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Reviews

American Ballet Theatre at City Center

Virtuoso dancing, nuggets from ABT’s treasure chest repertory, and some newer experiments, characterize the company’s fall season at New York’s City Center.

by Nicole Collins
copyright 1999 by Nicole Collins
Autumn 1999

A truly great evening at the ballet leaves a viewer feeling more fully alive exiting the theater than entering it. American Ballet Theatre achieved just such a coup de théâtre on more than one occasion during its annual spring Metropolitan Opera House season this year. The caliber of the dancers is very high, especially among the men. Moreover, from the corps up through the principals, the troupe conveys high morale and a sense of optimism. Their performances affirm that it is possible for technique to evolve, for extensions to become higher, tempos faster, without sacrificing more old-fashioned virtues, such as lushness and three-dimensionality. And as they move through the rungs of the hierarchical, pyramid-structured Petipa ballets, most of the dancers are maturing. They are learning the lessons that each level has to teach them.

ABT continues to founder in its attempts to expand the repertoire, but its basic repertoire is thriving. Among the full-lengths offered this season, the comic, virtuosic, extroverted Don Quixote may be the absolute best fit for the temperament of the company’s current principal roster. The second-best match is La Bayadère. Thanks to the company¹s revitalized classicism, this tragic story of betrayed love and the dream of undoing what cannot be undone reverberated with a moral force far more profound than its exotica trappings evoking the Old India of ceremony and caste.

Among the one-act works, the season saw spectacular revivals of Leonide Massine’s Gaîté Parisienne (1938) and Twyla Tharp’s Push Comes to Shove (1976). These ballets were staged so adroitly and performed so beguilingly that one could have believed them to be brand new. Indeed, each in its own way is an exaggerated illustration of theatrical illusion, that special alchemy by which rehearsal begets spontaneity. In these works, as in Don Q, spontaneity escalates to spontaneous combustion Gaîté works up to a frothy can-can bacchanal, while in Push, the more forcefully its Haydn score declaims, the zanier and more chaotic its dance world becomes.

In these, the season's major revivals, company director Kevin McKenzie proved adept at taking the measure of his company’s gifts and providing apt vehicles to display them: In Gaîté, Angel Corella, better known as the company’s young virtuoso, proved a manic, spaghetti-limbed unsuccessful Latin lover as the Peruvian, the broadly caricatured role Massine made for himself. Even more inspired was the choice of Ethan Stiefel in the moody Baryshnikov role in Push: The part requires a superb classical stylist who is also at ease in Tharp’s sinuous, jazz-inflected moves. Stiefel excels in both modes, and he brought to the role an elusive combination of sly wit, self-love, and understated, relaxed sensuality. Jose Manuel Carreño, another supreme classicist, led the alternate cast, a last-minute decision necessitated when Corella injured himself just before Push’s run. Carreño is too serious and Apollonian a dancer to seem comfortable in the part, but his interpretation offered some lovely dancing.

Unfortunately, with the season’s sole company premiere, McKenzie flubbed spectacularly: Kenneth MacMillan’s Anastasia is a dull, long, hulking brontosaurus of a ballet. Like all the MacMillan work I've seen, it leans toward drama more than dance, but in this case there isn’t even a well-thought-out scenario. A danceless ballet and a storyless drama, it offers little to the dancers and even less to the audience.

In 1967 Anastasia originated as a one-act ballet set to Bohuslav Martinu’s Fantasies Symphoniques. This work depicts the isolation and despair of Anna Anderson as relatives and strangers alike condemn her claim to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia, daughter of Czar Nicholas II and long presumed murdered along with the rest of the family during the Russian Revolution. The tone is Expressionist and high-strung. Anderson is mired in an endless loop of memories, internalized to a degree suggesting madness. To add to her woes, the preoccupied heroine is romanced by a man whom the program identifies as her husband. Their struggling interaction and the subsequent emergence of a baby onstage are among the sequence¹s more perplexing moments.

In 1971 MacMillan attempted to transform this psychological ballet into a big three-act historical drama, with the original work the last section. As might be expected, this makeover fails. The first two segments, set to excerpts from two Tchaikovsky symphonies, feel like so much filler: They are aimless, lifeless, mumbling, and stagy. The ballet commands attention only in the last act, which ABT has previously performed (the one-act version entered the repertoire in 1985). This section offers some interest—Susan Jaffe offered a notably unhysterical and honest performance, her legs stabbing the air while her hands trembled and flashed like a struggling fish at the end of a line but it is not worth the wait.

