© Rosalie O'Connor ABT 'Baker's Dozen' reviews 'Baker's Dozen' reviews ABT 'Sinatra Suite' reviews 'Sinatra Suite' reviews ABT 'Ballo della Regina' reviews 'Ballo della Regina' reviews 'C. to C.' reviews recent ABT reviews more Eric Taub reviews Discuss this review (Open for at least 6 months)

It was a commendable departure for ABT to present a season where choreography counted for more than star dancers doing star turns, indeed, after the opening-night gala, there were no Corsaires or Swans of any chromaticity. Yet the houses looked fine: whatever fans stayed away due to the absence of Angel, Nina or Irina were more-or-less offset by those who came for the choreography. Again, I'm filled with admiration for the canny way Kevin McKenzie has built an audience for these Fall seasons which once played to near-empty houses.

Baker's Dozen

Best things first, so let's set the Wayback machine for 1979. I remember back then thinking Baker's Dozen to be a little gem of a piece, and representing an ultimate expression of ideas she'd played with for most of the decade: uniquely American music; dense, near-frenetic phrasing; and insouciant, playful regard for theatrical conventions, like entrances and exits. So beautifully distilled were these, I wondered what more she could possibly do with these memes, and, perhaps, so did she, as her later works tended to be more conventional, at least outwardly. I'm still scratching my head over her recent Variations on a Theme by Haydn,for ABT which seemed a pean to the virtues of symmetry. The tremendously fecund Tharp of Baker's Dozen might well have found symmetry wasteful.

After seeing ABT's game but imperfect staging, I realized Baker's Dozen wasn't just a gem, but a little masterpiece. If ABT brings it to your neighborhood, go see it. Twice, if you can. Although brief, it's tremendously concentrated, and a distillation of the exhilarating dance of the Seventies.

Set to four piano rags by Willie "The Lion" Smith, is a happy romp by a dozen dancers (who's the "Baker's" thirteenth? Tharp?). Dressed in chic, restrained white by Santo Loquasto velvet leggings and dresses for the women, loose slacks and shirts for the men the dancers look be attending a summer garden party, perhaps, or taking a break from watching tennis matches. Tharp spent much of the Seventies playing with theatrical conventions, no more so than here: after a long, bangin' introduction, played with rough-edged verve by Barbara Bilach, Tharp brings her dancers onstage with the seeming randomness we liked to call, back then, Tharpian motion. Individuals meander, run or leap in and out of the wings with little respect for the proscenium's sanctity, coalescing into little groups, dissolving, recombining, with a disingenuous lack of focus. Disingenuous because for all the apparent randomness, Tharp's control is a iron fist in a velvet glove, and the apparent happy accidents of her dancers' intersections speak of nothing so much as her brilliant sense of timing, gesture, and ability to tell a story, or rather several stories. For all the strength and dexterity of Tharp's invisible hand, she wields it with a democratic, even populist philosophy which seems no less revolutionary today than thirty years ago.

It wasn't all that many years before Baker's Dozen that Tharp was making experimental dancers like her celebrated Dancing in the Streets ... in which she and her dancers performed, as the title said, in the streets. Dance was something which could happen anywhere, at any time, free of the strictures of the proscenium arch. Not perhaps the most profound of revelations, but when Tharp started making works for such proscenium-arch theaters, she didn't just reject conventions like interesting stuff should happen downstage center, wings are just for entrances and exits, etc., but revelled in demolishing them. In Baker's Dozen, as with her ground-breaking Deuce Coupe and Push Comes to Shove, not only does much of the most interesting action happen right on the edge of the wings, but, in a sense, past the wings. As her dancers fly in and out, sometimes remaining onstage only for moments, we don't think of them as standing their waiting for their cues (even though they doubtless are), but as continuing a dance which begins, and ends, somewhere beyond the mere confines of City Center. When her dancers do stay before our view, Tharp resolutely refuses to tell us at what we should be looking for more than the briefest moments. If she presents us with a trio downstage left, there will soon be a couple upstage right, doing what appears to be an entirely oblivious of the trio, until, suddenly and magically, they're not, but by then there could well be more commotion elsewhere. It's as if Tharp is saying to us, "You're not babies. I'm not going to spoon-feed you. Here's a bunch of great dancers doing great dancing. You decide what to look at." Especially when performed in an ever-so-hierarchical ballet company, this anti-elitist message is still exhilarating and subversive. (In Push Comes to Shove, for ABT, she managed to similarly subvert ABT's star system, while simultaneously making one of Baryshnikov's greatest star vehicles she was good.) At times there's so much going on in Baker's Dozen that it literally becomes two or three ballets which just happen to occupy the same stage at the same time, and what could be more democratic than that?

