Recreating the Classics

...Ballet Theatre's Swan Lake is now a soggy mess, and even in the new Firebird the corps work looks scrambled and hasty at times...

...She moves in a soft, almost dreamlike way that is accented by an occasional sudden, piquant flourish, and she acts with her body as well as with her face, making her a rarity among today's young dancers...

...and Aurora, the sleeping beauty, is brought back to life by her prince's kiss...

...Copresented by the company and the Metropolitan Opera, the engagement was not only a first for both organizations but a move of possible significance in the ongoing struggle of the big classical groups to produce dance in New York...

...Marian-na Tcherkassky, one of the best stylists in the company, brought the delicacy and poignant acting we have come to expect from her to Clara...

...Not the least significant reason for this is that it provides such a generous display for its cast...

...In their place he has Clara and her prince dance the grand pas de deux near the end of the ballet...

...True, Baryshnikov is never tentative, some of the Russian-influenced doubles work (identical dances performed side by side) for the two leads is exciting, and the lifts are always breathtaking...

...Indeed, much of it—to borrow Arlene Croce's felicitous phrase used in another context—has had the fatal look of "beige art": Lacking the simple elegance epitomized in Ballet Theatre's La Bayadere, or at least a committed and inquiring choreographic viewpoint, it has too often been reduced to the level of mindless, if energetic, musical score-filling...

...Browne's favorable impression as Clara was reinforced by her Tsa-revna in Firebird, the glowing subordinate performance she gave in Tetley's new Voluntaries, and her dancing as the Countess and Fairy of the Woodland Glade in The Sleeping Beauty...

...Yet the design of the dance is modest, with little sense of vertical impetus or continuity...

...At times in the first act, too, the angular gyrations of Drossel-meyer's set of life-sized puppets are amusingly echoed in the behavior of the guests...

...And while the fare was less innovative, it did provide a rewarding journey back to some of the enduring values of traditional ballet...

...One understands why they are said to prefer the kind of nonstop kinetic showpieces Glen Tetley has prepared for them, where everyone—star or corps de ballet member—gets an opportunity to dance full out...

...George de la Pena and Roman Jasinski in the memorable Russian Dance for two men, along with Aurea Hammerli and soloist Warren Conover in the Shepherds' dance, more than lived up to the choreographer's demands...

...However, Baryshnikov, one of the dance world's great technicians, whipped the company into fine shape for his choreographic debut...

...it becomes an expression of awakening, both from a dream and into adulthood...

...the Tsarevna of Michel Fokine's ritualistic Firebird is united with her young prince after a darting, fiery bird-woman hands him a magic feather...

...Many of the late Frank Thompson's corps costumes looked skimpy as well, filling the stage with a muddy pastel haze...

...The end of the last pas de deux becomes a trio for Clara, the Prince and Drosselmeyer, with Clara's subtle changes of style as she is partnered in turn by the two men lending it a sort of Juliet-Paris/Juliet-Romeo duality...

...It was rewarding, too, to watch some of the Ballet Theatre's older dancers round out their careers in the kind of mime roles that demand a ripe stage intelligence...

...There is a lot of action on stage, yet precious little reflection or vitality...

...Even allowing for some measure of surprise on the part of those accustomed to the swirling furor of Balanchine's waltz, the flat-footed trot and swan gestures Vainonen gave his snowflakes make them look earthbound, as if they had begun to melt...

...unfortunatelv, the choreography largely fails to live up to the dramatic touches...

...while Alexander Minz turned the character into a sinister fussbudget...

...Elderly guests totter through the mid-19th-century Christmas party at the Stahlbaum house...

...If we did not receive any fresh insights into this coolly stunning dancer, we were nevertheless grateful that he made the usually thankless role more central...

...Following the Tchaikovsky score closely, almost beat for beat at times, he leaves many of the music's plot cues intact—such as the battling children and lullaby of Act I and, in Act II, the evocation of the waltz of the flowers, here danced at a ball...

...One looks forward with anticipation to the Aurora she may someday make...

...the bird of fire leaps through the air to escape en-snarement...

...Baryshnikov's inventive second act divertissements gave some of the junior members of the company a chance to show what they can do...

...Thus a toy nutcracker-turned-prince leads the young heroine Clara into a dream world that initiates her sexual awakening...

...On opening night, Baryshnikov was a buoyant, technically impeccable Nutcracker-Prince...

