tiptoe toward true autobiography, and the kind of structured narratives you might expect from Balanchine.

Which is good news, as you could feel Elo cycling and re-cycling much the same material in his last few efforts.  But everything feels different about Awake Only, from the opening moment in which a charmingly self-possessed little boy in pajamas (the adorable Liam Lurker) raises the curtain with a magical gesture, to the blushes of dawn with which John Cuff's lighting often washes the stage, to the obvious autobiographical material that informs the dance itself. As I whispered to my partner, Dorothy - I don't think we're in clubland anymore!


And honestly, I was glad to leave behind the night club (and the cinema, another Elo obsession), and breath a little fresher choreographic air. Not that Elo is entirely free of pop convention here - that little boy "wakes up" a seemingly aged Cirio in Spielbergian style; still, he kicks off what amounts to a poignant and honest engagement with the choreographer's own road to adulthood, set (somewhat surprisingly) to testaments of faith by Bach.

Mom and Dad (a very fine Lia Cirio and Sabi Varga) are on the scene - as paragons of modern ballet, it seems, though their moves are still inflected by Elo's signature quirks and swivels.  And then there's "The Dance" itself - a bevy of ballerinas, in a conceit straight out of Balanchine - from whose ranks emerges Cirio's love interest, a surprisingly tender Kathleen Breen Combes.  What comes next struck me as structurally hazy at times, I admit - but their couplings clearly represented a coming-of-age for Cirio (who lost his shirt after one) and were studded with passionate duets, as well as moments of eloquent stillness.  The dance wraps with an intriguing glimpse of what we assume is "the future" - closing with an intensely poignant gesture that I'll always remember: Combes embraces Cirio's head - his mind - at the last moment, only to have him slip from her grasp to the floor; Elo has in effect choreographed his own death.  Needless to say, seeing Jeffrey Cirio suddenly stilled, after what amounted to a tour de force of constant, quicksilver motion (above), was in and of itself quite devastating.

Alas, the opening number on the program, a reprise of Christopher Bruce's Rooster, boasted little of this mature depth, although its various struts (set to the Rolling Stones) are undeniably fun, and offer a good showcase for the company's young soloists and hard-working members of the corps.  Here the women cut the strongest profile - dressed mostly in black and red, as cheerleaders for Hell's Angels, I suppose. Rachel Cossar again impressed with her intelligent presence in "Lady Jane," while ripe, rollicking Brittany Summer came off as the closest thing to a "Stones girl" currently at the Ballet.  Diana Albrecht and Ashley Ellis also caught my eye - although Bruce's star turn went to the elegant Whitney Jensen, who made a memorable "Ruby Tuesday."  The men had their moments, too - Robert Kretz was a credible cock-of-the-walk, John Lam dazzled as always, and young Irlan Silva made the most of "Paint it Black."

The always-commanding John Lam.

Still, in the end the trouble with Rooster is that it sells the Stones short - Bruce can't really conjure their own awareness of the destructive power they themselves were unleashing; his vision of "Sympathy for the Devil," for instance, is simply a wilder-than-ever good time (rather than a riot-with-murders, as occurred at Altamont).  Tellingly, the finale is simply a repeat of steps from the numbers that have come before; there's not even an attempt at build or summation.  Oh well, as a showcase it's fun, and I suppose it pulls a few musically illiterate boomers into the Ballet.  But beyond that, it's a wash.

The "Program" closed with a return to The Second Detail, a seminal work by William Forsythe, who has been a great influence on Elo and the Ballet's style in general.  I believe we've seen this mysterious piece twice before, yet its cool, strange extravagance - it's part collective rehearsal, part funeral for modernism, part self-referential art-object (there's a title card reading "The" on stage throughout) - has lost little of its weird appeal.  Under clinical overhead light, and set to Thom Willems' thundering, meandering score, it's all abrupt shifts - from explosive combinations to precision corps work - which cycle back to extreme, stretched solos, which themselves suddenly collapse into shrugs and slouches.  And the Ballet seemed to dance it more confidently than ever.

In fact they danced the hell out of it, with edgy, intense displays from Isaac Akiba, Paulo Arrais, and John Lam (at left); there was also off-hand virtuosity on hand from Kathleen Breen Combes, Bo Busby, Jeffrey Cirio, and Whitney Jensen - whose persona was almost made for this stuff.  The piece closes with its most perplexing gambit - an Isadora-Duncan-style diva, done up in Robert Wilson drag, staggers through the collective, briefly organizes it, then suddenly expires. The great Lorna Feijóo once again brought off this strange solo with confident aplomb.  She must know what it means; maybe someday she'll tell me.