What's so delightful about works like Baker's Dozen is that they don't tell us any agenda, but show us, and Tharp makes her statements without any polemics. It's too much fun just watching. Her vocabulary has wonderfully off-kilter movements, but here they're never the self-conscious spastics one sometimes sees in later works, with split-second shifts of emphasis and direction that dazzle and nourish our eyes. Tharp loves steps fast ones, tricky ones, five crammed into the space of two. Baker's Dozenis like a particularly bubbly champagne, except the happy explosions are in your optic nerves, not your palette. Moreover, for each of her dozen dancers, she's telling a story, or many stories. For instance, we wonder, will Michele Wiles, who's quite wonderfully happy and goofy here, ever find a tango partner who'll stay with her? Will Simone Messmer ever find a pose that's louche enough, even when she's plummeting off of one man's shoulders into another's arms like a capsizing statue? Although ABT's dancers brought a lot of verve and personality to their roles (at least the cast I saw), they couldn't quite match my memory of Tharp's tremendously articulate dancers of the time, and there were times the ABT crew were a bit too casual and blurry; just because it looks like a happy romp doesn't mean we shouldn't also see the steel-trap machinery beneath. Perhaps it just took them awhile to get out of thinking of themselves as "happy peasants" and melding their roles more tightly to their own characters. Certainly the dancers who succeeded at this were particularly delightful, like the scrappy (does he get sick of hearing that?) Craig Salstein. I saw the same cast twice, and the improvement between Friday night and Saturday afternoon was so marked, I hope I can see how much better they've gotten next fall. My particular dozen were Stella Abrera, Marian Butler, Yuriko Kajiya, Simone Messmer, Sarawanee Tanatanit, Michele Wiles, Julio Brigado-Young, Thomas Forster, Blaine Hoven, Jeffrey Golladay, Craig Salstein and Isaac Stappas.

Sinatra Suite

It was fascinating to see the communal Baker's Dozen followed by the resolutely star-struck Sinatra Suite, Tharp's reworking of her Sinatra Dancers as a vehicle in the mid-Eighties for Baryshnikov and the beautiful Elaine Kudo (who'd later join Tharp's company, and returned to stage both of this season's Tharp works). By then, the country was well into the Age of Reagan, the wealth and power-worshipping milieu which persists to this day. And what greater hero for rugged individualists than Frank Sinatra, inarguably a genius at both singing and crafting his persona in an age before spin doctors and image consultants. What's marvelous about Sinatra Suite is that you can see in it both a genuine appreciation of star power (after all, Tharp is nothing if not one herself), and a bit of an ironic commentary on Sinatra's tough-on-the-outside-but-tough-on-the-inside imagery. Sinatra Suite's couple, a casually tuxedoed man and his glamorously gowned date, practice the tough-love kind of romance, brusquely shoving each other about between wary, if beautiful, clinches. Baryshnikov could also be simultaneously pugnacious and disarming, and spoke volumes with every snarl and snap of his imaginary chewing gum, even as the first four duets actually had more choreographic interest for the tough-cookie girl than the handsome, not-quite-affectless gentleman. Last year, Sarah Lane and Angel Corella were just sensational together, the petite Lane wearing her mascara like armor as she hurled herself again and again into the lists against Corella's lip-curling, impeccable punk. I saw Sinatra Suitetwice, both times with Misty Copeland had energy to spare, but I missed the glamor, even if it's supposed to be dime-store. José Manuel Carreño was a wonderfully handsome mannequin in his tux, but his sweet demeanor reduced his tugs-of-war with Copeland to vacuous game-playing. A few years ago Carreño got some notoriety here for an Apollo in which he was seen to be counting to himself, and when it came time for "That's Life," where he has to chew gum, all I could think was "Oh no! How's he going to count?" Carreño survived "That's Life" well enough, but gave me a scare at the end of "My Way" where he struggled so with putting on his tux's jacket that he almost blew his catch of the charging, and not insubstantial, Copeland. Herman Cornejo managed the jacket better, at least, but also seemed to be performing the role more by rote than living it. It needs a great mime with a powerful personality. I'm sorry I missed Marcelo Gomes, but I have to wonder if his natural hamminess might've overwhelmed the part as badly as Carreño and Cornejo underwhelmed it.

