New York City Ballet

New York City Ballet
Koch Theater (New York State Theater)
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Matinee

Agon
The Lady with the Little Dog
Cortège Hongrois

Alexey Miroshnichenko’s new ballet, The Lady with the Little Dog, opts to reference the short story by Anton Chekhov by reducing most of the plot to broad symbolic values. (The dog, which takes one promenade and receives huge applause, is a literal presence that seems to appear only to justify the title.)

The protagonists, the man and woman who meet on holiday, have an affair, and later decide that they must quit their unhappy lives to pursue "true love," are portrayed by a woman costumed (by Tatiana Noginova) in a pretty black dress (Sterling Hyltin) and a man in a white suit (Andrew Veyette). They are shadowed by an eight-man corps of "Angels" dressed in gray leotards (led by Troy Schumacher and Giovanni Villalobos). At curtain rise, a scrim with black and white diagonal stripes filters the scene on stage. This motif is repeated in the presence of a narrow carpet, bearing what now looks like a parallelogram pattern, that the Angels unroll and re-roll throughout. The ballet uses this carpet first to divide the space in which the man and woman, strangers to one another, appear; then, in a starkly red-lit passage, it serves to represent the location in (and on) which their passion/transgression takes place; at the end of the ballet it forms the path on which Hyltin and Veyette, now stripped down to flesh-colored clothing (this is actually the second time they are stripped; the Angels strip them for the sex scene), ascend Adam and Eve-like toward the risk of their future. The choreography is set to Rodion Shchedrin’s 1985 romantically tinged score.

Miroshnichenko is clearly an intelligent choreographer who put a lot of thought into this piece. He seems to have been caught between a desire to make clear a story that contains some complications (such as the protagonists’ feelings toward their respective spouses) that he thought he might not be able to effectively communicate in dance (however: Think of Davidsbündlertänze; Liebeslieder Walzer), and a sense that maybe he actually could put the literal story on stage. By hedging his bets and doing a little of both, he causes confusion, whether you know the story or not. If you don’t know the story, and you are a regular attendee of NYCB, when you see a dog on stage, you think comedy because you’ve seen the dog in Double Feature used to wonderful comic effect. If you do know the story, the existence and purpose of the Angels is a mystery; they are not in the Chekhov, so are they meant to symbolize those undanceable elements? Or something else? Both? At one point, for example, it seems as if they are recreating the fence behind which the woman lives; but how would you even guess this if you hadn’t read the story? It’s just guys lying in a row with their legs in the air. Because some of their choreography is acrobatic and oddly comical (or just odd), they seem to be introducing a lighthearted element into a story that reads as anything but.

The choreography for the principals is pretty; Hyltin has some very pretty steps and she looks pretty; she smiles when she and Veyette dance their initial meeting and she looks anguished in other parts, as per the musical cues. Veyette is a given a solo that he dances well, but which otherwise does not do much to use his considerable talent.

The Lady with the Little Dog had the misfortune of having to follow George Balanchine’s Agon; if you want to see a man and woman lay bare mind, body, and soul, it’s all there. This ballet opened the program and received a very crisp, clear performance. Wendy Whelan is back dancing the pas de deux with Albert Evans. There is just nothing like the electricity they generate as they spring like jaguars across the stage in that opening diagonal; you can almost see the sparks when Whelan punctuates that opening movement by aggressively flinging her leg around Evans’s body. The barely contained aggression of their polite greeting before the dance proper begins lets us know in no uncertain terms that this is going to be adult entertainment, not the kids’ play of the two preceding pas de trois.

The program was rousingly concluded with Balanchine’s Melissa Hayden tribute ballet, Cortège Hongrois. It was very well done, with particular notice going to the czardas dancers, led by Rebecca Krohn and Sean Suozzi, and Ashley Laracey, who stepped for Gwyneth Muller to dance the second variation quite beautifully. Maria Kowroski and Jonathan Stafford danced the leads. (I always forget, but am always happy to be reminded that it is this Balanchine Glazounov that uses the ballerina variation from the old Pas de Dix--done very effectively by Kowroski, who was accompanied with eloquent clarity by Cameron Grant in the pit. Thank you, Mr. Balanchine.