Watching the "Next Generation" at Boston Ballet

I'm late with several reviews - and one of those is the note I've been meaning to post for over a week regarding Boston Ballet's "Next Generation" performance, which occurred during the run of Fancy Free.

"Next Generation" is an annual showcase of the rising talent in the Boston Ballet School's pre-professional program, joined onstage by the dancers of Boston Ballet II, the company-within-a-company at the Ballet that serves as a bridge between the completion of schooling and a full-fledged professional career.  The evening is always a charming occasion, but it's all the more remarkable because the entire program is accompanied by the New England Conservatory Youth Philharmonic Orchestra, under the baton of Mark Churchill.  So not only are we watching the dancers of tomorrow, we're hearing the musicians of tomorrow as well.

Brittany Stone and Trevor Felixbrod in The Eighth Layer.

The program always opens with Les Passages, a pleasing promenade designed to highlight the progression of training, choreographed by the School's faculty (above).  The students were all delightful, of course, with a clean, consistent standard of focus in evidence everywhere.  My only thought was that the boys this year got the better choreography - a rambunctious suite of jumps that inevitably drew the loudest applause.  The same gap held true for the students' second appearances, in Alla Nikitina's "Dance of the Girls" and "Lesginka," both drawn from Georgian (as in Russian) folk motifs; the boys just got to do more.

The sexes were on more equal footing, however, in The Eighth Layer, a premiere by the Ballet's own Yury Yanowsky, featuring dancers from Boston Ballet II, and set to a new score commissioned from Berklee grad (and rising light in the world of film scoring) Lucas Vidal.  The dance proved something of a sensation; it was conceived as a meditation on "the relationship between space and energy"- which sounds, I know, like gassy nonsense - but it actually did evoke a sense of quarks popping in and out of some fluctuating quantum field, and thanks to the utter commitment of the Ballet II dancers, often crackled with visceral, athletic thrills.  Vidal's music - a more romantic variant of Philip Glass - was likewise seductively exciting.  The only problem with the piece, actually, was that it currently lacks a satisfying finish; but I'd be eager to see the Ballet stage it again, more fully, with perhaps an expanded score from Vidal, just to see how far its sparks can travel.

At the conclusion of the program, the Ballet II dancers mixed it up with the School's senior trainees in Balanchine's  Raymonda Variations, a pillar of purified classicism that's challenging for young dancers, but not too challenging.  The trainees made Balanchine's demanding corps work look easy, but Ballet II leads Lauren Herfindhal and Matthew Poppe stole the show all the same - especially Poppe, whose cabrioles (and particularly their landings) were things of limpid grace and beauty.

Lauren Herfindhal and Matthew Poppe in Raymonda Variations - Photos: Rosalie O'Connor

I can't close this notice, however, without taking special notice of the artists who were in the pit rather than on the stage. Under Mark Churchill's direction, the young musicians of the New England Conservatory Youth Philharmonic Orchestra were in startlingly strong form throughout the evening - indeed, through most of the performance they could have easily been mistaken for a professional orchestra (and concertmaster Momo Wong's solos were something spectacular).  Sometimes the future of the performing arts looks bright indeed, and "Next Generation" was just such an occasion.

Footloose and Fancy Free at Boston Ballet

James Whiteside, Paul Craig and Isaac Akiba kick up their heels in Fancy Free.  Photos: Gene Schiavone.

It's actually rare that a Boston Ballet program doesn't hang together thematically, but, well, the current Fancy Free (through this weekend at the Opera House) lives up to its moniker; it's a little bit of this, and little bit of that, thrown together fancy-free; most of it's good, some of it's great, and some of it kind of misfires.  You leave it happy, but a little confused.

But that's okay - there's certainly no confusion about the fact that we've been overdue to see Fancy Free, the seminal Jerome Robbins/Leonard Bernstein portrait of three sailors on leave that became the springboard for On the Town (and its subsequent Hollywood incarnation with Gene Kelly), which has long since worked its way into the national consciousness as a central cultural trope of World War II - even though ironically enough, the Jewish Robbins and Bernstein (Robbins was born Rabinowitz), both avoided military service during the fight against the Nazis.

Other ironies cling to Fancy Free; it was inspired by gay artist Paul Cadmus' notorious The Fleet's In! (below), a painting funded by the WPA which had to be withdrawn from public view due to the apparent sexual aggression of its subjects (who, it seems, swing both ways - note the sailors sprawled together on the left).  The gay Robbins, who was far more determined than the bisexual Bernstein to keep himself in the closet, quietly deleted the work's homosexual subtext, however, explaining some years later that "I wanted to show that the boys in the service are healthy, vital boys: there is nothing sordid or morbid about them."