Ballo della Regina

Steps densely packed and dazzling are also at the heart of Balanchine's Ballo della Regina. On the one hand, set to bouncy but forgettable ballet music from Verdi's Don Carlo, Ballo is a pretty bit of fluff, with confectionary corps work, and a rather meandering structure which changes moods with a flip of the score's pages. It's also one of the greatest challenges ever made for a ballerina, both technically and artistically, and, as such, is both a great risk and great opportunity for ABT.

Back in '78, Balanchine made Ballo to explore and celebrate the amazing allegro technique of Merrill Ashley, and to this day the ballet's a sort of ultima thule for bravura pointe-work. Even more than most Balanchine ballets, Ballo demands aggressiveness from its ballerinas. It's not just that Ballo rewards a strong, confident, aggressive ballerina (and if she can do rights to Ballo, a dancer deserves to be called a ballerina), but that it punishes, harshly, a dancer who doesn't commit herself completely. You might get through Ballo by dancing conservatively, but your timidity will be painfully obvious. Think of the scary opening of the girl's solo in Diana and Acteon, where she must dive into a deep, unsupported penchée on pointe. You can fudge it, of course, and a lot of dancers do, but there's no gray area between giving yourself completely to that step, like diving off a cliff at Aculpuco, or, well, not. Now, expand that penchée into an entire ballet, and you'll have an idea of the ballerina role in Ballo. But unlike that Diana and Acteon bit, Ballo has more kinetic demands: the ballerina can't just nail poses, however tricky, but she must attack long, complicated and unforgiving phrases, with Balanchine's on-top-of-the-beat musicality. She who hesitates may not be lost, but she'll sure look bad.

Indeed, in making the brave but quixotic decision to stage Ballo, ABT ran the risk of looking bad for many reasons, not the least of which is that they simply don't have a dancer capable of doing the role justice. Of the City Center Ballo ballerinas, Gillian Murphy was technically assured, but tentative and uncomfortable; Michele Wiles game but out of her element, and Yuriko Kajiya started was pretty thoroughly defeated. To make matters worse for these ballerinas manqués is that over at the New York State Theater, Ballo has been in and out of City Ballet's repertory quite happily for decades, and is now the property of Ashley Bouder, who pretty much epitomizes the word "attack." If she isn't better than Merrill Ashley, she's so close as to make no difference. In this particular ballet, none of ABT's women can hold a candle to La Bouder. (They can't hold a candle to Megan Fairchild, either, for that matter.) I really do hate to do the ABT versus NYCB thing, as I'd rather focus on each company's strengths (such as they might be), but when Kevin McKenzie decides to stage a gem from NYCB's tiara, such comparisons become inevitable.

