A great talent says farewell

Julie Kent & José Manuel Carreño during his farewell at the Met

The New York Times
July 1, 2011
By ROSLYN SULCAS

A Crowd Favorite Takes His Leave

“The love for José Manuel Carreño poured across the Metropolitan Opera House stage in almost palpable waves as one by one, his fellow dancers, his colleagues and his daughters delivered bouquets of flowers at the end of his final New York performance on Thursday with American Ballet Theater, where he had been a principal since 1995.

There are few dancers as adored by both balletomanes and the general public as Mr. Carreño. Handsome, but not untouchably so; charming; infallibly courteous; a superb partner with a virile stage presence and a reliably plush, polished technique, he has been one of the standard-bearers of Ballet Theater’s reputation for brilliant male dancers.

His role of choice for his departure was Prince Siegfried in “Swan Lake.” That wasn’t taking the easy route; the part is full of the big jumps that are always the first technical casualty for male dancers as they get older. (Mr. Carreño is just 43, but that’s a lifetime of back strain from lifting ballerinas over his head.)

Mr. Carreño can still jump, although he no longer has the buoyancy he possessed years ago. His line is impeccable, his turns a thing of beauty: perfectly centered and upright as he spins, the unsupported leg outlining perfect geometric shapes. When he does execute a jump turn called “tour en l’air,” he lands with a luxurious bend in perfect fifth position, bang on the music.

Those details are a thrill for ballet nerds. More important, every step is permeated by an innate elegance and authority. You have no doubt, watching Mr. Carreño, that he is a star, although of the nicest, most un-divo-like kind.

On Thursday there were two dancers embodying the dual role of Odette-Odile. (Once customary, such casting is rare today.) Presumably this was Mr. Carreño’s choice — Julie Kent as the innocent Odette, Gillian Murphy as her evil alter ego, Odile — as was the guest appearance of the former Ballet Theater dancer Joaquin de Luz (now a New York City Ballet principal) as the prince’s friend Benno.

Oddly, the emotional rapport onstage that Mr. Carreño shared with Mr. de Luz (who danced with energy and panache) was far greater than what he had with Ms. Kent, a longtime partner who is celebrating her 25th anniversary with Ballet Theater this season. With her lyrical, elongated lines, Ms. Kent can look picture-perfect, but so mannered and grand ballerina was her performance, so languorous the tempo of music and dancing, that you could doze off between positions.

This didn’t help Mr. Carreño, who has never been a great actor, but things perked up considerably in Act III with the arrival of Ms. Murphy and of David Hallberg as the sorcerer von Rothbart. (Isaac Stappas played his nonhuman alter ego). Both Ms. Murphy and Mr. Hallberg put an over-the-top spin on their roles, neatly skirting the line between vulgarity and fun, as Mr. Hallberg seduced the Queen (Susan Jaffe, a former Odette-Odile of Mr. Carreño’s) and the princesses with callous magnetism and hilariously exaggerated timing.

Ms. Murphy and Mr. Carreño offered no less. For once that gala staple, the black swan pas de deux, was the showstopper it’s meant to be. In the coda Ms. Murphy offered quadruple and quintuple fouettés, and Mr. Carreño rose to the occasion with a bravura exhibition of his own that seemed as much an expression of excitement about finding his Swan Queen as it was a display of audience-pleasing feats.

This production of “Swan Lake,” by Ballet Theater’s artistic director, Kevin McKenzie, so effectively ruins Act IV as to make the dancers quite inconsequential. It’s a pity that Mr. Carreño’s final exit here is to turn his back on the audience, run up a ramp (left! sharp right!) and throw himself into the lake in bad lighting, but so be it.

The audience members — who screamed, threw flowers, held up phones to record the moment and sobbed as Mr. Carreño, looking overwhelmed, opened his arms to us all — weren’t going to let him go so easily anyway.”

Personal comment: This is the performance I mentioned last year [in my entry for September 9, 2010] when I was talking about the dual role of Odette/Odile usually being danced by the same ballerina in productions of Swan Lake performed by major companies and smaller ones who have ballerinas up to the task. I wish I could have seen this perf as the combination of Murphy as Odile and Hallberg as von Rothbart not to mention the marvelous talent of José Manuel Carreño was an occasion not to be missed. Sigh!