Okay, count me in as sordid and morbid - and the long arc of The Fleet's In! is probably an archetype of how art is processed into pop in this country; but, you know - whatever. At any rate, Robbins left the hetero-sexual harassment angle in, that's for sure (although even this was toned down over time, until in the Gene Kelly vehicle it's actually the women who are the happy aggressors).

The Fleet's In! by the openly gay Paul Cadmus

On its own terms, of course, Fancy Free remains a lark that still spreads bold wings against a dark, empty sky; to the tune of Bernstein's structured "jazz," Robbins' boys fight as much as they flirt, and they float in a kind of desolate urban void, seemingly populated only by the occasional lonely woman (and a bartender straight outta Edward Hopper).

On opening night, this trio included two of the Ballet's strongest athletes, Isaac Akiba and James Whiteside, who were hanging with the up-and-coming Paul Craig (at top).  Akiba channeled his usual eagerness to dazzle into a galvanizing solo, nailing the work's most difficult moment (multiple tours that fall into full splits).  Whiteside, meanwhile, was slyer - one brow was always cocked, the other eye always winking - and delivered a witty, booty-shaking turn as the little clique's class clown.  But Craig was the surprise, once again displaying a smooth technique and a subtler set of acting chops than most dancers his age; his sailor was the guarded, knowing romantic, the guy who might be able to offer a girl more than a five-minute roll in the hay.  As said girls, the reliable Erica Cornejo and Kathleen Breen Combes lit up the stage with fire and smarts, respectively, before they finally fled their uncontrollable suitors - and another up-and-comer, Brittany Summer, then made hilarious comic hay out of a cameo as their next target.

From Barber Violin Concerto

The rest of the program intermittently held to this high standard.  In the evening's first offering, in fact, Peter Martins' Barber Violin Concerto, the dancers themselves were superb, it was the work itself that seemed slight.  Martins offers two couples, one apparently "classic" (she's in toe shoes), the other "modern" (he's bare-chested, both are bare-footed) who first have their own variations, then switch partners, to the accompaniment of Barber's lovely, vaguely modernist concerto.

The idea seems to be a dryly affectionate parody of the conflicted intersection of the modern and the classic; over the course of the dance, the ballerina lets down her hair (!), while the "modern" woman does everything she can to distract her calm, classical consort.  This isn't quite enough to fuel an entire dance, though (it ends suddenly), and several gambits play a bit oddly (or ironically?) against the smooth lyricism of the Barber - still, the work often has a pleasing grace.  Lia Cirio and Pavel Gurevich (at right) were appropriately elegant and remote as the classicists, while Yury Yanowsky and Sylvia Deaton threw sparks as the brutal modernists.  Deaton, who has long lit up the corps and small featured roles, proved a particularly appealing free spirit - she grabbed her big chance with both hands, in a night of young turks taking turns in the spotlight, and perhaps made the biggest splash of all.

Silhouettes from Études 

If the Martins seemed only lightly connected to the Robbins, however, the concluding dance, Harald Lander's Études (to an elaborate orchestration of Czerny's familiar piano exercises) felt like a puzzling non sequitur.  Perhaps the idea was to focus on the corps itself after so many cameos by its former denizens; I don't know.  The idea of the piece is clearly to build from simple exercises to ever-grander choreographic structures, in what can only be called coordinated group solos.  This has some formal interest, I admit - it's at its most effective at its most mechanical, in a few silhouetted sections (at left).  But the development gets repetitive, and at times seems like a big in-joke on what some people think of as "ballet" (you know the type - the ones who insist on an elaborate descriptive vocabulary in French).

And in the end, there's only reason to program Études, and that is if you've got a company that works like clockwork.  And alas, as deep as the Ballet's bench currently is, at least on opening night there were a few slips, both from the corps and the soloists. Still, as the Ballerina with a capital B, Misa Kuranaga was her usual perfect self, and Jeffrey Cirio and Paulo Arrais, the company's current junior stars, wrapped things up with a dazzling technical duel.  It got so competitive, in fact, that Arrais wobbled at one point - but I may have preferred that moment of real, human drama to the some of the robotic virtuosity that had come before.

A grand, if not impossible, dream

Everybody dance now - the Ideal Woman on the hoof in Don Quixote.  Photos by Gene Schiavone.

Okay, let's get the truth-in-advertising part out of the way: Rudolf Nureyev's Don Quixote, with which the Boston Ballet has had a long relationship - and which, in a spectacular new production, runs through the weekend at the Opera House - has almost nothing to do with that novel you may have heard of by that Spanish dude named Cervantes.  In fact, much like the dreaded Man of La Mancha, it's practically an unintentional travesty of its source.  The immortal Quixote gets his share of hard knocks here, it's true, but somehow Cervantes' satire of chivalric delusion never gains any traction, and the daft Don remains a noble dreamer to the end.