So, versus NYCB, ABT is already taking a hit in the ballerina column. ABT's venue didn't help, either. Usually when you see a Balanchine ballet at City Center, it's, in a sense, going home, as many of the most popular of his ballets were first performed there before NYCB migrated to the larger New York State Theater in the mid-Sixties. Often it's interesting to see, say, Serenade or Symphony in C in this more-intimate setting, and certain old-timers will take such stagings as an opportunity to remind one and all that City Ballet was never as good at Lincoln Center as it was at City Center (this is a variant on the aging balletomane's game of "Ah, But You Never Saw Danilova," which I actually rather enjoy playing now that I'm ancient and decrepit myself). Ballo, which is all about running and jumping and flying (I did mention allegro, didn't I?) didn't make the transition to the City Center with much grace. From the corps to the leads, dancers were continually having to rein themselves in to keep from running out out of stage. Based on a rather inconsequential story about a fisherman finding a perfect pearl, Ballo does hint at aquatic imagery, but instead of whitecaps and breakers shimmering in the morning haze ABT's dancers, singularly and en ensemble, more often brought to mind ripples in a wading pool.

It also doesn't help that, as we saw a few years ago when ABT staged Symphony in C, ABT's dancers just aren't trained in Balanchinean allegro. They don't dance on top of the beat, let alone ever-so-slightly ahead of it, and too often in the ensemble work there was a depressing metronomic quality to the corps pointe work. I would've happily traded some of their precision for more life back in the day City Ballet was far sloppier, but their dancers breathed. I do remember that after a year or so ABT got the hang of Symphony in C, and I found myself thinking ABT's Ballo might look splendid indeed on the Met's big stage this spring. Alas, they're not bringing it.

I think it's a safe bet that Balanchine didn't wake up one morning in 1977 and say, "I think I'll make a ballet for Robert Weiss," and it's telling, and a little sad, that only spectacular moments in ABT's Ballo came from its male dancers. The male role in Ballo is negligible compared with the ballerina's (and the short, tricky little adagio even more so), but it does give the man some chances to fly, with a heady assortment of male bravura: split jetés, barrel turns, copious brisé volées, and, in general, lots and lots of jumps. Here, ABT did the ballet proud. An artistic director cannot do very wrong by giving David Hallberg a role with lots of jumps, turns and beats, and, partnering both Murphy and Wiles, Hallberg was his familiar spectacular self. I suppose I should set up a macro program to paste in my praise of his flying-carpet leaps, the long double S-curves of his calves and feet which are just so pretty in batterie. Although at times it seemed that Hallberg was restraining himself due to the smallish stage, Herman Cornejo seemed to have found the perfect solution if there wasn't enough room to jump forward, he just jumped up. And up, and up. And still more up. Watching Corenjo I had the epiphany that Cornejo was indeed a fisherman, bobbing about in his little boat on the roiled waters far above Ballo's undersea grotto. Balanchine might not have had this particular bit of imagery in mind, but it work, and I'll go with it.

Remembering how spectacularly magisterial Gillian Murphy had been in Ballet Imperial, I was hoping that she'd break out of her naturally reticent demeanor and give Ballo the ride she's capable of, at least technically, but alas, at the performance I saw (her second of the season), it was not to be. Dancing with David Hallberg, who seemed to be taking extra pains to reassure Murphy, despite the somewhat unrehearsed look to their adagio, she seemed unsure of why she was onstage, at times making "Wherefort-art-thou-Romeo" glances offstage in search of Hallberg (and it should be understood there's nothing romantic about Ballo,) and other times simply seeming unsure of herself. She managed all the famous difficult bits well enough the double echappes with the quarter-turns and the Plisetskaya jump in her first solo, the brutally fast pirouettes-into-arabesqe in the second but without the underlying legato which could've tied these solos, indeed the entire ballet, together into an artistic whole. She invited us to join her on an obstacle course when she should've dragged us onto a roller coaster. It didn't help that she seemed a bit unsure of her positioning onstage at times conspicuously measuring her strides into the head-kicking jeté, or banging into the flies at the end of her second solo. What's distressing to me the most is how Murphy occasionally gets sloppy in the midst of her most technically demanding bits, as her feet don't quite arch and her knees never quite straighten. It's a merciless ballet.

