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Letting down Mr B.

Giannandrea Poesio

Wednesday, 26th March 2008

New York City Ballet
London Coliseum

Keeping up with tradition also means being able to maintain and perpetuate the distinctive and often unique choreographic trends and standards the company has long been associated with. Which was, in theory, the aim of the Four Voices: Wheeldon, Martins, Bigonzetti and Ratmansky programme presented last Tuesday. Unfortunately, none of the four items presented stood out for being inventive and ground-breaking, two qualities that constantly informed the works of both George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. Christopher Wheeldon’s Carousel, set to Rodgers’s music, had very little of the choreographic ingeniousness I praised in Electric Counterpoint and often slips into trite predictability punctuated by extremely naive ideas, as in the ‘human’ reconstruction of the merry-go-round. Similarly, Zakouski, by the company’s director Peter Martins, is merely a pretty party piece, the steps of which can easily be guessed in advance, as two diehard ballet-goers sitting next to me showed. I have also seen better creations by the Italian Mauro Bigonzetti than In Vento. The title plays on the assonance of the Italian for ‘in the wind’ (‘in vento’) and the first person singular of the verb to invent (‘invento’). Despite some refined visual games, and some effectively theatrical ideas, the creation drags on for what seems an eternity and, regardless of the title, shows little novelty or invention. The same could be said of Russian Seasons by Alexei Ratmansky, who seems to have gone for yet another adaptation of the overused formula of creating a series of dance numbers to adapted folk songs — something that has been around now for more than 30 years. Indeed, it would have been much better to have stuck to the old repertoire, as the new one leaves little hope for the future.