Perhaps the source of McKenzie’s error in mounting Anastasia was in departing from the formula that has proved most successful for him: choosing works especially suited to the talents of particular company members. McKenzie told The New York Times that he’d chosen Anastasia because it “is a wonderful vehicle for a ballerina,” noting that many of his recent revivals and premieres have been tailored to the men. This seems disingenuous, however, since the role’s only meaty moments come in the last act, the one ABT already had in its repertoire. Surely his decision to mount the three-act version was a bet on the ticket-selling potential of a big, sumptuous period ballet involving figures and events that continue to capture the public imagination.

Both Anastasia and last year’s sole Met commission, the dismal Snow Maiden, seemed chosen to second-guess audience taste rather than to express McKenzie’s own taste. (His choreographic preferences emerge most clearly in his commissions for the company’s now-annual fall City Center seasons.) Yet the audience being pandered to seemed unimpressed with Anastasia even MacMillan fans must have been disappointed by the lack of a recognizably passionate pas de deux and there are rumors that ABT plans to shelve the ballet next season. As for The Snow Maiden, on the night I attended, New Yorkers expressed their lack of interest in Ben Stevenson’s inept, misguided pastiche of the Petipa-Tchaikovsky ballets complete with peasant dances, ballroom polonaises, a white scene, and a story line about a supernatural creature who becomes involved in the mortal world—by not buying tickets. Half the orchestra seats remained empty. And no wonder. Stevenson lacks a basic grasp of craft: He is poor at moving groups of dancers around the stage and at presenting the soloists. His skill at telling a story through dance is similarly limited.

Stevenson has altered the original Russian tale for the worse, defanging it of its moral pointedeness. In the tale, the young Misgir leaves his fiancée for the Snow Maiden, with disastrous results. In the ballet, by contrast, Misgir feels compelled to dance with the Snow Maiden, but she never poses a real threat to his pending marriage. (So what’s the point?) The ballet does leave intact her sad fate in melting, but not the sad fate of Misgir, who wanted a woman more beautiful than his affianced and loses everything because of it. If ABT were not so bent on unearthing or commissioning new full-length works, perhaps it might have considered restoring the Nijinska or the Balanchine versions of another ballet about an Ice Maiden, Stravinsky’s Le Baiser de la Fée (a new version could also be interesting). Indeed, although ABT’s current management seems to believe that the Met audience craves novelty only in the form of unfamiliar full-length works, a repertory program concluding with just this sort of one-act drama filled far more seats than The Snow Maiden this season. This bill comprising Balanchine’s Symphonie Concertante, Anton Dolin's Variations for Four, the second-act pas de deux from MacMillan’s Manon, and Gaîté Parisienne was among the best attended I saw. It was one of two mixed bills that the company interspersed among the evening-length fare, both of which beautifully complemented the 19th-century works. Indeed, when the curtain opened on Paul Taylor’s Airs in the seventh week of the season, I felt grateful for the sheer range of 19th- and 20th-century masterpieces available to the troupe.

The classics presented this year included the already-mentioned Don Q and La Bayadère, plus Giselle, Romeo and Juliet, and last season’s big new company hit, Le Corsaire. (Conspicuously absent were both Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty, perhaps because the MacMillan and Stevenson ballets both had patched-together Tchaikovksy scores and because Peter Martins's new Swan Lake for New York City Ballet received its premiere during ABT’s run.)

I was able to see only one performance each of Giselle and Romeo and Juliet, but I watched three casts of the others. I was grateful to see that ballets that had grown a little musty and uninspired-looking earlier in this decade looked spruced up and very alive again. This was especially true of La Bayadère, a work not performed last season. Bayadère is usually considered a lesser ballet than Giselle, but I feel ABT’s current dancers have more of an affinity for the Petipa work; in their rendering, Bayadère was the more moving tragedy. Perhaps this is because the company's strength is its pure-dance abilities. The women, especially, are most persuasive in the Petipa narratives, where they can express themselves through steps and music without worrying overly much about extradance characterization.