The partnership of Michele Wiles and Hallberg began more promisingly. The adagio was perfect, even the scary penultimate pose, where Wiles had to arrive at a flat-footed penchée and hold it for a few beats before Hallberg gave her some reticent support with a single hand on her hip. Wiles, God bless her, launched into her first solo with commendable brio, hopping so highly in those double-echappe quarter-turns that you could almost see her willing herself back to earth so that she wouldn't get behind the music. Alas, to little avail; as all the ABT ballerinas demonstrated to varying degrees, once you get behind the beat in those solos, it's impossible to catch up. In the second solo, Wiles bravely essayed a double pirouette into arabesque (the only one I saw all season), and then wisely stuck to singles. To continue with the nautical similes, she danced like she'd discovered the water was far choppier than it appeared from shore, transitioning from bravura to survival mode in midstream, yet at least she managed to smile and look like she was actually happy to be there, which was more than I could say for Murphy or Kajiya. About the best thing I can say about Kajiya is that her presence allowed Cornejo to dance. Their adagio was tolerable (Cornejo will never be a great partner), but Kajiya was completely overmatched by her solos. In other roles, she's technically formidable (you'd be hard pressed to find a girl do cleaner pirouettes a la seconde, or more boring), but simply not fleet enough for Balanchinean bravura, and it was almost painful to watch her fall further and further behind the music in her solos.

So in Ballo McKenzie again has a showcase for his men, which is not, I think, what he intended.

The fascination with hyper-dense steps seen in dances like Ballo or Baker's Dozen, especially when performed by virtuosos like Baryshnikov or Ashley, led the iconoclastic Arlene Croche to write an essay hailing such jam-packed movement as the wave of the future (i.e., the Eighties). I've often wondered if Croce's ever regretted her words, as it seems the legacy of those heady days has been a simple equation lodged in choreographers' heads that if some steps are good, more have to be better, and too many are just enough. Which might be true of a choreographer with a genius for kinetic invention; have you seen any?

C. to C.

Although the season as a whole placed Choreography ahead of Stars, the biggest novelty of the season, Jorma Elo's C. to C., wasn't bereft of artistic stars, just the dancing kind. C. to C. is subtitled "Close to Chuck," and, hearkening back to Diaghilev's formula, brings together two superstar artists: the minimalist painter Chuck Close and his longtime friend, the composer Philip Glass. C. to C. had two stunning backdrops by Close his signature ultra-close-up portraits and the premiere of a piano piece by Glass, dedicated to Close. Dressed by the fashion designer Ralph Ricci, C. to C. has all the accouterments of a great Diaghilevian masterpiece except for, well, great choreography.

While one might conceivably mistake Glass and Close for the Stravinksy and Picasso of their generations (at least, if one believes the pre-performance media blitz), Elo's not a Balanchine or Fokine. He's got a certain facility for stringing steps together, but accomplishes little aside from giving ABT's dancers many opportunities to show just how beautifully they can render even the emptiest convolutions. I suppose that's the point: it looks difficult, it isdifficult, and there's so much gutty, sweaty physicality going on (once the dancers actually start moving) that it just must be good. No matter that the dancers are straining to shift an aesthetic pea: they're wreathed in the glory (and sweat) of their exquisite physicality. Effort's presented as virtue, and, in these days when we feel we should worship our bodies with daily visits to the altar of the sports club, perhaps it is.

I hope this is Elo's message, as otherwise his imagery's opaque when it's not being trite (or even when it is). At least it's more subtle than his musicality: though he can be daring spatially, and loves to cantilever his dancers far out of plumb, he's oddly timid in the temporal realm. There's a stolidity to his phrasing (once his dancers actually start dancing) which adds to the sense that we're watching high-tech calisthenics. It's as if he doesn't feel the subtler weaves of Glass's tapestry, or doesn't want to. (Suddenly Glass Pieces is looking less facile and more a masterpiece.)

