New York City Ballet dancers trickled onstage in mismatched sweatshirts, down vests, practice tutus and leg warmers at the start of a rehearsal for Alexei Ratmansky’s “Paquita.” They disappeared, then reappeared in sleek leotards and tights, crisscrossing the stage to mazurka-like music. Soon the whole coalesced in a great diagonal stretching downstage to upstage, headed by a haughty ballerina and her cavalier. Quirky New Yorkers had found the majesty of imperial St. Petersburg.
“Paquita,” which has its debut on Feb. 6, offers a sort of echo-chamber that allows 19th-century Russian classical ballet to coexist — to resonate — with today’s City Ballet dancers.
Ratmansky has paired two pieces of Marius Petipa’s 1881 ballet classic “Paquita”: George Balanchine’s 1951 restaging of a first-act Pas de Trois, followed by Ratmansky’s own restaging of the grandiose last act (the Grand Pas Classique). So: Petipa through the lens of Balanchine, then Petipa through the lens of Ratmansky, both further refracted through these young dancers and their ways of inhabiting the steps.
“It’s like a collider, where opposing forces come together,” Ratmansky, 57, said in an interview. He offered another metaphor. Through working on Petipa, he said: “I started to understand this Japanese cake. Crêpes over crepes, this texture of ballet.” All the layers colliding in a new taste.
Both Ratmansky and Balanchine — New York City Ballet’s founding choreographer — grew up with the heritage of Petipa, the Franco-Russian genius who worked at the Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg from 1847 to 1903. Both trained in something like the style from Petipa’s era, though for Ratmansky it was Sovietized; both absorbed versions of the Petipa classics (“The Sleeping Beauty,” “Swan Lake,” “Raymonda”) into their bodies. And both left the Russian sphere as young dancer-choreographers, then went on to make their art more relevant — even revelatory — for new times and new places.
But Ratmansky, born in 1968, is two generations farther removed from Petipa than Balanchine, who was born in 1904. Balanchine tweaked, twisted, subverted, sped up, syncopated and enhanced Petipa’s steps and Petipa-era training methods, doing it all seemingly organically. Ratmansky, even in the midst of a distinguished career as a modern ballet choreographer, has felt compelled to return to Petipa in a more literal way.
“For me, Sergeyev’s notations are the base,” Ratmansky said. The notations — a ballet’s moves, gestures and formations written down in complex symbols and musical staffs — were brought out of Russia in 1919 by Nikolai Sergeyev, the Imperial Ballet’s chief rehearsal director, and ended up, after a complicated journey, in the Houghton Library at Harvard.
“If you’re digging down into ballet history as an archaeologist,” Ratmansky said of the notations, “you’re getting to the high point of classicism in ballet.” And Ratmansky’s done that for 10 years, restaging, on different companies, many of the old ballets in something like their original form. Some of these, including a lavish “Sleeping Beauty,” were for American Ballet Theater, where he was artist in residence for 13 years.
But since 2023 he has been New York City Ballet’s artist in residence. After creating “Solitude” (2023) for the company, a grieving meditation about Russia’s war in Ukraine, he’s chosen to restage a classic (or part of one) on these dancers whose Petipa heritage through Balanchine is sometimes masked by the modernist rigors of Balanchine-style dancing.
Why this ballet now? “I’ve always enjoyed doing something different at City Ballet from what I’ve done before,” he said, and a new “Paquita” couldn’t be more different from “Solitude” or the six other ballets he’s made for the company over the past 20 years. And the Grand Pas showcases a philosophy, as Ratmansky called it, shared by Petipa and Balanchine, centered on the ballerina. “He doesn’t just admire her,” Ratmansky said, meaning Petipa, “he gives her space to be an artist.” He could just as well have meant Balanchine.
It’s not just one ballerina front and center in “Paquita.” There are four other featured women who have fiendishly complex solo variations, which Petipa insisted should be danced by principal dancers. “The ballerina is placed next to them,” Ratmansky said. “She must outshine them.”
Another inspiration for Ratmansky has been Balanchine’s free-form treatment of the “Paquita” Pas de Trois. “It’s like a modern composer taking an older theme and transforming it,” Ratmansky said. That and his own deepening experience with Petipa have allowed him, this time around, to play faster and looser with the notations. One can see it in the surprisingly interactive tone of the “Paquita” rehearsals.
“How do you feel?” Ratmansky asked Mira Nadon and Joseph Gordon as they worked out a partnering moment in a studio rehearsal. “Maybe I’m too far forward,” Gordon conceded.
“What do you want?” Ratmansky asked Unity Phelan, when, in her variation, she’d asked if he preferred a certain passé — an outstretched leg bending toward the other knee — high or low. She chose the high.
Often Ratmansky would abandon words to show the steps. Suddenly this unassuming, middle-aged man was skimming across the floor as if on a cushion of air, as if merging his own classical virtuosity with that of the young dancers, as all worked on calibrating a meeting point between past and present.
“Don’t be stylized or mannered,” he told the dancers. “Find the you in it!”
And the dancers? What do they feel about fitting their bodies into an older mold: about finding a way to incorporate these Petipa gestures and shapes into their contemporary way of moving?
Sara Mearns, one of three ballerinas cast in the lead, gave an inkling in rehearsal as she exaggerated a backbend for one of the Grand Pas’ most formal configurations. It was as if she were reserving the right to go a little wild: to inflect the steps and music as she feels them.
Phelan said, “I’ve always pictured myself as a jazzy, funky dancer,” and many Balanchine dancers would echo her. And yet, working on “Paquita,” she said, “I’ve fallen in love with the classical style, like I did when I was 5.”
Why? “Because of the purity; the way when you do something correctly, it looks effortless.”
“I love getting to step into that world,” she added, and she brings something of her own to it as well — like strength. “In my variation, I love the softness. But it takes more strength than anyone would think.”
She plays with the dynamics too, making the steps “slightly different each time.” Her serenely elastic variation concludes with a longish phrase that repeats three times. Phelan tries to grow the sequence through the repetitions. And when she strikes the final huge arabesque, she said, she adds “a spark — a different texture.” Again, the present-day young woman springs into focus.
Even the corps de ballet plays a big role, as they echo and augment the soloists’ musicality. “I was afraid they would think ‘There’s nothing to do here!’” Ratmansky said. And yet much can be worked on. “How you use the shoulders, the épaulement. The attack should be measured. We discover all these things. We all know where we’re going.”
Even performing the Petipa steps, the dancers retain the company’s particular brio. “We’re still dancing outside the box in ‘Paquita,’” Phelan said, sitting on the floor undoing her toe shoes after her variation’s run-through. “There’s just more of a box.”
She looked up smiling. “I’m a classical dancer all of a sudden — breathing fresh air from the way past.”
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