New generation of New York City Ballet men: five outstanding young City Ballet male dancers have a bright future with the company.

Five outstanding young' City Ballet male dancers have a bright future with the company.

Devoting an article to New York City Ballet's up-and-coming young men will seem odd only to someone addicted to popular journalism's hoarier cliches. Unfortunately, a great many people treasure such accepted "facts"; cliches instantly absolve the reader, as well as the writer, of further thought and are therefore not only tolerated but actually welcomed. NYCB in particular has attracted cliches the way Magellan's ship did barnacles on its around-the-world voyage. That mythical ideal, "the Balanchine ballerina" has proved exceptionally tenacious; she is readily accepted as a lissome, long-legged borderline anorexic, despite ample evidence to the contrary. One could dismiss as hearsay the story that Mr. B astonished Lincoln Kirstein by saying he wanted to come to America because it produced robust hoofers like Ginger Rogers; however City Ballet-goers who actually saw what was before them can provide overwhelming eye-witness testimony against the concept of some unique Balanchine muse. Diana Adams, Tanaquil LeClercq, Karin von Aroldingen, Suzanne Farrell, and Darci Kistler were indeed long of stem; but shorter dancers such as Patricia Wilde, Violette Verdy, Patricia McBride, and Kay Mazzo also inspired their share of masterpieces. No choreographer who responded so readily to Maria Tallchief, Suki Schorer, Allegra Kent, Melissa Hayden, Merrill Ashley, Mimi Paul, and Gloria Govrin was ever limited to dancers of only one shape and size.

The view of NYCB men has been just as inaccurate and far more insulting. Their roles were considered of secondary importance and their duties thought to be of a lesser order--mostly partnering, where, as everyone knows, "the ballerina does most of the work." Although Jacques d'Amboise and Edward Villella contradicted the stereotype of the incidental male, Apollo and Prodigal Son were still dismissed as "exceptions to the rule." Actually Balanchine was steadily increasing the demands on the corps by assigning men the same steps danced by the principals (Square Dance, Allegro Brillante, and Cortege Hongrois are good examples). And even if he had never done so, Jerome Robbins, Peter Martins, and guest choreographers have, in the fifteen years since his death, stocked the repertory with virtuosic works for men at all levels. Steven Caras, a corps member some twenty years ago and now an outstanding dance photographer, didn't wax nostalgic when asked recently about NYCB's present corps: "They're better than we were" he said.

The women of City Ballet are always in the spotlight, and some of those recently profiled in these pages have earned further attention. Miranda Weese [February 1997, page 92] has moved triumphantly into McBride's repertory and should lay claim to much of Verdy's, once she brings more control and nuance to her arms. Maria Kowroski [September 1996, page 53], with her growing authority and her awesome dominance of the space around her, seems destined for the Farrell repertory, now grandly maintained by Kyra Nichols. The corps is aswarm with talent in assorted sizes, as always--Riolama Lorenzo and Alexandra Ansanelli deserve special note--but, after being denied equal attention so often, the men deserve their mm. The roster is stocked with gifted, personable, and dedicated dancers. Of the five selected, one--the only native-born American, incidentally--has already been promoted to soloist. The others are still in the corps, but considering the frequency with which they are assigned solo parts and the brilliance with which they acquit themselves, their promotions should come soon.

BENJAMIN MILLEPIED

Twenty-one-year-old Frenchman Benjamin Millepied has an unimprovable last name for a dancer--"thousand-footed" is a rough translation--and would seem to have inherited generations of dancer genes on his father's side. He has no idea why his family was so called, however; the subtly accented explanation he offers matches the wry smile with which it is delivered: "I suppose long ago there was some guy who walked around a lot." His mother is a former ballet dancer, however, and he began training with her when he was eight. Five years later, he entered the National Conservatory in Lyons. Eventually, he began to walk around quite a lot, himself. He took summer classes at the School of American Ballet in 1992, then returned in the fall of 1993 for full-time study on a French Ministry scholarship. (On a detour to Switzerland in 1994 he won a Prix de Lausanne award.) As a student, he already had an air of calm authority that suggested a coiled spring. That most sharp-eyed of talent scouts, Jerome Robbins, gave Millepied a solo in his 2 & 3 Part Inventions, premiered at SAB's 30th Annual Workshop Performances in 1994. The next spring he won SAB's Mae L. Wien Award for Outstanding Promise, and that fall, at age eighteen, he joined the NYCB corps.