C. to C. starts on a dimly lit stage, with a black-and-white image of the bespectacled Close gazing somewhere, perhaps, off over our left shoulders. Bruce Levingston plays on an onstage piano the Glass tribute which veers from his familiar arpeggios and subtle rhythmic evolutions to more-atmospheric bits suggesting folk-dances, and back again. All six dancers Misty Copeland, Kristi Boone, Julie Kent, Marcelo Gomes, Herman Cornejo and Jared Matthews are shrouded in heavy black mantles and enormous, voluminous skirts of some heavy, black, taffeta-like material. After Misty Copeland oh-so-slowly collected the other dancers' shrouds ("Guess what, Misty? You get to be the maid!"), there's was a slow-motion section where Gomes demonstrated yet again why he's the hardest-working man in ballet. He brought such sensuality and eloquence to every shading of his torso as he reached to engage Julie Kent or Kristi Boone that for a moment it hardly registered that his body from the hips down was made invisible by that huge skirt. Perhaps that was Elo's point; it was hard not to look at this section as a reference to Close's near-paralysis after a stroke several years ago.

Happily, the dancers shed their maxi-skirts, leaving the men in what might pass for leather bikers' pants, and the women in sheer black leotards with what looked like a heavy black Crusader's cross set in front. I was happy to see them all moving so freely, especially in front of a second, fiery red-and-orange Close self-portrait, but my enthusiasm faded a bit when their movements looked to be cut almost entirely of the same cloth as Elo's NYCB premiere from last year, Slice to Sharp. Again there were the big, conventional jumps, skewed-from-vertical poses and emphatically quirky gestures for hands, fingers and heads. I might've considered this twitchiness to be a further commentary on Close's condition, except that Elo used much the same device in last year's ballet. Here, too, Gomes seemed to be the focus of the ballet; at least, amongst considerable commotion, he maintained a strong and calm center. He had a poignant duet with an angelically affectless Julie Kent, and one astonishingly hard partnering moment among many, when Kent curled and draped herself over his back before he leaned forward and struck a miraculous arabesque. Hard-working indeed, but for a moment I saw Elo monumentalizing an artist and his muse. Perhaps there's hope for Elo yet, or perhaps he was momentarily speaking my language.

As an Diaghilevian all-star collaboration, C. to C. is disappointingly less than the sum of its parts. The Glass was pleasant, the Close backdrops stunning, the Ricci costumes magnificent, the dancing powerful, but Elo's choreography, for its twists and turns, depressingly pedestrian. I felt a bit sour for not loving it as did the wildly appreciative audiences, especially after the dancers were clearly working so very hard, and perhaps that was Elo's point, but do I need a choreographer to tell me that ballet's hard work?

From Here on Out

The season's other premiere, Benjamin Millepied's From Here on Out, also had steps, lots and lots of them, crammed together with an uncritical catholicity which might've been charmingly naive if it weren't so deadly earnest. It's set to a commissioned score by Nico Muhly, who, rather oddly, contributed a program note describing the work and its gestation: "When Benjamin and I first met in Paris in 2006.... The energies of the final section clear the air, and a lout statement of the bass line closes the piece." Millepied might've written a program note which begins, "As the curtain rises, the ensemble's gathered within a pool of light on the otherwise murky stage, rocking gently from foot to foot in a teetering movement which might make you recall Doris Humphrey's "Two Deaths." He might've, but he bravely prefers to let his choreography speak for itself; bravely and unwisely, as he really doesn't have much to say. In this somewhat-abstracted, packed-full-of-ingredients cavalcade, Millepied expands the teeter-tottering motif into a gentle investigation of the differences between dancers standing up straight, then flopping about with unstrung sinews, and then back again. In some of his duets I thought he might've been getting his inspiration from those little toy figures made of strung-together beads, which go utterly limp when you press a button in the base, only to spring back erect when you release it. Slim pickings for an entire ballet, and while Millepied invents some fairly complicated juxtapositions of his ten dancers, he doesn't even attain Elo's abased level of inherent meaning, let alone Balanchine's or Tharp's. There's one moment where he carefully stands most of his dancers in a row along the stage's right side, facing inward. Instead of actually dancing, he pulls a bit of a switch by having them all tumble into the wings. But Millepied's timing is so ponderous and heavy handed he sucks the air out of this mild surprise. Millepied's work often looks as if he's figuring things out as he's going along, and, while there are times when a voyage of mutual discovery can be thrilling, with Millepied I often have the feeling I'm seeing pages from a clever student's sketchbook, dolled up and presented with an earnest naivety which, unfortunately, doesn't disguise the banality at the heart of his "discoveries."