ABT’s new Nutcracker: a review

Gillian Murphy and David Hallberg as Clara and her Nutcracker

The New York Times
December 24, 2010
A ‘Nutcracker’ Sprouts Alter Egos
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY

Once you’ve seen a number of different “Nutcrackers,” you might think you know all the main ways that the old ballet can be retold. But you don’t.

In Alexei Ratmansky’s new version of “The Nutcracker,” currently in its world premiere season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, American Ballet Theater has a production like no other. Made with complete theatrical authority from first to last, it shows many aspects of Mr. Ratmansky: satirist, storyteller, dramatist, poet. I’m impatient to see it again, but a large part of the delight it affords on first viewing lies in not knowing what’s going to happen.

This work (to which critics were first admitted on Thursday) isn’t a “Nutcracker” that leads us back to the original story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, though it takes a few unusual points from there. Instead its basic structure is that of numerous Russian “Nutcrackers” since the Stalinist era: little Clara (the Russians usually call her Masha) no sooner sees the Nutcracker, once he’s transformed into a Prince, than they fall in love-love-love and at once turn into adults. Never mind going to meet any Sugar Plum Fairy — instead they get to dance the music of her pas de deux themselves.

But Mr. Ratmansky takes that formula, tweaks it and makes it new. When his boy (transformed) and girl meet, they’re kindred spirits but from different worlds. They suddenly become doubled — they acquire mature alter egos, a twist that transforms the ballet’s sense of time and space. They’re like the hero and heroine of Philip Pullman’s superlative trilogy, “His Dark Materials” — young lovers from parallel universes.

At first it seems marvelous that we see the grown-ups they’ll become, but then Mr. Ratmansky takes us one step further and shows us how those adults still feel like the children they were. Their grand pas de deux is alternately formal and informal: they show the big, classically perfect dance shapes, arcs, gestures and steps that reveal their ideal qualities, but they also just can’t help expressing their own lesser-mortal amazement about this.

The main story is still focused on their younger selves. Mr. Ratmansky has animated the entire company. (I don’t enjoy a few supporting performances, but at every moment they’re precisely considered.) Yet amid several superb interpretations on Thursday, none surpassed those of the two central children. Young Catherine Hurlin’s partly angry, partly vulnerable, never picture-perfect Clara exemplifies the individuality of Mr. Ratmansky’s approach. Tyler Maloney as her Nutcracker Boy has the same courage and the same vulnerability. Mr. Ratmansky asks him to sustain one particular pose — arms open, face upturned, not facing the audience but on a diagonal — that suggests his mix of astonishment and gratitude, and it strikes home as something unusual in ballet, a private moment that is emotionally huge but not being sold to the public.

When these two children find themselves in the Land of Snow, it’s not a winter wonderland for them — it’s an adventure, now frightening, now freezing. The poetry of Mr. Ratmansky’s vision here is very striking: no Snowflakes were ever more ambiguous, and they have been given pouncing jumps, spinning arcs, and insistent gestures that make us feel we’re in the land of Hans Christian Andersen’s “Snow Queen.”

Later this young heroine and hero do meet a Sugar Plum Fairy — in this case, an exotically regal, nondancing one. It’s thanks to her presentation that suddenly they have another moment out of time and see their adult selves united in love and, finally, marriage.

As the older Clara and Nutcracker, Gillian Murphy and David Hallberg gave performances on Thursday that count immediately among the high-water marks of their already distinguished careers. Mr. Ratmansky has given them roles that wonderfully yoke their dual commitment to ballet classicism and to dramatic sincerity. There are spectacular throws and catches in the pas de deux, and yet acrobatics aren’t the point here; what you think about is the spontaneity of love’s first excitement.

Mr. Hallberg’s solo starts with a slow fall sideways that’s exactly what nobody expects to see in a ballet, but this quirky impetus becomes the humanizing force within the beautifully bobbing series of jumps that follow. Just as Ms. Murphy’s Clara finishes the main part of her solo (one of the blander passages of the work, admittedly), she goes right off into the wings, then sticks her head out as if sharing a joke with us. She pops straight back on and tears up the stage in a circuit of jumps and turns in which her own terrific academic clarity and fullness become charged with renewed rapture.

