Ballet dancers are today so generally overworked and often so palpably under-rehearsed that improvement has to be a matter of perpetual back-and-forward sliding.
So it was good to see that Alexandre Hammoudi’s act1 solo in Ratmansky’s The Bright Stream at ABT last Wednesday night was indeed a noticeable improvement over the previous Saturday’s matinee. No slithering across the stage in grand pirouette, and a much more accurate vertical axis to everything aerial. He was nonchalantly big and bravura as Ratmansky surely intends, but not slovenly.