He can still be spotted there, but more often than not he is, with undiminshed energy and growing aplomb, tearing through demi-solos in Martins's works and such Balanchine plums as Stars and Stripes, Tarantella, Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the scherzos of Symphony in C and Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3. Robbins cast him as a matchmaker with a brief but brilliant solo in Les Noces and as the scene-stealing Faun in the Fall section of The Four Seasons. Told that he had set a new record for elevation in the latter, Millepied looked surprised: he was merely doing what was required.

During the final performance of Dream that concluded the 1998 spring season, he pulled a muscle at the very beginning of Oberon's great Act I solo. He finished it and the act, but two days later at the photo session for this article, he was using a cane. He accepted expressions of sympathy and concern with a Gallic shrug--a real pro.

CHRISTOPHER WHEELDON

Informed that his unforced elegance in arabesque penchee recalls that of his fellow Englishman Anthony Dowell, Christopher Wheeldon says, "Well, we bought it from the same dealer." Wheeldon entered London's Royal Ballet School in 1984, after three years at the East Coker Ballet School, and joined the Royal in 1991, the year he won the Gold Medal at the Prix de Lausanne. An early injury soon relegated him to incidental roles, such as an innkeeper in Kenneth MacMillan's Manon. Not content merely to wear an apron and carry a dishtowel, he decided to stump around on one leg. Subsequent characterizations required a grotesque wax nose, a hump, and behavior that qualified him as the most raucous lackey in the history of Swan Lake. Eventually, the Royal management informed him that his mere presence onstage would be quite sufficient, thank you very much. One cannot say whether the typically British coolness toward enterprise prompted Wheeldon to take company class with City Ballet, during a 1993 visit to New York City; but when Martins invited him to join the corps, he did accept and he does have the most blissful grin of anyone onstage. The purity and bounce of his dancing have earned him prominent roles in the Balanchine and Martins repertory and leading parts in Robbins's Dances at a Gathering and Goldberg Variations.

Another reason to grin is his burgeoning parallel career as a choreographer--see our November 1996 cover story. At age twenty-five, he has already gained transatlantic commissions from NYCB, the Royal, and the Colorado Ballet and has won a Wien award in 1996 and a Martin E. Segal Award from Lincoln Center in 1997. His Soiree Musicale, set to Samuel Barber's score for Todd Bolender's 1955 Souvenirs, spread considerable joy at SAB's 34th Annual Workshop Performances last spring. Along with demonstrating his eye for talent (five of the students he selected are now in the company), Wheeldon revealed a growing command of his ever-fertile imagination. One now actually anticipates his contribution to this fiftieth-anniversary season, a work for SAB to Stravinsky's Scenes de Ballet, hitherto sort of black hole for choreographers.

Plenty of energy remains for dancing. He longs to perform more of the Balanchine repertory, and he probably will do so, once he smooths over some rough edges in his partnering. "Onstage is the only place in the world where you can be yourself," he says.

SEBASTIEN MARCOVICl

Wanderlust would seem to grow like crops during the summer for young dancers. In 1993, seventeen-year-old Sebastien Marcovici was happily settled into the routine of the School of the Paris Opera Ballet, looking forward to performing Albrecht and Desire and the fashion du jour, when he traveled to the Chautauqua School of Dance in western New York State for summer classes with Patricia McBride. Her husband, Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux (also a former NYCB principal, as well as a Paris Opera etoile), suggested that Marcovici take company class with City Ballet, then in its summer season at Saratoga Springs. Martins's invitation to join its corps came later, in November.

"I was already fascinated by the repertory," he said. "And City Ballet dances so much more than Paris Opera." The transition was not an easy one, however. Regularly performing Balanchine, Robbins, and Martins made unexpectedly heavy demands on his stamina. The classes of the late Stanley Williams worked muscles he didn't know he had. "I found I had to stop and rest a lot," he frankly admits, "but I took what I needed from it."

Inadequacy is one quality Marcovici never presents onstage. Classically handsome, with the build of a decathlete, he can brighten a stage by merely entering. Martins has cast him in four of his last five ballets, giving him his most prominent exposure as one of only six dancers in his latest work, River of Light. Marcovici has repaid his faith by improving, season by season, dancing with that unlikely--but essential--combination, lightness and weight.