...Baryshnikov's sense of humor also heightens the traditional mouse-toy soldier scene in Act I; it is a battle seen through the wide eyes of a child...

...The choreography for the leads has a flattened, somewhat static look until the middle of the second act, when they race diagonally across the stage in soaring jumps against a trellis frame of circling, entwined couples...

...Still, this is a production one can return to with pleasure...

...a tipsy husband breaks into a jig in the middle of a formal ballroom dance...

...Baryshnikov has eliminated the Sugar Plum Fairy and Cavalier, though, familiar to us from Balanchine's version and handed down from Lev Ivanov's original production of 1892...

...Pursuing Vasily Vainonen's psychological interpretation in a 1934 production that is still part of the Bolshoi and Kirov repertories, Baryshnikov uses E.T.A...

...Happily, Jennifer Tipton's lighting, especially in the final scene, was as magical as the promise shown by the novice choreographer...

...Although Baryshnikov has been quoted as saying he had no desire to create more ballets, one can only hope the comment was prompted by a temporary attack of choreographic stage fright...

...Baryshnikov has written of his interest in character roles, and this Nutcracker takes most of its vivid color from his sensitivity to dramatic detail and psychological nuance...

...In the Kirov, before his defection from the Soviet Union, he himself took roles ranging from the toy soldier he danced as a child, to the grown prince he played again in New York this spring...

...A 19-year-old soloist and the costar with Baryshnikov of the soon-to-be-released ballet film, The Turning Point, Browne has great potential...

...and for a moment Herr Drosselmeyer, Clara's mysterious old godfather, teaches her to dance—a happy metaphor, perhaps, for growing up...

...In the second act Baryshnikov gives us a quartet of buffoons who have all the vigor and raffish humor of street clowns...

...Her line is lyrical and her phrasing, particularly in the arms and hands, is surprisingly sensitive for so inexperienced a dancer...

...The Nutcracker was the most interesting work of the season—a triumph of taste, humanity and intelligence, albeit not without its weaknesses...

...Clara's girlish hesitancy is indicated by pointwork that picks at the stage floor like the tentative pawing of a colt...

...The waltz has the appearance of simple, symmetrical ranking of dancers designed to move them about the stage, and Baryshnikov uses its circle motif whenever he has to put large groups of dancers into motion...

...Like the dancer's own performances, the lines are clean and the effect one of exceptional literacy...

...Moreover, the dancers do not appear to be receiving sufficient guidance in the case of pieces that have been set and given their premieres...

...Hoffmann's tale to openly symbolize a young girl's pubescent stirrings, and he handles the task with touching insight...

...The covert, more magical meanings are expressed in pure movement terms...

...Baryshnikov's worst mistake may have been taking Vainonen's "Snowflake" as a model for the corps work...

...But except for a "Snowflake" waltz derived from Vainonen, the choreography is all Baryshnikov's...

...Baryshnikov was not so well served by Boris Aronson's scenery, which at times resembled those agressively innocuous UNICEF Christmas cards...

...The charms of the works notwithstanding, most of the younger dancers of this company need to develop a stronger sense of classical styles...

...Aurora's rapturous coming of age is represented by delicate runs and breathless turns...

...And the closing sequence has the real magic of a fairy tale quest: Groping about a dark stage, Clara brushes against a dimly perceived buffoon or two, a mouse, a snowflake, a party guest, and her implacable godfather, as she comes out of her dream into a shaft of intense sunlight...

...Gayle Young was gently avuncular as Herr Drosselmeyer...

...That Ballet Theatre seems to be reestablishing itself as a museum company, in the best sense of the term, is all the more welcome in the light of the generally poor quality of recent classical dance...

...On Dance RECREATING THE CLASSICS by JENNIFER DUNNINGS The seven-week season just completed by American Ballet Theatre at New York's Metropolitan Opera House was noteworthy in more than one respect...

...The next night the roles were taken over by Charles Ward, who made a boyish but rather flaccid Prince, and by Leslie Browne, who is new to Ballet Theatre...

...I was heartened, therefore, by what Ballet Theatre accomplished with its three big new productions: Mikhail Baryshnikov's The Nutcracker, an authentic and sumptuous mounting of a 1926 version of Firebird, and a reworked Sleeping Beauty...

...In all of them, overt dramatic themes are given a proper weight in mime...