Let me make a long story short: Sascha Radetsky was born to dance the Champion Roper in Agnes de Mille's Rodeo. Despite his Slavic name and cheekbones, Radetsky has an easy, understated boy-next-door charm which we over here like to consider all-American. After perfectly embodying the good guy who finishes second to the bad-boy Ethan Stiefel in the 2000 film Center Stage, Radetsky has been blessed, and sometimes cursed, with an ingrained virtue. He sweats wholesome. Back in 2003, Radetsky was almost heartbreaking in his naive, dreamy enthusiasm as the second sailor in Fancy Free -- indeed, he's the best second sailor I've ever seen -- but that resonant affability makes him an almost too-nice Hilarion, and dastard manqué as Von Rothbart.

Regardless, since those memorable Fancy Frees three years ago, I've yearned, um, had a hankerin' to see how he'd take to that epitome of all-American archetypes, the Champion Roper who teaches the Cowgirl that when you cain't get a man with a Stetson, a little yellow dress works wonders. I missed Radetsky's performance when ABT revived Rodeo last fall, and so it was a bit of long-delayed gratification to see him, finally, in the role opposite Xiomara Reyes' Cowgirl and Isaac Stappas' Head Wrangler. Happily, Radetsky didn't disappoint; indeed, he was better than I'd imagined. Radetsky's gotten more muscular, chiseled and weathered. He looks every inch the cowpoke, dancing with an almost laconic economy which evokes miles ridden beneath the Western sky.

Both of ABT's current Americana ballets, Robbins' Fancy Free and de Mille's Rodeo were created during World War II, and in both the atmosphere's suffused with adolescent hormones and not-to-be-thwarted sexuality. It's not hard to see these ballets and understand the force of the perhaps clichéd idea of impending death as a perfect aphrodisiac. Today, both ballets can seem dated and even prehistoric in their depictions of gender roles, and yet, they're still entrancing in their pungency. Watching Rodeo this year I couldn't help but think of George Zoritch's immortal dig from the wonderful documentary Ballets Russes, "Anyone who's not bedridden could be in Rodeo." Well, perhaps. There are certainly no entrechats dix, or beats, or many pirouettes or familiar feats of virtuosity. And yet, it still looks pretty damn hard to me, at least for the men. All that careful riding of invisible horses so you can practically see them, the bow-legged shuffles and balancing on one leg, the tricky wheeling and kicking like you're on a wheeling stallion, delivered without conviction or commitment could turn de Mille's cowboys into quaint anachronisms almost as embarrassing as were ABT's recent hopping, skipping bow-waving Polovtsian warriors. The fact is, ABT's got plenty of hunky men who twirl their invisible lariats with gusto and look like they'd be more than happy to get all John Wayne in the face of anyone unwise enough to suggest that they might be little better than invalids.

Although in this performance there were occasional slightly rough patches, Aaron Copeland's elegaic score and Oliver Smith's golden, near-abstract decor still called up image of Western vastness which has become a part of even halfway assimilated American's internal landscapes. While de Mille's story of the transformation of a tomboyish cowgirl into a buttoned-and-bowed girlie-girl (like all the others) might seem trite, narrow-minded and overbearingly stereotypical today, there is more to de Mille's story than merely her succinct and witty telling of it (for that alone the ballet's a gem, although I'll admit the square-dance entr'acte can be cringeworthy these days), and Rodeo has many stories and layers, not the least of which is about how people build a community in the face of such vast emptiness, and promise.

As I mentioned, Radetsky's Champion Roper was brilliant, deservedly bringing down the house with the long tap-dance solo with which he steals the wavering Cowgirl back from the Head Wrangler. Xiomara Reyes was refreshingly uncalculating, with a gamine smile which was happily far from her sometimes saccharine sweetness. While Reyes tumbled off her invisible and hardly controllable pony with abandon, and became a joyful whirlwind in the dancehall scene, she didn't show the gut-clenching depths of the Cowgirl's yearnings and misery, as, love-struck with the Wrangler, she can't speak to him, but smacks him on the chest and pivots away. I remember Cowgirls of years past, like the sorely missed Rebecca Wright, would do a horrified double-take as they realized they'd just hit the object of their infatuation. Stappas was a handsome and appropriately testosterone-soaked Wrangler, especially after setting his own sights on Reyes, while Jennifer Alexander, the Ranch Owner's Daughter, seemed enough assured of her own charms never to doubt that Stappas' Wrangler would return to her, as indeed he did.

Also on the bill was a revival of Lar Lubovitch’s 1999 Meadow, a ballet which creates an intriguing, flowing atmosphere without, ultimately, much substance. With its three movements to music by Franz Schubert, William David Brohn and Ferrucio Busoni (some recorded, others performed live by ABT's orchestra), Meadow contrasts the loose, organic, flowing movements of its five-couple ensemble with the more-formal posings of Stella Abrera and David Hallberg. In Ann Hould-Ward's loose, blue-dappled fabrics, the ensemble rushes about the stage in the first movement in circles and arcs suggesting as much the cresting of waves and looping whirlpools as, perhaps, the movements of wind-rushed grasses. Lubovitch does a masterly job of keeping the movement flowing betwixt and between the couples. Although the effect is of big, swoopy and decidedly informal movement, a closer look shows constructions of subtlety and wit. As Brian MacDevitt's rather moonshadowed lighting fades in on Hallberg cradling Abrera with her arms and legs pointing skyward, we notice they're both in tight, shiny fabric -- bare-chested Hallberg's blue-dappled like the ensemble's, Abrera in a golden-patterned unitard. Their duet's more formal, and creates a sense they're celebrants of some unspecified ritual or, perhaps, godly manifestations of, well, I'm not quite sure. The third movement found Abrera and Hallberg joining in with the ensemble, at times subsumed in the overall flow of humanity, before the pair's left alone onstage. As Hallberg again cradled Abrera in that opening pose, she flies (on wires, I assume) upwards as the curtain closes. Coming, as it did, after a reprise of Jorma Elo's frenetic Glow -- Stop, Meadow seemed both a welcome refuge from the former's hyper-caffeinated attack, and also the epitome of choreographic restraint, even though, ultimately, it didn't have a lot to say.

Getting back to Radetsky, his Roper was all the more impressive in that he'd also had to take over the brutal role in Glow -- Stop which was supposed to have been danced by Angel Corella.

Abrera, Alexander, Hallberg, Radetsky, Reyes, Stappas

I really thought that Lar Lubovitch’s Meadow with David Hallberg and Stella Abrera (a.k.a. Mrs. Radetsky) was stunning. The central pas de deux to Gavin Bryars’ Incipit Vita Nova gloriously wove through the architecture of the score that included exquisite song for a countertenor. It was truly lovely and unique in so many ways. It didn’t have a detailed story line, but it had a spirituality that was compelling.