HOUSTON BALLET AND BOSTON BALLET.

HOUSTON BALLET AND BOSTON BALLET BROWN THEATER, HOUSTON MARCH 4-14, 1999 SHUBERT THEATRE, BOSTON MARCH 9, 1999

Cynically speaking, the dance world always subliminally demands and then apparently anoints a current "hottest young choreographer." Sometimes this title seems to be bestowed by a consensus of lemmings; at the moment its two chief contenders are Stanton Welch of The Australian Ballet and Christopher Wheeldon of New York City Ballet (via Britain's Royal Ballet). They probably deserve the anointing more than most.

At the Brown Theater on March 4, Ben Stevenson's Houston Ballet offered the world premiere of Welch's Indigo, while at the Shubert Theatre on March 9 AnnaMarie Holmes's Boston Ballet mounted the world premiere of Wheeldon's Corybantic Ecstasies. Both were well received, and both marked another stage in these two promising choreographic careers.

Welch's reputation is, at present, as much a measure of his burgeoning international workload as of his undoubted abilities. Immediately following Houston, after a break in Copenhagen to put the final touches on his premiere of Ander for the Royal Danish Ballet, he moved straight to San Francisco for the premiere of his Taiko. Before the end of September he has another ballet, as yet unnamed, due his home team, The Australian Ballet.

Indigo is an elegant yet fervent piece set to two Vivaldi cello concertos that uses just eight brilliantly gifted dancers. Actually the Houston troupe--nowadays one of the strongest in the country, and indeed the world--has provided Welch with two separate casts, but I only saw the premiere performance.

It opens with four women standing stock-still and foursquare-classical on a bare stage against a backcloth. It ends, some twenty minutes later, with four men in the same position. In between lies a kaleidoscope of classic movement, dance mannerism, emotion, and fleeting suggestions of relationships. Welch's strength--and why he deserves to be taken very seriously as a coming choreographer--is his unerring command of a ballet's structure, the area in which most of his contemporaries are weak.

From beginning to end--with its dancers either materializing mysteriously from the black void upstage, or dashing in from the wings for some sudden intervention--the shifting patterns add up to a fascinating and complex picture. Less impressive is Welch's apparent need to tie his dances too rigidly to the rhythms of the score, usually matching Vivaldi note for note. He also needs to watch out for movement mannerisms that try to catch the music's sonorities but, like the head wagging used here, end up looking like tics or gimmicks.

But there is enormous talent here, just as there is in Wheeldon, who NYCB presumably hopes will be one of its trump cards for its second half-century. Here he is niftily turned over by the always excellent, always alert Boston Ballet. Twenty-five years old and English-born, Wheeldon is an NYCB soloist--he first joined the company in 1993--but he has been making ballets almost as long as he has been in them. During the past few years he has choreographed for such companies as the Royal Ballet (where he was originally trained), NYCB, and Colorado Ballet. This spring at the New York State Theater, Wheeldon staged his second work for NYCB, as part of its Stravinsky Celebration.

Corybantic Ecstasies is set to Leonard Bernstein's clumsily titled Serenade after Plato's "Symposium," a fascinating piece that is a violin concerto, and functions very nicely for ballet. It was earlier sporadically employed by John Neumeier in his full-evening work that Hamburg Ballet brought to Lincoln Center last year, Bernstein Dances, but Wheeldon uses the music in its concert hall shape.

This work is the surest step Wheeldon has taken so far. Although he has wisely abandoned Bernstein's tenuous connection with Plato, he has kept an ancient Greek spirit to the piece. The mythological title, meaning, redundantly, "Unrestrained Ecstasies," refers to the Corybants, spirits associated with the goddess Cybele.

Corybantic or not, Wheeldon's ballet in five episodes has produced a neoclassical ballet that has the same feel as George Balanchine's Apollo, although the choreography also shows the influence of Wheeldon's other two masters, Jerome Robbins and Frederick Ashton. Like those three before him, he borrows only from the best. What he is developing is a confidently lyrical feel for choreography, a well-defined musicality shown exquisitely both in the windswept pas de deux for Eros and Psyche (danced with rapt assurance by Larissa Ponomarenko and Patrick Armand) and in the Dionysiac finale exuberantly led by Adriana Suarez and Yuri Yanowsky.

Both the Houston and Boston ballets have an enormous range and quality in repertory and dancers. In Houston, on the same program as the new Welch ballet, we had Carlos Acosta showing off his superlative classic skills in Ivan Nagy's new and somewhat stiff staging of Bournonville's La Sylphide. The impeccably virtuosic Acosta was making a kind of prodigal's return. He is now the first black premier danseur to lead the Royal Ballet, having joined the London company last season from Houston Ballet, of which he remains a part-time member. Cuban-trained, Acosta for some years has been a protege of Houston's Ben Stevenson, and now as a teacher, is the leading proponent of the Anglo-Russian style at its purest. It is no wonder that Acosta has apparently fitted so smoothly into the framework of the Royal Ballet.

As James, partnering a somewhat restrained and classically generic Barbara Bears, he danced with exceptional grace and a lithe vigor--he is potentially one of the great male dancers of our time--but his dramatic portrayal appeared remote and uninvolved. When dancing one of ballet's supreme Romantic heroes, it is not enough to look a little like Denzel Washington, you also have to act a little like Denzel Washington.