Moreover, the ease of the entire company with Petipa-style classicism, their clean technique and the joy they seem to derive from it, clarified the schemes by which music, choreography, story, and structure work together in Bayadère to draw the audience into that cathartic identification that Aristotle saw as tragedy’s function: In the first act, we witness the story in third person, as it were, watching the actions unfold. But in the ballet’s second-act dream scene, the perspective feels closer to the first person—we feel even more keenly in touch with the protagonists’ distress. In other words, this white scene is not just a pure-dance divertissement (as are the dream scenes in Don Q and Corsaire, for instance), but the ballet’s heart. In the same way that the corps de ballet descends a ramp to evoke the descent of the spirit into the Kingdom of the Shades—the notes of a moonlit waltz falling down the register as well—this act takes the audience down into a world that feels interior to the ceremonial one of the first act. This, in any case, was the view of Bayadère proffered by Susan Jaffe and Jose Manuel Carreño, who have developed a moving partnership.

When Jaffe and Carreño are cast together, their interaction provides the most intense moments of the evening. This emphasis is different from the one, say, provided by Amanda McKerrow and Corella in another excellent Bayadère cast. And it’s an emphasis that has become rare on today’s stage. Their interpretations have a clear approach, a point of view. At the same time, once they are onstage, they have a rapport beyond any plan. One can note, for example, the interpretive care the two take in shaping the first-act pas de deux in Bayadère differently from the monumental second-act one. In the opening act, Carreño’s Solor arranges a secret rendezvous in the forest with Jaffe’s Nikiya. When together at last, the warrior, just returned from a long tiger hunt, and the temple dancer, just consecrated head bayadère, dance with the abandon and frank sensuality of young lovers in a hurry to marry. Jaffe seems enraptured as she takes Carreño’s arm and wraps her own body with it, throwing back her head in their embrace.

This dance includes a lift in which Solor holds Nikiya supine in his arms, and they look at each other as he rocks her back and forth. Carreño swoops Jaffe up and swings her with an eagerness typical of the whole of their encounter, the motion suggesting an overjoyed heart. The sequence reappears in the second act, in which Solor, distressed at Nikiya’s death, dreams an opium dream of being reunited with her down in the Kingdom of the Shades. But when the action reemerges there, it takes on a new tone, tender and protective. In this pas de deux expressing the desire to rectify a past mistake, the two imbue each step with an importance that seems to say, “See this, and remember.” They dance as though engraving each movement in each other¹s memory, a quality appropriate to the story and stunning to watch as dance. This elusive, inimitable quality seemed to me a kind of lyric gravitas: The movements uncoiled with the fluidity and poignancy of song and with the solemnity of a spoken vow. The spectator feels this kind of dancing as much as watching it. Here, Carreño, facing Jaffe, suspends her in a low, hovering lift in which her legs trace a slow, arcing trajectory. There, the two stand side by side as Jaffe développés à la seconde, then, with a swivel of her pointe, they are in a newly configured balance together. The other casts performed these steps, too, but Jaffe and Carreño performed them as if they were the only thing that mattered or had ever mattered. The choreography became the visual manifestation of two united and unseverable hearts.

Similar effects made for an unusual spin on Don Q, another ballet that returned to the repertoire this season after a brief hiatus. The pair gave a lovely, unusually romantic performance, even though Jaffe's temperament is not well suited to the part of Kitri. Indeed, some of her virtues—strength, seriousness of purpose, and a refreshing womanliness—work against her in this role. Kitri is a lighthearted girl, not a woman; moreover, comedy requires a light touch. In the first act, Jaffe’s facial language and her fan-fluttering expressions of jealousy were a little too sharply etched. Carreño is not a natural comic, either, but in his case the friction between dancer and role was intriguing: His Basil, the barber who is in love with Kitri, suggested that one may be a prince among men without being a rich man, as is Kitri’s rival suitor, Gamache. It’s not that Carreño refused to give the part its rustic due, but the role’s broadest gestures passed through his body with elegance and understatement.

In place of comic effervescence, Jaffe and Carreño offered something else: a serene approach to the ballet’s famous virtuosity. In the third-act grand pas de deux, the pair seemed liberated to do what they do best: Regal classical dancing that proffers the thesis that virtuosity and artistry need not be opposed. Here, as in their Bayadère, the two qualities were allied. Indeed, Carreño tells us in every work he dances about ballet’s foundation in courtly values—dignity, harmony, manners, restraint. Moreover, he reminds us that these values reflect not an empty social code but are based in a solid moral foundation—the gravitas he brings to Solor, the nobility with which he imbues Basil, characterize all of his performances. His execution is also well textured—in Don Q he hung suspended, liquid smooth, in his turns, but in the Spanish-flavored drags and percussive steps, he was articulate and staccato without being too staccato.

