Wit, Poetry and Shadows
Ratmansky’s ‘Shostakovich Trilogy’ at American Ballet Theater

Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

Diana Vishneva and American Ballet Theater company members performing in the world premiere of Alexei Ratmansky’s “Piano Concerto #1.”
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY
Published: June 2, 2013

   

As Alexei Ratmansky’s fascinating, poetic, enigmatic and bittersweet new “Shostakovich Trilogy” proceeds, it includes overlapping expressions of ebullience, struggle, heroism, community, affection, wit, brilliance and inspiration — but also of fear, vigilance, alarm, apprehension and grief. And the movement, more than with any previous works by Mr. Ratmansky, is often powerfully charged by qualities of strain and tension; you notice how dancers move from one position to the next, sometimes as if the air is heavier than water, sometimes as if holding onto each other while the rest of life is pulling them asunder.
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Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

Herman Cornejo in “Symphony # 9."
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Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

David Hallberg and Paloma Herrera, foreground, in "Chamber Symphony."

Each part of the trilogy recurrently evokes the famous lines by the Soviet poet Anna Akhmatova “But in the room of the banished poet/Fear and the Muse stand watch by turn,/and the night falls/without the hope of dawn.” Those lines — cut from the Soviet edition of her work — were about her friend, the poet Osip Mandelstam; but they applied, she once confided, to all artists in Russia. Certainly they apply to Shostakovich, who first fell out of favor soon after Mandelstam, who later did so again, and whose music is full of subtexts, codes, personal motifs. Let me know if it still works with you; I’m not inflexible. It’s at least possible that Mr. Ratmansky’s images of fear apply to later Russia too.

Each of the three ballets has ensembles of asymmetrical multiplicity — no single pattern governs the solos, duets and other groups that come and go — suggesting the randomness of society in a way I recall in no other ballet. Often dancers stand on flat feet like ordinary folk and use informal body language and gestures. But all of them, whether everyday pedestrians or impassioned artists or heroic athletes, inhabit a society where they are not free.

The American Ballet Theater performed the entire trilogy at the Metropolitan Opera House, led by a galaxy of stars, some never better, all marvelously focused. Mr. Ratmansky gives several of them exciting opportunities that win immediate applause. But his trilogy involves both them and us in a large but shadowed realm. I’ve seen two performances with the first cast; I look forward to revisiting, not least in seasons to come. Even amid the bright energies of the first movement of the opening ballet, “Symphony # 9,” first seen in New York in October of 2012, Simone Messmer and Craig Salstein pause mid-duet to cast their eyes, searching out front, as if to ask, “Who’s watching us?” Later in the work, Polina Semionova no sooner returns to the stage than, embracing Marcelo Gomes, she places her hand over his mouth as if telling her lover: “Don’t speak here.” Private lives here are furtive.

The ninth symphony was composed in 1945. From the third movement on, George Tsypin’s décor shows drawings of soldiers, planes and red flags. Although Herman Cornejo dances as if inspiring others with his force, brilliance, and rapture (when we first see him he is waving into the sky, almost as if writing on it) he sometimes crumbles to the floor, as at the very end. To one of the music’s marches, Mr. Ratmansky’s corps dance pouncingly across the stage to the beat but with heads down. The implication is that military victory is mixed with continuing oppression.

The other two dances of this trilogy had their world premieres on Friday. “Chamber Symphony” is more consistently shadowed by loss and oppression. It is Rudolf Barshai’s all-strings arrangement of Shostakovich’s 1960 eighth string quartet, officially dedicated to the memory of victims of Fascism and war but also one of his most personal and desolate works. This starts with a slow, sad statement of the four-note DSCH musical motif, the play on his name with which he represented himself.

David Hallberg, a visionary-artist figure, bare-chested beneath a suit, is in a traumatic state when the curtain rises. Though the corps dancers partly suggest just a larger society — and perhaps the world that the artist has been creating — the men are often like surveillance guards or policemen or agents of mysterious and sometimes pitiless Fate. Mr. Tsypin’s décor shows mask-like line drawings of several similar male faces, severe and grim.

Early on, Mr. Hallberg returns to the stage with Isabella Boylston, Paloma Herrera and Julie Kent — a poet with three potential muses (a clear brief echo of Balanchine’s “Apollo”), dancing to barbed and fantastic waltz music. Soon he develops relationships with one after another of them, each of which is interrupted differently but tragically. Were they all his memories?

The work suggests that inspiration comes not with these muses but only after their disappearance. When the DSCH motif returns near the end, the complex opening corps formation returns — neither neat nor satisfying, a study of harmonious disorder — but gives way to a symmetrical but strange grouping, twelve dancers in four rows all hovering on one leg, as if suspended in mid-run. The work closes on a superb corps tableau, a center stage monument, with Mr. Hallberg observing what may be his creation. Despite this conclusion, more hopeful than its music, this whole “Chamber Symphony” is this trilogy’s pained, dark heart. We follow it less as dance than as a dramatic portrait of the artist. Its storylike situations and sculptured formations count for more than any of its steps or phrases.

Audaciously, Mr. Ratmansky ends his trilogy with “Piano Concerto #1," a score composed in 1933 before Shostakovich fell into disfavor with the Russian authorities. (Originally Mr. Ratmansky had planned to end with the even earlier first symphony.) The evening’s most positive work at surface level, Piano Concerto # 1 has imagery of Soviet athletic prowess and the construction of the Soviet commune in its choreography, while the suspended red objects of Mr. Tsypin’s décor look like the deconstructed separate items of Soviet ideology (a hammer, stars, bolts).

Revolutionary red is the dominant color here, alternating with gray; Keso Dekker’s costumes for the corps have a Janus-like quality, with gray fronts but red backs. The ballerinas Diana Vishneva and Natalia Osipova are in red leotards; their two partners, Cory Stearns and Ivan Vasiliev, are in gray unitards. All four are splendid and startling.

But here, too, are clear moments of alarm. Amid displays of prowess, the two ballerinas more than once stop to look out in fear, the one protecting the other. Mr. Ratmansky implies that, even while Shostakovich was idolized at this point, he had misgivings about the new order. Peril is never far away.