WESTWARD HO!(Etoile Polaire)(The Red Violin)(Evenfall)(New York City Ballet stages its Diamond Project)(Dance review)

Every few years, New York City Ballet stages its Diamond Project, which just means that the company commissions a handful of new ballets in the hope of coming up with something interesting or, failing that, of pepping up the dancers, who are always at their best in work made specially for them. This year, we got the usual bewildering assortment. The series led off with Eliot Feld's "Etoile Polaire," in which a talented eighteen-year-old, Kaitlyn Gilliland, glided around prettily to Philip Glass and to no apparent purpose. Then came a ballet, "The Red Violin," by Peter Martins, as skillful and empty as his works routinely are, and a strange piece, "Evenfall," by the normally excellent Christopher Wheeldon, in which women in filigreed tutus bent over and stuck their butts up in the air to Bartok's beautiful Piano Concerto No. 3. In addition, there was an opaque business, "Two Birds with the Wings of One," on a Chinese theme by Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux; a sort of struggling-in-the-dark transaction, "In Vento" (here the dancers really did look good), by Mauro Bigonzetti; and an instantly forgettable aerobic exercise, "Slice to Sharp," by Jorma Elo. It tells you something about how ballet choreography is doing at the moment that each of these six men occupies either the first or the second creative slot at a "name" company. (Feld, Martins, Bonnefoux, and Bigonzetti are the artistic directors of Ballet Tech, N.Y.C.B., North Carolina Dance Theatre, and Italy's Compagnia Aterballetto, respectively; Wheeldon is the resident choreographer of N.Y.C.B., Elo of Boston Ballet.) Near the end of the series, however, another artistic director arrived--Alexei Ratmansky--and it looked as though an eagle had landed in the barnyard.

Ratmansky, aged thirty-seven, took over Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet two years ago. He has made more than twenty ballets, most of which have not been shown here. Before N.Y.C.B.'s season, I had seen only two pieces by him--"Cinderella" (2002), for the Kirov, and "Bright Stream" (2003), for the Bolshoi--but that was enough. Russia is in the torturous process of catching up with twentieth-century modernism, from which it was isolated for more than half a century, and Ratmansky was made by God to help it do this. Trained at the Bolshoi school, he was not accepted into the company. He spent most of his performing years at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and the Royal Danish Ballet, dancing in the European and North American repertory. In other words, like so many of Russia's first-rate artists, he is both Russian and Western.

The great thing about Russian writers of the late nineteenth century was their willingness to address, directly, the hardest questions of human life. That tradition was inherited by Russian choreographers. Nijinsky in "The Rite of Spring"; his sister, Bronislava Nijinska, in "Les Noces"; Balanchine in most of what he did--at times, you almost turn away from what they're saying. It's too much. With Ratmansky, you don't have to turn away, or not yet, but the instinct is the same. Unlike most ballet choreographers working in this country right now, he takes on the great themes--love, grief, marriage, death--and looks them straight in the face.

Ratmansky's contribution to the Diamond Project was "Russian Seasons," to a 2000 score of the same name by Leonid Desyatnikov, who was clearly inspired by Stravinsky's 1923 score for "Les Noces." Both compositions incorporate Russian folk music and folk songs; both are also very sophisticated. (Desyatnikov invokes not just folk material but also jazz and Steve Reich--and Stravinsky.) Then there's the subject matter. "Les Noces," as its title tells us, has to do with one thing: marriage, which, if you were a Russian peasant, was a crushing event, forcing you to leave your youth behind and enter a stage of life where your job was just to produce more life, and then die. On the surface, Desyatnikov's score is not as monolithic, or as dire. Only five of its twelve sections have a song text, and, in keeping with the "seasons" title, they are ...