Ethan Stiefel shares with Carreño an exquisite classical line. The two of them, to my mind, gave the season’s most memorable performances. They have beautiful feet and textbook-perfect extensions—fully turned out, hips absolutely square. They also share a calm technical command. Their pirouettes glide through five and six revolutions, coming to a slow suspension on the final turn. Their jumps leave a picture of the shape in the air as long as possible while at the same time finishing exactly on the count, a feat that requires great control in scissoring the legs back in even faster than they propel out. (The younger Angel Corella boasts such technical facility, too, but his performances don’t always have the depth of his more-experienced colleagues.) In addition, Stiefel has a special interest in—and a special gift for—characterization. I saw him in three ballets this season, all of them comic: Corsaire, Don Q, and Push Comes to Shove. In every one of these roles, he realized a fully thought-out persona and remained in character even during his variations.

Stiefel rendered Basil a thoroughgoing village charmer, a Figaro type who makes up for a lack of sure prospects with magnetism and resourcefulness. The boisterous tone Stiefel set transmitted even to his Kitri, Paloma Herrera. (This was her best performance, the only one recalling the adolescent who five years ago seemed to get such delight from performing fast, difficult choreography.) He tossed his guitar in the air, she jettisoned her fan, and they attacked the first act with a devil-may-care bravura. In a typical moment, he pirouetted as though to impress her with his accomplishments. In her solo she développéd toward him and then, in a gesture of reciprocal flirtation, sustained the balance a little longer than was required. The two maintained this tone and a furious pace throughout. Their grand pas de deux seemed an exercise in friendly competition: He scissored his legs before making the beat of his front cabrioles, and they rendered the coda a turning contest.

Stiefel’s sustained characterization of the pirate hero Conrad in ABT’s year-old staging of Corsaire helped glue together a recension that, while full of many wonderful pure-dance sequences, feels hopelessly butchered as a drama. Whatever Corsaire might once have been, it no longer has the sturdy structural logic of the other Petipa works still in performance. The drama is often illogical, and dance and drama are mostly poorly integrated—both of the big pas de deux feel arbitrarily inserted into the action, for instance. But Stiefel, who decided for himself who Conrad might be, led a cast that nearly made up for the shortcomings of the staging. He portrayed a good-natured adventurer stealing women and money from the rich Pasha Seyd, who Stiefel seemed to suggest already had far enough of both. Radiant Julie Kent displayed nimble comic timing as his love interest, Medora, an outcast Ginger to his outcast Fred in their sole dance alone.

At the same time, Stiefel’s performance was just sufficiently tongue in cheek to make the absurdities of the drama funny instead of awful. Once one saw that the cast was having fun with the work, affectionately broadening the melodrama so that it became a comic thriller instead of a tragicomedy, the ballet improved. But to be successful the tone had to be consistent from all lead cast members. Besides Stiefel, Vladimir Malakhov was excellent as the avaricious, spineless slave-dealer Lankendem, and I enjoyed very much Ethan Brown’s lecherous old Seyd. Both John Selya and Joaquin De Luz rendered well the boot-stomping, sword-brandishing Birbanto, Conrad’s mutinous friend.

Stiefel was also wonderful, as noted earlier, in the madcap, topsy-turvy world of Push Comes to Shove, last performed in 1991. Both in the work’s opening rag, set to music by Joseph Lamb, and in the work’s main section, set to Haydn’s Symphony No. 82, he established the right tone in a role that doesn’t seem highly transferable, so much does it combine Tharp¹s own movement style with her observations of Baryshnikov. More generally, the work is an affectionate outsider¹s view of ballet dancers’ tics and pitfalls: infatuation with the mirror, scene-stealing, and bungled partnering—ballerinas are gripped too tightly or not at all by men uninterested in being anonymous porteurs. Well chosen for Stiefel, the work was also successful as a full-company effort.