Instead, Nureyev focuses on a young couple in love (whom I don't remember from the book at all) who, in pursuit of their nuptials, sometimes intersect with the delusional Quixote - but more often with hordes of townspeople, gypsies, and toreadors - who of course all want to cut a rug.  The whole piece, like much of imperial Russian ballet, is at its heart a pageant, with all manner of divertissements broken up by the occasional pas de deux ( as well as some rather lame "rollicking" comedy and a few utterly random episodes from the actual novel).


So there's not much to think about in this production (and the music, by Minkus, is pretty much free of ideas, too) - but frankly a whole lot to gawk and marvel at.  For the Ballet is now packed with superb dancers, and in the lead roles of "Kitri" and "Basilio" on opening night we got two of the company's best, Jeffrey Cirio and Misa Kuranaga (at top), who feel a bit like a matched set in their light, twinkling precision.  Cirio in particular had his adorability set on "stun," but you couldn't deny he aced Nureyev's tricky footwork with a seemingly unstoppable flow of sheer nimbleness.  His lifts were less dazzling than his leaps, however - he still needs a bit more upper-body power; but is he even fully grown yet? ( I'm not sure.)  Kuranaga was just as charming, if slightly more restrained, and she, too, was close to technical perfection, even as the ballet turned into a punishing obstacle course for her in its last act, with fouettés on top of fouettés, and a series of unsupported freezes en pointe.

Meanwhile Carlos Molina (at left) brought a convincing commitment to the Don's dazed, stricken stare, and even some poignance to his ravishment by various visions of feminine grace (Dusty Button, as the "Queen of the Dryads," above, was perhaps the most convincing of these).  But alas, as Sancho Panza Robert Kretz was all pratfalls and little loyal steadfastness (and for some reason he was a monk rather than a peasant), and we just didn't get enough of Paulo Arrais, who still made a skillfully funny sketch of Gamache, Basilio's competition for Kitri's hand.  There were other brilliant turns, many from the women - Kathleen Breen Combes tossed off her "street dancer" with brio, and Adiarys Almeida, Rachel Cossar, and Olga Malinovskaya all had striking moments.

There are a few intriguing eccentricities to Nureyev's choreography - he uses a male corps more often than you'd expect, and tends to arrange his background dancers in flat, moving friezes.  But basically he goes for the money solo every time (although there is a subtler pas de deux at the top of the second act in which Kuranaga and Cirio conveyed a sense of private, rather than public, romance).  Indeed, watching Don Quixote, you feel as if you're getting a glimpse into a grand, if somewhat empty, lost tradition - which I suppose has its own meta-resonance with Cervantes!  And is grandeur for its own sake really such a bad thing, anyhow?  (We may miss it when it's gone.) I should also note that the splendid sets were by Nicholas Georgiadis, and the atmospheric (somehow antique) lighting, drawn from a palette of burnt siena and umber, was by John Cuff.  Through Sunday.

Boston Ballet meets Beyoncé

Yes, that's James Whiteside, Principal Dancer of Boston Ballet - or rather that's his alter ego, "JBDubs," breaking out into the club scene and channeling Beyoncé - or at least her famous SNL skit - with his new (hopefully) hit single "I Hate My Job" (backed by fellow Boston Ballet dancers Bradley Schlagheck and Lawrence Rines; I hope they don't all hate their jobs!). Now I'm not sure old Beyoncé needs to worry about James' pipes - but his legs are another matter; the choreography here is hot, and the boys are definitely rockin' those, um, red shoes, oh yeah. And it sounds like James may have chops as a producer, and the lyrics are nasty fun most definitely. You can hear more of JB's songs on his blog (see how many of the Ballet's dancers you can spot in the song "So I Cry"), or, boogie down in a master class with him for just $15 at Urbanity Dance next Wednesday.  Now all I have to do is shake these images before I see Don Quixote in two weeks . . . that is if James hasn't decamped for stardom in Lady Gaga's entourage by then . . .

Boston Ballet's "Play with Fire"

Photo(s) by Rosalie O'Connor.

In Boston Ballet's "Play with Fire" program (through this weekend at the Opera House), two of the pieces are re-heated; we've seen Bella Figura, and an early version of Jorma Elo's Sharper Side of Dark, before.