Mr. Hallberg starts the coda with a solo of extraordinarily shimmering delicacy, building up to a more conventional display of heroic jumps around the stage (danced with unconventional finesse). Yet not long after, within the very same number, both he and Ms. Murphy, amid a busy phrase, suddenly stand on flat feet and reel a little — as if unable to believe what’s happening to them. These dances keep saying both, “This is perfect,” and, “We can’t believe this is happening”; you feel how full their hearts are.

The production seizes your attention surely from its opening kitchen scene. True, I don’t care for the two synchronized dancing maids. (Here and in some other character dances, Léonide Massine’s choreography comes to mind, not for the first time when watching Mr. Ratmansky’s.) But the whole “Upstairs, Downstairs” layering of this household, funny and touching, is vividly, intimately introduced to us here — and there’s a memorable preview of the mice. Richard Hudson’s sets and costumes perfectly complement the choreography, giving us a partly caricatured Dickensian world that changes unexpectedly into the silver birches of a Russian winterscape.

The cartoon quality in those maids becomes more irksome when whole groups of children repeat the same gestures in unison. Then, as Mr. Ratmansky’s version proceeds, these notes of caricature become part of a pattern. The effect of this is to make Clara and the Nutcracker — like Alice in Wonderland — by far the most real and three-dimensional figures onstage. The parents and Drosselmeyer are all vivid, but these grown-ups are almost as not-quite-real as the mice and the Snowflakes and the Sweets.

That’s fine, moment by moment and dance by dance. There are various kinds of laughs to be had from the Arabian and Russian dances, as well as from Mother Ginger (whose skirts contain a real surprise). But we never sense that Clara and the Nutcracker have become visitors to a realm of purer, larger forms. Though Mr. Hudson’s Sweet Kingdom designs are bright, they have none of the poetic dimensions of his Snow Scene. Even the main point of the Waltz of the Flowers is primarily just fun — with busy, silly male bees pollinating happy, silly, jubilant female flowers — though arranged with absorbing complexity.

The entertainment level doesn’t flag. Missing, at any rate on a first view, is the all-embracing generosity of spirit that marks many good “Nutcrackers.” Instead — and it’s a beautiful paradox — the large moments of Mr. Ratmansky’s version are intimate ones.

This version will repay re-watching. Ormsby Wilkins and the American Ballet Theater Orchestra were at their very finest on Thursday, apparently loving — without rushing — the score’s rhythmic interplay and fantastic instrumentation.

Several alternate casts of dancers follow, probably bringing other nuances. I plan to see at least one more of them this year and hope that it won’t be long before I have the chance to see this exceptional first cast again.

Personal comment: I think he liked it! Merry Christmas everyone!

Osipova’s Juliet

Osipova and Hallberg in Romeo and Juliet

The New York Times
July 11, 2010
By GIA KOURLAS

“Fatal Amour With Fever of Youth

In an interview a few years ago the young Russian ballerina Natalia Osipova spoke a few prophetic words: “I would love to suffer onstage.”

On Saturday afternoon at the Metropolitan Opera House she was given that chance, making an astonishing debut as Juliet opposite David Hallberg in American Ballet Theater’s sumptuous production of Kenneth MacMillan’s “Romeo and Juliet,” the company’s last performance of the season. Sometimes in ballet casting turns out just the way you hoped; it is a delight to report that she is more than a hoper.

Ms. Osipova is in possession of a singular free-floating jump; as ballerinas go, she is of the air. But in “Romeo and Juliet” she was an exquisite figure to watch, in part, because she knew how to speak with her feet. In a way, her resplendent turn as Juliet was more meaningful than the part itself, proving that the buoyancy of her dancing can succeed in roles that aren’t strictly bravura ones. Of course she wasn’t alone. In Mr. Hallberg, whose daring Romeo was a stretch from the princely parts that come so naturally to him, she had a superb partner.

Throughout the ballet Ms. Osipova’s dramatic sensitivity, full of nuance, was nearly complete; in her portrayal you could discern the great dancer-actress Alessandra Ferri somewhere in the background. (That former Ballet Theater principal, who worked closely with MacMillan, taught her the role from scratch.) From the first to the third acts Ms. Osipova’s emotional shifts were unmistakable yet subtle, allowing one to feel the emotions of the familiar story just as much as watch it unfold.

At the start, moments before Juliet is presented to her suitor Paris (performed by a much too brusque Sascha Radetsky), Ms. Osipova was a bundle of playful, nervous energy, nearly flying across the stage in coupé jeté en tournant jumps. Her expressions are amazing; there is something of Bjork in her pert nose, impish smile and the way her eyes flicker from innocence to amusement in a matter of seconds.

