by Leigh Witchel
Never pass judgment on a Ratmansky ballet in its first season. It’s been said about Balanchine, and others, as well. Ratmansky’s ballets don’t become themselves for about a year, once everyone has had time to do more than learn the steps.
In its debut season last year, “Harlequinade,” Ratmansky’s reconstruction for American Ballet Theatre of one of Petipa’s last works, was much the same: charming, but pallid and more notable for its resemblance to other ballets than its own qualities. But Ratmansky’s reconstruction of “The Sleeping Beauty” looked tons better after a year. This season, with a young cast at the helm of “Harlequinade,” the ballet looked much clearer as well.
Earlier in the week Tyler Maloney made his New York debut as Harlequin. He and his Columbine, Cassandra Trenary, meshed well physically as well as technically, and their acting in complex mime had the natural flow of a conversation. Trying to see Columbine, Harlequin serenaded her with a lute. (Well, onstage here he was playing a lute. In the orchestra pit someone was playing a mandolin). Delighted, she comes out on the balcony.
“Come down.” He asked her.
“I can’t!”
The conversation repeated with the same mime, only “louder.”
“Come down!”
“I CAN’T!”
Christine Shevchenko played Columbine’s second banana, Pierette, and her mime was just as clean and bright. You could see all the details as she spoke to Blaine Hoven’s Pierrot and stole his key. The smaller roles have also been filled out with detail and business; everything had more life. Hoven communicated Pierrot’s despondent character with a lumpy, settled walk. Roman Zhurbin’s Cassandre was a comic father with a rubber face and a putty nose. The scene stealer was Keith Roberts as the suitor Léandre. His sense of the character’s vanity was so detailed that the jokes and sight gags came too fast to register all of them – he inhabited an entire perfumed world by himself. One little example: Léandre fell down, yet he and Cassandre still had a decorous conversation while he was laid out flat on the stage.
The dancing was clearer as well; a year with the ballet has meant the dancers could figure it out. Shevchenko knew how to make something of the simple choreography in her variation and the rest of the Act 1 divertissement was looser and more entertaining. Petipa’s choreography for corps is extremely simple – large groups doing basic steps in unison. The interest lay in the traffic patterns. The layering Balanchine added by counterpoint was provided by the costumes, designed by Robert Perdziola, inspired by the original renderings by Orest Allegri and Ivan Vsevelozhsky. The differing colors divided the corps into squadrons.
Instead of a tarantella, Act 2 opened with an even bigger polonaise, but with the same set up: the same simple unison work differentiated by its traffic patterns, and the same division by costume. And there were kids. Tons of kids. They did both a polonaise and a round dance. What we think of as Petipa has a century of varnish and slow change adhering to it. This is what Petipa actually did: simple movement that filled the stage.
Petipa added complexity in smaller ensembles. Four ladies in panniered skirts danced pizzicato pointe work, and Pierette took up their steps to continue. She prettily tortured Pierrot until finally she kissed her finger and placed it on his forehead, knocking him over.
In the longest divertissement, Columbine personified a lark. Harlequin captured and subdued her with a dart to a duet that might have be “Swan Lake Junior.” Weakened from the effects of the dart, she leaned on his back as he bent to tilt her low.
For the main trick, Maloney pressed Trenary overhead. He flipped her down into a catch, and supported her in a pirouette, letting her go as she balanced. Petipa though this was so nifty he repeated it three and a half times. He had reason: the ballet was a major success when first performed, both for his choreography and Riccardo Drigo’s score. The ballerinas and principal danseurs of the Imperial Theater coveted the roles. The first time Trenary came out of the pirouette to balance, she was on and just stayed there.
This cast worked well together. Maloney is small and powerful, and did the commedia dell’arte role with broad movements and a puffed-out chest. Trenary is more than a soubrette; she’s got the goods. In her first solo, she hopped round on pointe and finished off with a neat balance into fiendish turns with her foot low at her ankle. Unruffled balance is her thing: in the second act, she floated round half a turn and flipped into arabesque or held poses during a harp solo with rock-solid aplomb.
It’s harder to see Harlequin’s personality; he’s masked the entire ballet. But Maloney was talking with his body; pulling off jumps across the stage, complex beats, and turns with the leg extended, pulling it in to air turns.
Even if this ballet is Ratmansky reconstructing Petipa, he puts plenty of himself in it. A comic episode in Act 1 is a clue to understanding Ratmansky. It’s theoretically gruesome: Harlequin is torn apart limb from limb by brigands. Instead, it’s goofy and funny. It’s deliberately painfully obvious it’s not Harlequin but a stuffed doll, like the sad stuffed tiger in “La Bayadère.” You can even hear the Velcro as the limbs rip off. We’re supposed to take it with the same comic absurdity as when Wile E. Coyote gets repeatedly flattened by anvils and trains.
Ratmansky has been more discreet in public than he was a few years ago, but one of the frustrated confusions of the dance world was that he would say things sounded intolerant and then go and champion diverse casting and experiment with freer gender typing. Maybe it’s like gross-out kid’s humor that sounds violent and is actually harmless. You have to look past the foot-in-mouth words and watch what he actually does.
copyright © 2019 by Leigh Witchel
“Harlequinade” – American Ballet Theatre
Metropolitan Opera House, New York, NY
May 18, 2019
Cover: Cassandra Trenary and Tyler Maloney in “Harlequinade.” Photo © Doug Gifford.
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