Angel Corella, the third great dancer among the men, has yet to mature as a prince or as a partner, which limits his effectiveness in some roles. He excelled as Solor and as Gaîté’s wealthy Peruvian, but I found him an unconvincing Romeo. Moreover, the lightness that gives him such a high jump worked against him as Conrad and Birbanto, where both parts require swagger—the illusion of broad-shouldered weight for Conrad and real groundedness in the folk-dance sections for Birbanto. In the right roles, however, Corella is a fascinating performer, at once technically clean and spiritually untamed. The ceremonial frame of La Bayadère, with its lovely preparations and poses giving shadow and rhythmic contrast to the bright explosions of the large jumps, provided a beautiful, rigorous setting for his virtuosity. He made a particularly memorable impression in Solor’s many jumps en manège: the large circle of double back cabrioles in the first act and the large circle of en dedans double tours in the second. At the same time, he was a wholly convincing warrior, proud and imperious in his feathered turban.

Gaîté Parisienne, Massine’s send-up of the can-can era to music by Offenbach, set Corella's habitual alacrity in even higher gear. Outfitted in Christian Lacroix’s purposefully tasteless white tuxedo with broad red cummerbund, he bugged out his eyes and giddily fluttered his arms and hands to evoke the sights and pleasures of the City of Light. He also made himself delightfully unappealing as the would-be Casanova who comes on way too strong with the women, even the coquettes. (As though to symbolize just how wrong he is for her, the Glove Seller, the work’s female lead, proffers him a fuchsia pair, which clash terribly with the already flashy get-up.) Frederic Franklin, who created the part of the romantic lead, the Baron, assisted with the staging this year—he was reportedly unhappy with the way the score was played in 1995, when ABT last danced the work. His fine-tuning worked wonders: The pace was glorious, and the ensemble seemed at its dramatic best here.

Other impressive performances by the men included Vladimir Malakhov’s Albrecht in Giselle. This is a particularly good role for him because of his light jump and delicate manner. He portrayed a self-deluded Romantic, in love with Giselle and innocent of the cruelty of leading a double life with two women. At Giselle’s death, he was distraught, repentant, and destroyed. Malakhov understands the ballet¹s style—the only jumps that he performed to full height were the cabrioles into exhausted lunges that come toward the end of his dance of death; during this sequence, the music is likewise at its highest volume. Elsewhere, he kept his jumps small, pliant, and noiseless. I loved the fluidity of a first-act sequence from entrechat trois to an à la seconde piqué and the very different sort of lightness in his second-act series of brisés, which skimmed the floor almost as ethereally as the partnered brisés for his Giselle, Julie Kent.

Last, Marcelo Gomes, a corps dancer who was pushed into many soloist roles this season, shows much promise. When he’s not sure of himself, he betrays his uncertainty, and he lacks presence. But when he is sure of himself—as he was in the role of the matador, Espada, in Don Q—he is already capable of shaping the variations into full expressive phrases instead of leaving them a series of individual steps.

As for the principal women, I find Jaffe less interesting as a solo dancer than when she is paired with Carreño. But I admire her maturity, her awareness of the others onstage around her, and her strongly focused upper body. I feel this slight qualification about the dancing of the other principal women, too. It may be curmudgeonly to point out that not one gave a completely unforgettable performance, even though there were many nice moments. The men are setting the standards very high, and the women don’t fully measure up. Their dancing rarely inspires the sheer wonder of the best dancing on the male side.

Yet quotidian pleasures abound: Nina Ananiashvili has a technical finesse and stage presence that are enviable as far as they go. Amanda McKerrow brings a lovely melancholy to her dancing—as Nikiya, her arabesques evoked the longing that was absent from either Jaffe’s or Herrera’s renderings. And as she exited from the second-act pas de deux, her arms beckoning Solor had a wordless expressiveness I didn’t feel in the others’ portrayals. As the slave girl Gulnare in Corsaire, McKerrow danced with the desperation of a caged bird in the difficult Pas d’Esclave.

Ashley Tuttle’s Gulnare, on the other hand, impressed most in the petit allégro of the Jardin Animé solo, which skimmed the air and unfolded in one continuous skein. She also brought a refreshing brightness to Jiri Kylian’s Stepping Stones. A Renaissance Madonna beauty, Julie Kent is typically photographed in demure poses. So she surprised me with her gift for comedy in the role of Medora. This season her technique seemed stronger, her stage presence more forceful, and she has always had an exquisite petit allégro—her beats and double rond de jambe sautés in the second act of Giselle were at once lushly articulated and ethereal.