And yet these are the evening's dances that burn bright indeed - I suppose once again proving the old saw that you should never catch a dance premiere - instead, wait for the steps to settle on a company, and watch them unfold in a way you never dreamed possible. But by all means see these works now! Certainly "Play with Fire" showcases some of the best dancing the Ballet has done this year, and maybe in years.  For long stretches it's dazzling, even awe-inspiring.  What's more, Jorma Elo's re-working of his earlier SHARP Side of DARK seems to have burnt away much of the mannerism that has sometimes obscured this choreographer's true gifts.  Sharper Side of Dark isn't just the most beautiful ballet he has yet created, it may eventually count as a major breakthrough.

And it's clear what has brought about this transformation; Elo has finally embraced the pas de deux, that core balletic statement which he has so often danced around (sorry!). This choreographer has always been obsessed with ballet's place in modernity; indeed, he has consciously replaced the moonlight and willows of Swan Lake and its ilk with the lighting grids and technology of clubland; if that is where romance happens today, Elo seems to be saying, then that is where ballet must follow.

The trouble has always been that Elo's (accurate, I think) vision of modern movement - jumpy,  independent, always wary - has been at odds with the bedrock of ballet, which has always been about romantic commitment.  Thus his dances have often come off as ballet with ADD - his dancers have always swerved around each other, unable to connect, and so unable, in the end, to connect with us.

Jeffrey Cirio in Rooster.

But he somehow has transcended this problem in Sharper Side of Dark, which is basically a long series of duets set to Bach's Goldberg Variations.  True, the "lovers" here only intermittently touch - and the twitchiness of Elo's usual manner has hardly been entirely banished.  But often these partners now move in synchrony - and it's a gorgeous, ravishing, hurtling kind of grace.  Elo is helped immeasurably by the fact that the Ballet is now technically so promethean, and so in tune with his various modes; on the evening I saw the program, the stunning performances just kept coming (and coming), so I simply have to commend everyone in the dance:  Lia Cirio, Kathleen Breen Combes, Corina Gill, Whitney Jensen, Paulo Arrais, Jeffrey Cirio, Sabi Varga, and James Whiteside were all at their absolute best.  Bravo.  This kind of performance only makes you wish the Ballet could bring Sharper back in repertory again, and soon.

The second item on the program, however, was nearly as strong - and in its thematic range and depth, more ambitious than anything Elo has yet attempted.  Jiří Kylián's Bella Figura (at top, and masthead), an exquisite meditation on identity and gender that by now is a postmodern classic, ravished us when we first saw it last season, and in the meantime it seems to have only grown more mysterious and evocative.  And once again, performances were even subtler and more affecting than I remembered them: Rie Ichikawa in particular was unforgettable as the proto-soul who seems to be struggling out of a voluptuous darkness and into some sort of exquisite, though vulnerable, consciousness.  (I'd bet this will be remembered as the performance of Ichikawa's career.) But once again, the great turns kept coming - some nights there's almost an "Oh yeah? Watch this!" dynamic in operation at the Ballet. Lorna Feijóo tore up the floor with Lasha Khozashvili (who's a good match for her, o ye casting gods), and there was more finely poised work from Dalay Parrondo, Sarah Wroth, Tiffany Hedman, John Lam, and Paul Craig, as well as the tireless Sabi Varga, who has of late cut his own profile as a reliably committed and intriguing presence onstage.

Bella Figura seems to keep ramifying in your mind long after the curtain has fallen - so it's a tough act to follow; but alas, Christopher Bruce's Rooster, the last item on the program, was hardly up to the task, friendly and funky as it may be.  But then just how deep a dance do you really think you can choreograph to a score by the Rolling Stones?  As a general rule, a rich choreographic language requires a rich musical one, and let's be honest, the Stones, for all their rude appeal, hardly weave instrumentals of any real development or depth.  And take the sneer out of Mick Jagger - i.e., plunk him down into a ballad - and boy, does his basic weakness as a singer suddenly loom; often, in "softer" Stones hits like "Lady Jane" and "As Tears Go By," his phrasing is relentlessly labored, and you can hear him landing on pitches with a flat, ungainly thud.  Ouch.

Oh, well.  I admit Christopher Bruce did what he could with the material - he conjured a kind of prom night that easily admitted a variety of modes and moods, from the Stones' folk-rolk noodling to their darkest "Satanic" doodling.  James Whiteside had fun strutting as the titular (and very self-aware) cock-of-the-walk, while Jeffrey Cirio impressed as a smoother, cooler customer; likewise Rachel Cossar and especially Whitney Jensen had some dazzling moments in the spotlight.  Still - this was the premiere of the evening, and really everything in material as superficial as this depends on the confidence and daring of the performers.  So my recommendation is - bring this one back!  Rooster will never amount to much intellectually, but something tells me that re-heated, with all the performers more familiar with it, it may be quite a bit hotter - or at least ignite with something of the Stones' empty fire.