Ironically, Muhly's score was pretty darn good.

Repertory and such

The Leaves are Fading was given a reverent staging by Amanda McKerrow; I liked the calmness of this ritualized gathering of happy peasants, especially the delicacy with which Tudor weaves together ensembles with unmatched numbers of men and women. Of the two casts I saw, Xiomara Reyes was sweetly winsome paired with Gennady Saveliev's lunkish but oddly pertinant swain. If you hold my feet to the fire I'll admit that Julie Kent can often give extremely canny and moving performances, as she did with Marcelo Gomes, carrying me in the palm of her hand as she took their duet from simple flirtation to sublimity.

I wanted to believe that Gillian Murphy's reserve in Agnes de Mille's Fall River Legend spoke of seething passions beneath her surface, but I couldn't sense the seething internal life that I remember years ago from Sallie Wilson (whom ABT seems to avoid when it comes to staging this and Pillar of Fire, ballets she once owned, as a performer). I'm glad ABT's keeping key parts of its tradition like Fall River Legend alive, but unlike the real Lizzie Borden, this staging gets away with nothing. Perhaps if its allowed to remain in the repertory for a few years, dancers will grow into their characters; well, I can dream, can't I?

In Fancy Free, Jose Manuel Carreño once again was utter perfection as the third, rhumba-ing sailor. The performance I saw was sweet in many ways, except that once again ABT's dancers are taking liberties with bits of Robbins' choreography. I'm all in favor of dancers adding bits of character-defining business, but when David Hallberg, having just danced that wonderfully indeterminate duet with Gillian Murphy, omitted the final moment where the sailor reaches to pat the girl's rear before deciding the better of it, it was going too far. It's not that Hallberg and Murphy danced badly together; far from it. But suddenly they weren't doing Robbins' Fancy Free, and I remembered the cartoonish desecration ABT would make of this ballet back in the days when Robbins' had no actual control over its staging. If you ever saw Dennis Nahat's borderline-obscene Third Sailor, you'll know what I mean, and join me in hoping the Robbins foundation will tidy ABT's production up before things get so far out of hand.

Let's see. Stanton Welch's ridiculous bit of barechested beefcake fluff, Clear, treated us to the amazing sight of Sascha Radetsky's hard-edged physique. Ripped, cut, buff, and God knows whatever other adjectives one might apply, all surmounted by some blinding tattoos sprouting from his upper arms and shoulders. If you could still purchase strike-anywhere matches, you could strike them on his washboard abs. Compared to Radetsky, Carreño looked like a 98-pound weakling. Oh, there was some athletic leaping and bounding, and Paloma Herrera as the honorary girl in the boy's club, but mostly Clear is too silly for words. Lar Lubavitch's Meadow is, for me, a puzzlement. It's tasteful, well-crafted, pretty and leaves me utterly cold, despite perfect performances by Stella Abrera as the Girl who Floats in the Air, and Hallberg as the Guy Who Lifts Her.

I'm sorry ABT's season was only two weeks; apparently City Center had scheduled renovations for what would have been the season's third week. The week became free, but by then ABT was already booked to visit Berkeley. I guess our loss was the West Coast's gain.