Paloma Herrera’s Kitri was splendid, but she otherwise disappointed. She desperately needs to work on her placement. The Spanish-style épaulement of Don Q encouraged her to lift and focus her upper body, but in strict classical roles (Gamzatti, Symphonie Concertante), her torso often looked limp, giving a paradoxical impression of weakness even as she tossed off a difficult step. She also needs to watch her shoulders, which she occasionally raises in pirouettes, piqué turns, and supported arabesques, all errors of style which seem inappropriate in a principal dancer. I fear that a too-quick rise to fame and a vocal fan club (who belie the ballet-studio wisdom that general audiences notice a dancer’s head and upper body more than her legs) have encouraged Herrera to settle into a premature complacency, a misguided self-satisfaction that I hope she will address after a season of being outdanced by new competition.

Emerging virtuosos include soloists Irina Dvorovenko and Gillian Murphy (who was promoted after the season ended). Murphy first attracted notice last year for her polished, finely honed third Odalisque variation in Le Corsaire, a peformance she repeated this year: She maintains her ease and beautiful line in a gliding series of triple pirouettes that she seems to negotiate with no visible preparation whatsoever, so that the whole of her variation has a glassy smoothness, with no roughness in the difficult patches. Tried out in such secondary leads this year as Gamzatti and Gulnare, Murphy maintained her statuesque poise and technical assurance, but after just one go-around it remains unclear whether she is capable of shaping dance phrases expressively. In these bigger roles, one felt her paying too much attention to each separate step instead of stringing the notes into a song.

Equally confident in Gamzatti’s difficult pas de deux, Dvorovenko is a strong technician who occasionally seeks too much effect—her high extensions sometimes look thrown instead of unfolding in a controlled presentation, for instance. But her bravura served her well as Kitri, making for yet another excellent cast. She brought to the ballet some extra flourishes, fluttering her hands joyously in the work¹s signature high-kicking jumps, and she accompanied the third-act fouettés with flirtatious fan work. Dvorovenko has china-doll good looks—round blue eyes, pert mouth, porcelain skin, and lustrous black hair. In Don Q, her features also proved highly mobile, good for registering the second-act farce, though the first act sometimes felt too studied. Earlier in the season, as Gamzatti and Myrta, she had seemed a little offputtingly arrogant, dancing with a haughty, high chin that made me think of a ship’s prow. But as Kitri, and also in Push Comes to Shove, she made a different, warmer impression.

Perhaps the most endearing, imaginative female dancing came in the smaller roles and variations: Soloist Yan Chen gave a sparkling rendition of the first Odalisque variation in Corsaire, her approach musical and unified. She was also quite nice in the Peasant Pas de Deux. Tall, leggy, exuberant corps dancer Michele Wiles, who performed several demi-soloist parts, offered a richly textured, musically interesting interpretation of the third Shade variation. She was successful here in getting her lankiness under control, but in some of the faster variations, this remains a challenge. Another corps dancer, Anne Milewski, offered an enchanting portrayal of Amour in Don Q, her dancing light and surprising in its effects. She also showed a winning combination of impishness and tenderness toward Brian Reeder’s Don Quixote.

Other notable soloists include Oksana Konobeyeva, who displayed a winsome charm as the Flower Girl in Gaîte in the season¹s first week. She later injured herself, however, which forced the cancellation of her scheduled debut as Gamzatti. Ekaterina Shelkanova has a lovely épaulement; her striking coordination suggests a rare balance of strength between upper body and lower. This season she was underutilized. By contrast, corps dancers Carmen Corella and Anne Liceica were prominently cast. Corella, Angel’s younger sister, has an interesting, warm sensuality that was shown to good effect in the role of Mercedes in Don Q Liceica is, like Murphy, a strong turner, and she alternated with her in the third Odalisque part, among others.

Sadly, many New Yorkers still seem unaware of these high-caliber dancers, who appear in town twice yearly. While foreign ballet troupes under the aegis of the Lincoln Center Festival have been routinely selling out in recent years, there were empty orchestra seats at ABT on evenings of far superior dancing. This is unfortunate, because these performers offer a bright ray of light in the too-often-moribund ballet scene of our day. Yes, the dearth of new choreographic talent is distressing. But the art form can wait for its prince to come, so long as committed interpreters flourish. In the meantime, let us be thankful for ABT’s maintenance of the great ballets of the past two centuries.