It’s a test tube ballet: an experiment that at first glance might seem like pining for the past. But while Alexei Ratmansky’s new production of “Paquita” finds its footing from ballets of earlier centuries, it lands in the here and now as a daring proposal about legacy and lineage. What makes classical dancing modern? In this case, it’s placing a conceptual lens on tradition. Mercifully, with tutus.
This spectacular “Paquita,” like Ratmansky’s version of “Swan Lake,” moves like the wind. But it is also distinct: a one-of-a-kind experience created for New York City Ballet, a one-of-a-kind company. Performed on Thursday at Lincoln Center, the ballet unites two sections of Marius Petipa’s 1881 “Paquita”: George Balanchine’s 1951 “Minkus Pas de Trois” (staged by Marina Eglevsky) and Ratmansky’s restaging of the Grand Pas Classique, the opulent final act of “Paquita.”
In this homage to Petipa and Balanchine, the founding choreographer of City Ballet, Ratmansky mines the history and steps of his treasured ancestors to find a fresh way of presenting the dancing body. It’s bold. It moves with an elegant ferociousness. And it’s almost spooky. Throughout, something that Balanchine used to say vibrates in the bodies of a generation of dancers he never laid eyes on: “We all live in the same time forever. There is no future and there is no past.”
In 2014, Ratmansky, with the assistance of Doug Fullington, reconstructed “Paquita” for the Bavarian State Ballet in Munich using notations that recorded its movement and gestures. He also relied on drawings from the pas de deux in the “Grand Pas” by Pavel Gerdt, the celebrated Russian dancer who performed in the 1881 production.
For this “Paquita,” Ratmansky didn’t adhere as strictly to notations as he has in the past. He gave his dancers — nearly all women — the freedom to be themselves within the classical vernacular.
Ratmansky’s “Paquita,” with costumes by Jérôme Kaplan, leads with Balanchine’s “Minkus Pas de Trois,” last performed by City Ballet in 1993, before moving onto the Grand Pas. In the Pas de Trois, Erica Pereira, Emma Von Enck and David Gabriel bound across the stage, arms linked, in light, lilting footwork, followed by variations. Like a showcase before the main event, they lay the groundwork of athleticism and finesse with youthful verve.
Gabriel, suspended in air much of the time, was a flash of virtuosic clarity, while Pereira stepped up her game, both taking up space and stretching into her positions in ways that gave her technique breadth. Von Enck, with her usual filigreed accuracy, crackled and cascaded from balances to beats with decisive, smooth nonchalance. In this Balanchine work, they are dancers of today illuminating a bygone era — the women’s black tights and all.
The Grand Pas, a wonder of buoyancy and speed, airs a different kind of radiance. The dancers, in yellow and black — their tutus sprout a blend of both — enter in two rows of four before pairs flitter through openings, with principal dancers among them. They stretch into a long diagonal flanked by the lead ballerina, Sara Mearns, on one end as her partner, Chun Wai Chan, stands at the opposite end.
Mearns and Chan’s pas de deux is arresting, full of dips and backbends connected by supported turns. The other dancers move behind them, echoing Mearns in kaleidoscopic patterns that merge and mutate in the background like a frame in motion. There’s so much to see on a stage that is never static, only alive.
In his fiendishly difficult variation, Chan, with supreme elegance, maintains his grandeur without needing to fight for it. Mearns, throughout, blooms at her own luxurious pace. She had moments of hesitation, yet the placidity of her positions, the shape of her arching back and the glint of her hands framing her face and her body made her the anchor of “Paquita.”
Four other dancers are placed on their own singular pedestals, ballerinas, too, one and all: Olivia MacKinnon, Unity Phelan, Indiana Woodward and Emily Kikta. MacKinnon, in the unenviable position of dancing the first variation, was a picture of graceful grit — more finesse will come over time. Woodward is electric with feet that skim past each other like tiny blades, while Kikta, using all of her length, is a goddess en pointe, her long legs stretching behind with tranquil magnitude and authority.
And Phelan, starting her variation with arms that rise overhead and float past her throat like a prayer, moves with such silken calm that she seems to be gliding, led by her willowy arms, by a breeze. When she balances, she keeps the breath going.
This “Paquita,” as it pushes through its vibrant finale, adds up to more than a dance; it’s a philosophy of dancing that is both rigorously disciplined and never calculated. At City Ballet, Ratmansky is artist in residence, a job that seems to allow his intellect and imagination to grow with equal depth. The force of these women with their artfully messy buns (loved them) was of the moment and of the past: athletic, casual, American.
While so many new ballets wash across the stage as a parade of feelings, Ratmansky’s are full of meaning and ideas. In “Solitude,” his first for the company as artist in residence, he presented a blisteringly visceral response to the war in Ukraine that gave dance a voice in matters of the world. “Paquita” crystallizes something else.
A dance can never be resurrected as it was. It changes with dancers, and with time, but its essence, through the will of a dancer to react consciously to every muscular moment, can generate rebirth. In “Paquita” — it’s difficult to grasp it all in one performance — dancers move with a sense of legacy as they instill an old world dignity to their Balanchine tenets of speed and abandon.
This all lives inside of “Paquita,” which gives it a way to assert itself in the 21st century — not as a relic but as a way, like Balanchine said, to live in the same time forever. This “Paquita” is more than a reinvention. It’s a reawakening and a reminder of why Balanchine started City Ballet: He turned a Russian tradition into an American experiment.
I can’t explain what “In the Night” (1970), Jerome Robbins’s meditation on three stages of love, set to Chopin, is doing on this program. At least Phelan was in it — an image of fire and ice, opposite Andrew Veyette. She was also in the program’s closer, Balanchine’s masterpiece “Symphony in Three Movements” (1972), filling in at the last minute for an injured dancer.
Set to Stravinsky, the propulsive and playful “Symphony in Three Movements” has a connection to “Paquita”: a long diagonal line of women. The tone is different in the Balanchine — more forceful than poised — as is the direction of the line. Yet when pictured together, the bisecting lines from each ballet meet in an imaginary middle. Was it planned, this visual reverberation?
In white leotards and tights, with their hair cinched in ponytails, the dancers of “Symphony in Three Movements” are fierce, ballerina warriors; that was beneath the surface of “Paquita,” too. At City Ballet, the women still rule.
New York City Ballet
Through Sunday at the David H. Koch Theater; nycballet.com