Boston Ballet's "Simply Sublime"

Photo above and at top: Gene Schiavone.

In a way, Boston Ballet's current program "Simply Sublime" (through this weekend at the Opera House) is a milestone, because nothing in it is really new, and that's kind of the point.  The company has been edging for years toward a standing repertory that it could simply dip into for an evening's programming, the way other world-class companies can.  The idea is to see how the work in question has settled on the company, to assess how it has grown since its premiere.

And that's perhaps the central pleasure of "Simply Sublime" - the works have settled well on the Ballet's dancers, and have grown in power and subtlety; although, okay, the company hasn't done Les Sylphides since 1976, so the current dancers can't be familiar with it (few of them were even born in 1976).   But the steps of this Michel Fokine classic (at top) are so familiar, so built into our basic understanding of "ballet," that in a way you feel every major company already has the piece as a part of its artistic DNA.

Not that I'm a fan of Les Sylphides, however.  I know it's a classic in formal terms - it's the first so-called "ballet blanc," in which dance skipped away from story and became a pure meditation on music and mood.  The trouble is that the ballet's formal innovations are now all commonplaces - its sense of purification is old hat - and its "variations" hardly vary in tone (and it smooths a series of dizzingly different Chopin waltzes into one long, labored sigh).  Indeed, its content is one long sentimentally dated cliché; all these "sylphs" do is flutter and pose in attitudes of virginal melancholy, that is when they're not being half-heartedly chased by a dreamy "poet."  The girls even wear wings on their backs, for chrissakes (are they fairies? fireflies?).  I know this is the kind of ballet that makes little girls want to become ballerinas.  The trouble is that I'm a big girl now.

Indeed, I confess I've never seen Les Sylphides come off - and I still haven't, not quite.  The Ballet got closer than most companies, I suppose - the corps was certainly fine, and all the company's leading women could do these steps with their eyes closed.  But alas, as the poet, Nelson Madrigal too often landed with a clunk, and the brilliant Whitney Jensen just seemed too coolly self-possessed for this kind of fluff; and to be honest, watching the great Lorna Feijóo bourrée around and bat her eyes is like watching a jungle cat pretend it's a kitten.  Only the lovely Erica Cornejo had the right kind of dreamy presence for Les Sylphides; gently diaphanous romance is her forte, and she was ravishing throughout.  Which only goes to show you that there's no choreography so silly that some dancer somewhere can't make it seem transcendent.

Photo: Eric Antoniou

The program then leapt decades, to Christopher Wheeldon's celebrated Polyphonia (at left) which proved the triumph of the evening.  In one way, the piece seems a world apart from Les Sylphides; the Fokine is all curves, the Wheeldon all angles.  But seen from another perspective, the two are almost like twins separated at birth (by almost a century) - or rather Polyphonia feels like the latest branch in the Fokine family tree.

This is because Polyphonia (the name means "many voices") channels and re-focuses bits and pieces of the "white ballet" tradition into a stunningly harmonious - if slightly cold - new whole (only this time the ballet is violet, not blanc, as at left).  When I first saw this dance a few years back, I imagined (like a lot of critics) that it was essentially derived from Balanchine - perhaps because the costuming reminded me of the great Mr. B. at his most abstract.

But as it has settled on the Ballet, Polyphonia seems to have opened up into a cornucopia of references to everyone from Pilobolus to Mark Morris (even Petipa gets a nod). Yet intriguingly, like Les Syphides, it maintains for its many entwined couples a single mood - alienated, ironic, perhaps post-romantic but not actually unromantic - even though (again like Les Sylphides) it's drawn from various piano pieces from a single composer's career (in this case the great György Ligeti).  This time, however, each piece is allowed its own integrity (and each was played astoundingly well by the talented Freda Locker).  And all the dancing was exemplary - my eye was caught again by Paul Craig and Dalay Parrondo, as well as Adiarys Almeida and Jeffrey Cirio.  But the dance belonged to the calm contortions of Kathleen Breen Combes, whose duets with Yury Yanowsky were always serenely disturbing.

