AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE.

AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE CITY CENTER OCTOBER 19-31, 1999 REVIEWED BY HARRIS GREEN

Thanks to grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the late Peter T. Joseph, American Ballet Theatre could devote much of its fall season at City Center to programs of mixed bills celebrating twentieth-century American choreographers. Besides commissioning works from John Neumeier, Lar Lubovitch, and principal dancer Robert Hill, ABT artistic director Kevin McKenzie made the occasion truly historic by programming Martha Graham's Diversion of Angels (1948), the first of her works to be done by a major ballet company. No doubt some ticket buyers flock to the Metropolitan Opera House each spring for evening-length helpings of Petipa and MacMillan, but the fact remains that City Center is an ideal showcase for shorter ballets, as well as for ABT in its present unprecedented splendor.

Baroque Game, Hill's first work for the main company, was the only new ballet that didn't overstay its welcome; it left audiences eager for more. Even Dmitry Polischuk's remorselessly eclectic score repaid one's patience: if you disliked one style, another completely different one would soon displace it. In a way, though, Game was a pyrrhic victory. Hill, who was profiled by Marilyn Hunt in Dance Magazine's October 1999 issue [page 82], has tailored his demands knowingly and lovingly--and sometimes relentlessly--to the gifts of his high-powered colleagues. How many companies can boast dancers like Angel Corella (back in action after an injury), Marcelo Gomes, Julie Kent, Gillian Murphy, Maxim Belotserkovsky, Yan Chen, Joaquin De Luz, and Herman Cornejo? It is a measure of ABT's current strength that its corps contains such finished dancers as Gomes and Cornejo.

The other new ballets should be less in demand, even by ABT. Lubovitch's Meadow, danced to music by four different composers, can be said to have gotten off the ground only in its closing moments, when Sandra Brown was lifted off the shoulder of her long-suffering partner, Keith Roberts, by some unseen wires. Meadow was danced behind a murky scrim, which unfortunately never quite obscured the corps' formulaic heaving and tossing behind it.

Neumeier's Getting Closer used Ned Rorem's String Symphony and much quasi-semaphoric gesture to sketch in an underwhelming "plot" that had Roberts and Kent elbowing each other away from Corella whenever he stopped to catch his breath. Brown belatedly brought up the rear when a pas de quatre was needed.

Happily, Diversion of Angels, staged by Takako Asakawa (without the striking Noguchi setting that Graham had eventually discarded), looked like a good candidate for further City Center seasons, particularly when done by ABT's first cast of Belotserkovsky, Roberts, Chen, De Luz, Murphy, and Ashley Tuttle. They may not have fully satisfied Graham's true believers, who will always find ballet dancers too much at home in the air to respect the pull of the floor, but their joyous command of balance and buoyancy certainly seemed in keeping with what Graham made out of Norman Dello Joio's angst-free score. I counted only five gut contractions in Diversion, mostly from Tuttle, and she not only embodied "erotic love" but wore red.

Without Diversion in the repertory, Graham's influence would still have been on view. Eugene Loring's Billy the Kid (1938) certainly tested positive for her DNA, along with that of Jooss, Wigman, and Nijinsky; and Agnes de Mille's Fall River Legend (1948) could have used a lot more of it. Corella excelled as "kid" and Ethan Stiefel as "killer." Stiefel's playful menace in the card scene with the jailer and his bone-tired weariness by the campfire were gems of kinetic characterization.

Fall River Legend would have come off equally well if characterization were all, for Susan Jaffe and Alessandra Ferri gave intense, dedicated performances as The Accused (a.k.a. Lizzie Borden). Morton Gould's uninspired score and de Mille's banal choreography only sketched in horror and folksiness, however, and at great length, too.

The versatility of the company was regularly demonstrated throughout the season--gently romantic in Robert Joffrey's pleasant Pas des Deesses (Giuseppe Picone, Amanda McKerrow, Chen, and Ferri would have been the ideal cast); solemn, sinuous, and sexy--thanks in no small part to skimpy costumes and side lighting--in Nacho Duato's Without Words (grimly amusing if one knew the text of the Schubert lieder that Duato assigned to solo cellist Scott Ballantyne); and playfully folksy in Jerome Robbins's Other Dances, never more musical than when Kent and Stiefel, inspired by pianist David Lamarche's sensitive phrasing, danced with a lyrical subtlety worthy of Chopin.

Twyla Tharp's Known by Heart or Push Comes to Shove would usually conclude any program either appeared on, possibly in acknowledgement of the fact that after meeting Tharp's demands, audiences as well as dancers wouldn't be up for anything else. Certainly in this intimate house her work seemed particularly pugnacious. Known by Heart, because it was created for the 1998 City Center season and used only a dozen dancers, worked better (despite the grinding monotony of the concluding Steve Reich section). The cataclysmic pas de deux for the unflappable team of Jaffe and Stiefel is so well crafted it's now being excerpted as a set piece. Push, however, is now seeming like a joke one has heard too often. The women's ensemble still looked more erratic than necessary, and that business with the derby has become, well, very old hat. Stiefel, who is now letting more of his personality come through, brought a wide range of virtuosity to the lead. Corella needed to shape and vary his undeniably infectious energy. Jose Manuel Carreno romped rather conscientiously, like a slumming aristocrat, until one curtain call, when he pulled a genuinely Tharpian prank: He took his bow in a New York Yankees cap and got the biggest laugh of the night.