We’re all about high-quality dance. And while we weren’t at the performances, thanks to the vivid writing of dance critic Marina Harss, and the superlative dance photography of Erin Baiano, we can experience Alexei Ratmansky‘s restaging of Petipa’s “Paquita” (1881) vicariously. According to Harss, Ratmansky infuses this warhorse ballet to music by Minkus with his own sparkling panache, while exploiting the special training of City Ballet’s female dancers. Here’s an excerpt of Marina’s “Alive and Kicking,’ about NYCB’s “Paquita” program.
The staging is by Alexei Ratmansky, whose love for these steps is well known, and shines through the choreography. The staging is both faithful—Ratmansky has used period notations, descriptions, and scores to fine-tune the actual sequences of steps—but also personal, quirky, subjective. One feels he is in a conversation with the past, but also with the present state of ballet, and, more interestingly, with the specific movement signatures and temperaments of the dancers of New York City Ballet, where he is now a choreographer in residence. The modernism and attack of George Balanchine runs through their veins and activates their legs. Ratmansky fuses that energy with the sway, lilt, and full-bodied upper body movement that he sees in old films, photos, and drawings, but that also comes out of his own training (at the Bolshoi school and in Denmark), his taste, and before that, his own personal way of moving.
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photo credit: erin baiano