Last up was Mr. B. himself - his sprawling Symphony in Three Movements, to the Stravinsky score of the same name (and that composer's first major work after his emigration to America).  Balanchine's dance dates from some three decades later - and thus perhaps the strange, parodic edge he seems to have given  his fellow Russian's attitude toward his new home.  Symphony was seen back in 1945 as a neoclassical tribute to the fight against fascism, but in Balanchine's hands it turns into a sardonic smile at all-American "drive" and "energy," with squads of bathing beauties in Esther Williams swimsuits (see masthead) lined up to dive into invisible swimming pools, as athletic boys bounce back and forth on a virtual basketball court.  It's fun, but I'm not convinced it's actually major Balanchine; it's all variation with little real development - the dancers are divers, then pilots, then maybe some kind of giant machine, but who knows why or wherefore - and the cornucopia of movement sometimes feels crowded on the Opera House stage.  Still, once again the Ballet's performance of the work had clearly matured since the last time we saw it, and Lia Cirio, Dalay Parrondo, and especially Isaac Akiba (one of the Ballet's best jumpers, and happiest athletes in general) all acquitted themselves exceptionally well.  Still, the piece's relationship to what had come before felt at best oblique.  Neither attuned to its score nor its true period, Symphony in Three Movements seems to dance to a political rather than emotional or aesthetic beat.

The return - and last bow - of a classic

Whitney Jensen sails through the Waltz of the Flowers.  Photos: Gene Schiavone.

I'm not sure I have anything left to say about The Nutcracker. I'm not sure anybody does. But as I settled into my seat to catch the first night of Boston Ballet's annual edition, I looked forward to its familiar pleasures just as I always do.   Does the Ballet do this holiday classic up right?  Yes, most definitely, and I'm not alone in that opinion - judging from online polls, it's the most popular Nutcracker in the country.  Which really should come as no surprise, given artistic director Mikko Nissinen has taken great care to pack as much entertainment value as he can into his company's big moneymaker - indeed, at times it feels almost overstuffed, a kind of holiday behemoth with something for everyone.

You could argue, I suppose, that some versions are cleaner and more coherent - often because they've recruited an adult Clara, which allows for more narrative dancing in the second half.  And indeed, the Boston Ballet edition is not so much an artistic statement as an extravaganza; it lurches occasionally in its narrative, and swings from fantasy to romance to comedy at the drop of a snowflake.  But who cares?  The kids always laugh at the mechanical mouse, and Dad always wakes up when the sylph of the "Arabian" dance begins her barely-PG contortions, while Mom just finds everything adorable; and I'm not going to argue with any of them.

Alas, a few of this elaborate production's tricks didn't quite come off on opening night; a magic handkerchief went rogue, for instance, briefly entangling Sabi Varga's spooky, sexy Drosselmeier.  So maybe it's a good thing the sets and costumes are being "retired," bright and bold as they are - in case you haven't heard, this year is your last chance to see them.  And you should, of course, because they're charming in a deliciously high, fantastical key - but something tells me next year's edition will be charming, too (never fear, my inside sources assure me the production will remain traditional - you can see an initial sketch of the possibilities at www.bostonballet.org/nutcracker2012).  So you should probably see the show this year and next, just like I do.

Indeed, watching the production play out over time has turned out to be the best way for me to assess the growth of the Ballet's general technical ability. By now, however, the bench of talent has grown so deep and so wide that it may have outgrown this particular yardstick.  To be honest, the second act is now one long stretch of technical prowess - every one of Tchaikovsky's divertissements seems to have its own expert interpreter.  Indeed, as the dancers parade into the Kingdom of Sweets at the top of the act, you could be forgiven for feeling slightly stunned.   We've already met mainstays James Whiteside, Lia Cirio, and Misa Kuranaga - but then Rie Ichikawa, Kathleen Breen Combes, Lasha Khozashvili, Adiarys Almeida, Joseph Gatti, Jeffrey Cirio, and Whitney Jensen file through, along with many others - the great dancers just keep coming and coming, until they fill the stage.

Lia Cirio (the Sugar Plum Fairy) guides Rachel Harrison (Clara) through the Kingdom of Sweets.

There were incremental steps forward evident for some younger members of the company, too.  The up-and-coming Paolo Arrais, for instance, who dazzled us as Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, unexpectedly had to step in for John Lam as the Snow King - and dazzled us all over again.  And somehow Isaac Akiba's leaps during his "Russian" dance had a lyricism this time around they've lacked before; Akiba has always been a great athlete, but now I could feel real emotion moving beneath his sunny ability; he's becoming a great dancer, too.  Lawrence Rines likewise made a solid impression as a loose-limbed Harlequin, against Dalay Parrondo's reliably precise Columbine.  And the very youngest members of the cast - the children - all performed with dedication and charm, while Rachel Harrison (above, with Lia Cirio) made a sweetly poised Clara.

Down in the pit, conductor Jonathan McPhee gave what may be the longest stretch of memorable melody in existence his usual vigorous shape, although as in Romeo and Juliet, I'm afraid there was roughness in the horns here and there.  Still, principal trumpet Bruce Hall came through with a gleamingly confident solo in the "Spanish" dance that seemed to almost sum up the virtues of this much-loved version - dazzling show-biz brio, a solid sense of fun, and dancing chops to die for.