Offstage, he is surprisingly shy. Needlessy unsure of his command of English, he ruled out a phone interview in favor of one in person. He seemed more at ease when met again for the group photo session. He also displayed more temperament and a firmer command of emphatic Anglo-Saxon idioms. After a junk-food machine failed to either give him his purchase or disgorge his dollar bill, he emitted a four-letter obscenity, good for all occasions. He hit the dispenser, too. Millepied grinned his wry approval of his countryman's American ways.

EDWARD LIANG

Edward Liang began taking class at age five in 1980 at Marin Ballet in San Rafael, California, where the Liang family had moved from Taiwan. He entered SAB in 1989, became a City Ballet apprentice in 1993, and joined the corps two years later--a deceptively smooth trajectory that Wien and Lausanne professional cash awards made possible ("There were a couple of summers when I had to work at McDonald's"). Injury prevented his big opportunity to shine in Western Symphony at the SAB workshop, but his long line, unfailingly musical phrasing, and assured technique have garnered considerable attention since then for this now-naturalized young citizen. Miriam Mahdaviani needed only one word to describe his work for her in Correlazione, her entry in the 1994 Diamond Project--"Wonderful!"

Last spring Liang set a record for versatility when he became the first company member ever to dance three such disparate roles as Phlegmatic in The Four Temperaments, Oberon in Dream, and the demanding man's part in Martins's Calcium Light Night, made on Daniel Duell (a completely different body type). For this barrage of debuts, he realized that more than his usual sunny assurance would be required. "You must grow into Phlegmatic" he says. "It's like entering a maze ... Oberon was my first dramatic part--I read a lot of stuff on acting. I learned you can do a certain gesture twenty different ways! ... For Calcium I had to really push my technique."

He may have set a personal best that season when he tossed off a solo in Bournonville Variations with flawless, buoyant virtuosity--feet aflutter, torso turned just so, hands and arms at the side subtly arced, and smiling all the while. "You have to have fun," he says. "You work all day like a monster, taking class and rehearsing. If you don't enjoy that five minutes, it's nothing."

JAMES FAYETTE

"He's a solid type," says Ethan Stiefel, now of American Ballet Theatre. "I think he opened his first savings account at the age of three," says a minion in the company's press office. Not surprisingly, James Fayette, the dependable subject of such tributes, is at age twenty-eight one of the company's better partners, a guy you can trust to toss, catch, hoist, and otherwise manipulate a ballerina on cue, in the most musical manner possible, and return her to the wings in one piece. A great partner himself, Martins recognized that Fayette, with his firmly grounded mesomorph build, had been doing all the above with growing authority and ease since he joined the corps in 1991. In spring 1997, he promoted him and Peter Hansen, another stalwart, to soloist.

Fayette began his training at the Patricia Schuster School of Ballet in his hometown of Ridgefield, Connecticut, when he was five years old, and entered SAB at age fifteen. He acquitted himself nobly in the principal role of Stars and Stripes at a workshop performance, but similarly stellar leads have not come his way in the company--unless you count Bottom, in A Midsummer Night's Dream. (He's an excellent Bottom, gently comic as befits the Balanchine version.) A question about whether he aspires to such astral heights as Apollo or "Rubies" has little meaning for him. He believes--quite correctly--that sustaining a ballerina through the deceptive intricacies that abound in City Ballet's precious stock of pas de deux is one of the art form's great responsibilities, with gratification to spare. (The most trouble he displayed last season was in stifling an appreciative grin at Kowroski's seemingly unstoppable extension that his support had helped make possible in "Emeralds.") Unlike Nicholas Magallanes and Conrad Ludlow, who were also masters in the art of presenting a ballerina, he still has plenty of spring and energy to spare for solo moments.

Fayette is already planning for that period tactfully described as "career transition." "I saw guys who had taught me a lot about performance go into a panic when they had to stop dancing and go out in the world," he recalls, "and I didn't want to go through that." Regular gigs, guest teaching, courses at Fordham University--he works at these as diligently as he does partnering.

And apparently he is never off duty. At the photo session in a rehearsal room at the New York State Theater, he didn't have to be asked to spread out paper for the guys to lie on in the group shot on page 71. He did so as a matter of course. He gathered it up afterward, too. When you're a first-rate partner, you don't just stand around doing nothing.

Harris Green is associate editor for features of Dance Magazine.