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  • New Ballets for a Silver Age
  • Jay Rogoff (bio)

Jennifer Homans ends her fine history of ballet, Apollo’s Angels, with a cranky chapter called “The Masters Are Dead and Gone,” in which she laments that “ballet is dying.” National dance traditions have homogenized into a kind of Eurodance, she mourns; contemporary European and American culture has lost the patience and perceptiveness to understand ballet’s tradition and subtlety of technique; “ballet is becoming ever more conservative and conventional, while contemporary experimental dance is retreating to the fringes of an inaccessible avant-garde”; and no [End Page 581] new choreographers of brilliance have emerged to save the art. She really means we have not yet seen another dance maker like George Balanchine, and of course we haven’t. Supreme artistic geniuses like Balanchine, Mozart, or Shakespeare rarely emerge more than once in a century.

Homans, however, forgets that ballet endures such crises cyclically: when late nineteenth-century French ballet decayed, despite the occasional masterpiece like Coppélia, dance seemed dead until Marius Petipa whipped the Russians into top-notch classicists. Later, after Tschaikovsky’s death, critics mourned the fate of Russian ballet; then Stravinsky revolutionized dance music with native folk melodies and outlandish rhythms, helping propel Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes to world renown. As Yogi Berra said, in ballet “you don’t know nothing”—we can’t, in fact, predict the coming of the next ballet genius, or how such a figure might make dance simultaneously traditional and new, as did Petipa and Balanchine. A new messiah might or might not now promenade among us, but in the meantime, ballet keeps alive and kicking in the repertories of Balanchine, Petipa, and others, and, since dance is the single supremely embodied art, in the bodies of the brilliant performers of the New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre.

In denying ballet a future, Homans mentions neither Christopher Wheeldon nor Alexei Ratmansky. Both have made dances that, after repeated viewings, stay with one like masterpieces, among them Wheeldon’s intricately expressive abstractions to Ligeti, such as Polyphonia (2001) and Continuum (2002), and Ratmansky’s thrilling plotless ballet Concerto DSCH (2008) and his hallucinatory sendup of nineteenth century story ballets, Namouna, a Grand Divertissement (2010). Others of their ballets, while suffering from problems of structure or tone, look good on these companies, enlarging their abilities as well as their repertories; they will have to do until the real thing comes along. In addition, Peter Martins, NYCB’s ballet master in chief for more than thirty years, has contributed more than eighty ballets to his company, ranging from excellent to drab, with each new work likewise providing an occasion for deliberating the state of the art.

Wheeldon’s Les Carillons premiered in January 2012, and I caught up with it at NYCB’s Lincoln Center home on May 23. It displays many of the choreographer’s gifts in an absorbing but sometimes frustrating ballet, full of peculiar play in its structure and staging. Assuming a Romantic mood, he sets this large-scale dance for five couples and a corps of ten to Bizet’s two Arlésienne Suites, which use several folk melodies. Although the music provides continual opportunities, Wheeldon’s postmodernist approach doesn’t particularly tweak Romanticism or the Romantic balletic tradition in ways that make us rethink ballet historically. Instead he aspires to abstraction while experimenting with choreographic indeterminacy. The ballet brims with false leads and deliberate, momentary confusions—all interesting in theory but so unfocused and unstable that they leave us longing for a clearer view. [End Page 582]

In its first duet, for example, Les Carillons strains to burst into narrative but never does. To an alto saxophone solo (Bizet championed Dr. Sax’s invention), Amar Ramasar partners Ana Sophia Scheller, newly and justly promoted to principal, in lovely extensions of her leg backwards. As he supports her in multiple turns and lifts in arabesque, each moment of contact promises a story about sexual pursuit—both dancers even take on pained amorous expressions—but nothing develops, and when Scheller and Ramasar return later, all their longing seems never to have taken place. Similarly, in the “carillon” movement, Wendy...

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