Boston Ballet's Romeo and Juliet

Misa Kuranaga and Pavel Gurevitch in Romeo and Juliet.  Photo(s): Rosalie O'Connor

We're awash in "translated" Shakespeare right now - we've seen at least five operas and ballets based on the Bard in the past few months, and there are more on the way. Few will surpass the John Cranko/Sergei Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet, however, which runs through this weekend at the Opera House in a rich and rewarding production from Boston Ballet.  Prokofiev's score is itself a wonder; it's one of the few story-ballet scores that are of serious musical interest - which is all the more striking because it's not just a series of divertissements, but is crammed with narrative and emotional detail.  And Cranko's choreography is justly celebrated for matching it toe-to-toe, if you will, in the plot department, while also brilliantly evoking its doomy mood; this is a Romeo and Juliet in which the mutual hatred of the Capulets and the Montagues operates as implacable curse (their final reconciliation is cut), and the deaths of the principals seem inevitable from the start.  Indeed, together Cranko and Prokofiev lift the story ballet to the level of tragedy; and fans of the Bard (as well as ballet) will want to catch the production because it offers a rare chance to see onstage what postmodern theatre productions of R&J usually cheat us of - rousing, convincing fights and dances, and a passionate vision of the physical grace of youth.

Which is what keeps this version, despite its grim undertow, always full of life (and love).  And Boston Ballet knows just how to do it up right (we've seen this production before, and just a few years ago - but I was happy to drink it all in again).  Susan Benson's opulent costumes and set (dominated by a looming central arch) tint the Renaissance with a shadow of the Middle Ages, and the painterly glow of Christopher Dennis's lighting seems to capture several different times of day and night.  Meanwhile, down in the pit, Jonathan McPhee delivered a generally gripping accompaniment (particularly strong where the building, dissonant chords which finally collapse in a deathly crash), although there were a few scrapes from both the strings and the horns at the top of their respective ranges.

Still, the Ballet Orchestra seemed to always be propelling the action, and indeed, the flow of the big crowd scenes are where Cranko's nearly cinematic choreographic sense is most in evidence. In this Verona, the corps is shaped and massed into a constantly engaging vision of a village on the move, and details "pop" in the background just when they should (when Tybalt is cut down, for instance, we immediately notice a horrified servant dashing off to tell the Capulets).  Interestingly, Cranko keeps the communal dances within a fairly circumscribed set of steps - it's when Romeo and Juliet are alone that he strikes out in creative ways to convey both the elation and the danger of their situation.  (The lovers leap into a series of strikingly original lifts in their first pas de deux - they're head over heels, after all - but as the walls of Verona close in around them, they also begin to drag each other down, literally.)

Luckily for us, the Ballet now has a deep enough bench of talent to convey both aspects of Cranko's vision.  On opening night, Nelson Madrigal took the role of Romeo - a part that with his ripe good looks he was born to play, and which by now he knows inside and out.  He still has a little trouble with his big double tours, but everything else is there, and emotionally the performance is beautifully transparent; he dashes about with a palpable romantic glow.  The big question in my mind about the production, frankly, was how Misa Kuranaga - always a technical marvel - would fare in the demanding dramatic role of Juliet.  And the answer is that she sails through it, convincingly conveying a specific personality through her impeccable technique.  By the finale, she has broken your heart. (I know that's a cliché, but sometimes clichés, like dreams, come true.)

Paulo Arrais as Mercutio.

There were more great performances around this central pair, however - in fact the evening was brimming with memorable turns.  Yury Yanowsky was once again an icily commanding Tybalt, who held the stage with a frighteningly bitter charisma.  Meanwhile Sabi Varga offered a surprisingly sympathetic turn as Paris, while Tai Jimenez stared down the crowd as an imposing Lady Capulet, and Boyko Dossev made a small miracle of the brief role of Friar Lawrence.  In the background of the crowd scenes, I also couldn't help but notice a convincing cameo from Paul Craig as a doomed Capulet, while Adiarys Almeida glittered later as a lightly sensual gypsy. (We already knew Almeida, like Kuranaga, could dance; now we know she can act, too).

But probably the big news of the night was Paulo Arrais's galvanic turn as Mercutio; this young dancer stole scene after scene from Madrigal - just as Mercutio should. But the surprise was not merely the happy wit and sexual fire Arrais brought to his early dances, but the poignant depth of his extended death scene.  I confess I always watch the Ballet's productions like a hawk for a sense of the ongoing development of its upcoming dancers. And the news from Romeo and Juliet is that Misa Kuranaga is now the Ballet's newest leading lady, and Paulo Arrais its freshest star.