I went twice yesterday to ABT’s mixed-bill program. Far from Antony Tudor’s best ballet, his 1967 Shadowplay, which I’ve never seen before, nevertheless was soothing balm, a relief from the busyness of the new ballets by Millepied, Ratmansky and Wheeldon with which it was performed. Tudor understood the regenerative potency of stillness and set his wild-child protagonist, originally danced by Anthony Dowell, taxing moments of both complete stasis as well as turns and balances requiring time-suspending control, providing a healthy challenge for both Daniil Simkin and Craig Salstein in yesterday’s performances.
Last Saturday’s matinee of Don Quixote at ABT took me back a bit. David Hallberg is very tall, so I guess he was the obvious partner for Polina Semionova in her ABT debut. But he’s perhaps not a strong enough partner to both support a tall, broad-shouldered ballerina like Semionova and dance his own solo material pristinely. There were partnering glitches in both the first and third acts, and his act 3 solo was ragged. But his manege was a lot better than in Sleeping Beauty last year.
Semionova really seemed as though she had been hitting the global gala circuit a bit too much, to the point where she couldn’t get her working leg exactly where it should have been repeatedly throughout the performance. She didn’t do anything untoward, but it was a drier and tighter performance than it should have been. Not the dancer she had been at a Youth America Grand Prix gala here in 2008. Hopefully she isn’t doing too much between now and her ABT Swan Lake on July 2, and hopefully she and Hallberg will have lots of rehearsal time to work out a mutual accommodation by then.