It’s also the kind of face, so full of life, that makes you feel a surge of joy: in the first act, when Juliet begins to realize that she must grow up, the elfin Ms. Osipova was a child-woman, naïve and enchanting, like Audrey Tautou in “Amélie.” Later, after locking eyes with Romeo at the Capulet ball, her face underwent so material a change that in a flash, almost jarring, she was suddenly, briefly, an adult.

In the third-act bedroom scenes, when Juliet, left alone, vacillates between bravery and fear and must decide whether to drink the sleeping potion that will free her from having to marry Paris, Ms. Osipova was something of a wild animal. Here, the texture of her acting and dancing was piercing: disheveled from her night with Romeo and horrified by the thought of death, she tossed the vial onto the floor and ran fearfully to crouch next to her bed. As she inched her way forward and back, it was astonishing to see willpower slowly spread through her body. With a hasty shudder she swallowed the liquid and collapsed.

As Romeo, Mr. Hallberg was at his most fresh, exhibiting his confidence through clear, clean jumps and an ardor that matched. He stood out even more against the other men in the cast, who offered watered-down versions of the characters (Jared Matthews’s Mercutio and Blaine Hoven’s Benvolio) or blandly harsh (Patrick Ogle’s Tybalt).

In his masked dance at the ball Mr. Hallberg made the first move with gleaming leaps and turns — his weapons for seduction. And during the rapturous balcony scene, as he drew Ms. Osipova into his arms, raising her higher as she arched back, he was rhapsodic, she meltingly fragile. By the end, dancing only for each other, they were windswept.

Physically Mr. Hallberg and Ms. Osipova are opposites; while he is tall and fair, she is raven-haired, possessing a delicate frame. But the courage to bare all whenever they step onstage gives them a resolute harmony. As young ballet stars they show a longing to push past the point of comfort in their roles, especially those as fraught with history and emotion as Romeo and Juliet. You can sense their impatience, their devotion and, finally, their desire not to settle for a performance on the surface.

Despite the roar that greeted them in their curtain calls, Mr. Hallberg and Ms. Osipova, their hair matted with sweat and their makeup running, were visibly dazed and drained. That’s what happens, it seems, for having suffered onstage. They danced to their deaths.”

Natalia Osipova – her back story

Bolshoi Principal Natalia Osipova

The New York Times
June 17, 2010
By ROSLYN SULCAS

A Determined Ballerina, Propelled to the Top

THE Bolshoi ballerina Natalia Osipova smiled brightly, theatrically, projecting outward as she danced the solo that Princess Aurora performs moments after arriving on stage in Act I of “The Sleeping Beauty.”

In a plain black leotard and a shabby practice tutu, Ms. Osipova was working before a single ballet mistress, Irina Kolpakova, in a rehearsal studio many floors under the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House. There, on Saturday night, she will dance this role with American Ballet Theater, with which she is spending a second season as a guest artist.

Ms. Osipova was suffering from a throat sore enough to warrant a doctor’s appointment immediately after the rehearsal. Later she would cry, feeling ill and frustrated at her inability to perform the steps as she would like. And a week later she would be the victim of a mugging that would leave her bruised and shaken. But for the moment she was Aurora, shy and curious, looking tentatively at the four suitors with whom she will dance the Rose Adagio.

Ms. Osipova’s single-minded focus in rehearsal comes as no surprise to anyone who has seen her perform. Since she burst on to the international dance scene in show-stopping performances of Kitri in “Don Quixote,” during a 2007 Bolshoi tour to London, the sheer energy and intensity of her stage presence has been as remarkable as her improbable floating jump and astounding technical prowess.

“Resistance is futile; you adore her on sight,” Luke Jennings wrote in The Observer. “Let us not exaggerate, but six stars seem to be in order,” Clement Crisp began in The Financial Times, adding, “Not since Plisetskaya and Maximova have we seen so adorable a Kitri and never one so divinely destined to claim the role as her own.”

Ms. Osipova, just 24, is now in demand by major ballet companies all over the world, and in Moscow she is an acknowledged star with a devoted following. But that wasn’t always a predictable fate for her, said Alexei Ratmansky, Ballet Theater’s artist in residence, who invited Ms. Osipova to join the Bolshoi during his tenure as the artistic director there.

