Julie Kent and Veronika Part: two ABT ballerinas with different and indomitable talents and approaches. When they share the stage, no quarter is given or expected.
Four years ago, Kent’s Hagar and Part’s Eldest Sister went at it in Tudor’s Pillar of Fire in a way I described in Ballet Review as almost ferocious. During ABT’s just-concluded week at City Center, all was comparatively genteel in Limon’s Moor’s Pavane, as befitting a work in which tragedy is enveloped by the stately measures of Renaissance court dance. They are meant to be friends here as well as mistress and servant. Nevertheless the two ballerinas–Kent was Desdemona and Part Emilia–generated a particular theatrical tautness. Neither one relaxes for a moment when they share the stage and that makes for first-rate kinetic theater.
I saw them Saturday night, after Part had already danced gloriously in Ratmansky’s new Symphony No. 9. Speaking of theatrical tautness, she and Roberto Bolle generated a heat together in this performance that eluded them when they did Swan Lake at the Met in 2009. Although Polina Semionova and Marcelo Gomes were of couse good dancing the same roles at the ballet’s premiere Thursday night, I preferred the Part-Bolle approach. Much more emotional and really quite gripping.
The idea that in this political and economic climate any single choreographer can save or even sustain ballet single-handedly is ludicrous. But Ratmansky does get the best out of everyone who does his work, and the entire company was dancing brilliantly in his ballet. Jared Matthews, for one, was freer than he often is as well as precise. The company didn’t give a have-a-nice-day performance; it was the real thing. It perhaps demonstrated their awareness that only by delivering peak performances can ballet continue to exist in this country. Going along to sort of get along is no longer a possibility.