New Home for an Artist, New Hope for American Ballet Theater
Jennifer Taylor for The New York Times
Alexei Ratmansky’s “Bright Stream,” with Anastasia Yatsenko, center, at the Metropolitan Opera House.
Wednesday’s news that Alexei Ratmansky, the departing artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, has been appointed artist in residence at American Ballet Theater came as a major surprise. These are glad tidings.
Ballet Theater is a major company that needs a resident choreographer. For years it has been churning out its gifted but varied dancers across a range of largely stale productions; Mr. Ratmansky and Christopher Wheeldon are the two most able and remarkable choreographers working in international ballet. Since Mr. Ratmansky announced earlier this year that he was leaving his job as artistic director of the Bolshoi, anyone who has admired his work must have been hoping he would soon find a company worthy of his talents.
In the context of Russian ballet over the last 80 years, Mr. Ratmansky looked like a mold-breaker. The Soviet Union certainly produced some very popular choreographers, notably Leonid Lavrovsky (whose “Romeo and Juliet,” though short on real dancing, was the Bolshoi’s great sensation in the 1940s and ’50s) and Yuri Grigorovich (whose “Spartacus,” though trashy in its repetitious slam-bam emphasis, packed an irresistible punch from the late ’60s to the late ’80s). The late Soviet period produced Boris Eifman, whose often ludicrous choreography managed to stir audiences and win some degree of international acclaim even in this decade.
“Romeo” and “Spartacus” did much to define everyone’s idea of the Bolshoi in those decades. Mr. Ratmansky has not yet choreographed any hit remotely as big. Perhaps he never will. Still, he seems the finest Russian choreographer — in terms of dance poetry — since George Balanchine, who left Russia in 1924.