“I watched the final exams at the Bolshoi school,” Mr. Ratmansky said, speaking on the phone from Jackson, Miss., where he was on the jury of the USA International Ballet Competition. “She got a lot of criticism from the examiners — not classical enough, no aesthetic, almost vulgar, just wrong,” he said. “But I felt you could see the physical talent and the openness, so I hired her.”

He gave her solo roles right from the outset. “There was a big division about her among the audience, and also among the dancers and coaches,” he said. “I don’t remember any dancer in my experience causing as much difference of opinion.”

Ms. Osipova’s extreme flexibility and steel-sprung jump — watching her hover in the air makes you realize how people felt when they saw Nijinsky — are quite possibly the legacy of her early training as a gymnast, which she began at 5 in Moscow, where she was born.

“I was very, very serious,” she said last week, speaking through a translator during an interview backstage at the Metropolitan Opera House. “I saw myself at the Olympics. When I seriously injured my back at 8 or 9, and my teachers recommended I stop, this was a tragedy for me.”

Her parents took her to audition at the Bolshoi academy, hoping ballet would distract her. She was accepted but remained, she said, indifferent to dance for several years and wanted to return to gymnastics. Then she was given a solo to perform during a school show at the Bolshoi.

“Afterward the audience was applauding, and I understood that this is incredible,” she said. “In that moment I realized, yes, I want to dance.”

Offstage Ms. Osipova is wiry and feisty looking, with pale skin, wide-set eyes and jet-black tresses. (She dyes her light brown hair to correspond to her ballerina ideals: Margot Fonteyn, with whom she shares a birthday, May 18, and Diana Vishneva, also a Ballet Theater guest artist.) Onstage she is a theater animal for whom the presence and attention of the public is the oxygen that she needs to come fully alive.

It seems unsurprising that one of her heroes is the similarly avid Rudolf Nureyev, whose “Romeo and Juliet” with Fonteyn is, she said, the single performance she would most like to have seen. Ms. Osipova described Juliet as her “dream role”; next month, she will dance it with David Hallberg and Ballet Theater.

“I am a very emotional person, and those emotions have to go somewhere,” she said. “So I am always happy when I have a role where my feelings can come into play. Of course sometimes I scare people. They say, Natasha” — Ms. Osipova’s nickname — “you’re crazy. But I have to go out onstage and give everything I have.”

Mr. Hallberg, who has danced with Ms. Osipova at the Bolshoi as well as in New York, said their performances together had been among the greatest experiences of his career.

“She doesn’t care what people think,” he said. “She is so artistically involved in each role that she is continually questioning, validating every moment. She taught me to release a lot of my inhibitions, just through our physical communication.”

Ms. Osipova, who was invited to perform with Ballet Theater by its artistic director, Kevin McKenzie, after he saw her on tape, said that she was extremely happy at the Bolshoi, where she was promoted to principal in May. But a ballerina in the 21st century, she added, has the opportunity to travel and experience the repertory and schooling of different companies.

The crime of different countries is an unpleasant extra; after the mugging, close to her rented apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, she said she was simply relieved that only her face had been bruised. “It was so quick that I think I felt more shock the next day,” she said. “But now I am thinking only about my first performance of ‘The Sleeping Beauty.’ ”

After just a few performances with Ballet Theater, it seems clear that Ms. Osipova’s technical gifts have raised the bar several notches higher for every other ballerina.

“If someone that talented comes out, it influences the dancers around her, and the younger ones,” Mr. Ratmansky said. “After her there was a wave of physical talent coming from the Bolshoi school. It’s an interesting phenomenon.”

Asked if he would like Ms. Osipova to join Ballet Theater’s roster of principal dancers, Mr. McKenzie said in an e-mail message that he “had that objective in mind.” Ms. Osipova said that while she would love to have a more permanent link to the company, her home was at the Bolshoi, where, she said, she felt she hadn’t yet fulfilled her potential. But she sounded touchingly girlish when talking of Ballet Theater.

“As little kids in school we were just thrilled looking at the stars of A.B.T.,” she said. “And now I’m walking next to them. It’s phenomenal.”

Natalia Osipova performs in “The Sleeping Beauty” on Saturday and “Romeo and Juliet” on July 10 with American Ballet Theater at the Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center; (212) 362-6000, abt.org.