MISGIVINGS

I've been busy lately and haven't kept up with my mail. Only this a.m. did I look at the New York City Ballet's brochure for its upcoming season at the New York State Theater, November 24 - February 25. I do not understand what's going on. Or maybe I understand all too well.

Let's start at the top. The first performance, on November 21, is labeled "Opening Night Benefit." But it's not considered an official part of the season (see the dates given above). It's also the only repertory program until January 3.

Time was, a full week of repertory preceded the company's seemingly interminable run of The Nutcracker, but let that pass for the moment. The benefit program, as the brochure advertises it, will feature a "one-time-only Premiere Ballet." Is this intended to draw an audience, which will pay premium prices for the better seats, via snobbish exclusivity? Will this mysterious item, choreographer and music unannounced in the brochure, never be seen again? Never this season, apparently. Never ever? This doesn't sound likely. A new ballet costs a company serious money and is, presumably, an attempt at bringing into being a work of art. (Am I being hopelessly naïve?) A ballet worth doing once should be worth doing again.

After playing Nancy Drew on the Net, combing the NYCB website and myriad other sources, I found out that the item in question is a ten-minute affair called Middle Duet and that it was choreographed for the Kirov Ballet back in 1998 by Alexei Ratmansky to music by Yury Khanon. Beginning with the minor fact that the premiere is merely "American," not "world," the handsome, well-organized brochure is being less than forthcoming.

Anyway, barring this little piece, there will be no new ballets this season. Given the quality of six of the seven new ballets in last season's Diamond Project (only Ratmansky's contribution, Russian Seasons, was a hit) detractors will point out that this may be just as well. But isn't it a truth universally acknowledged that new choreography is essential to the stimulation of both audience and dancers? What's up?

The sole novelty will be a "major revival" of Jerome Robbins's Dybbuk. What makes it major? The choreographer is no longer with us to rethink the piece. What would a minor revival be like?

About those weeks of Nutcracker, which have, over the years, escalated to five plus. No one would argue with the fact that The Nutcracker is essential to the NYCB, as well as to many another company. It pays the bills, drawing spectators in winter solstice celebratory mood who wouldn't otherwise go to the ballet, some of whom make their attendance an annual tradition. So this warhorse is essential economically even when not so artistically, though the NYCB's Nutcracker--devised by Balanchine--is a wonderful thing of its kind. Still, a dedicated ballet fan cannot live on sugarplums alone. Over five weeks of them, unalloyed by alternatives, with only shifts in the casting of the solo roles for diversion, might make one turn against sweetmeats for life.

Apart from the era in which my daughter worked her way up, height-wise, through the kiddie roles of Angel, Soldier (of ascending grades), Polichinelle, and Candy Cane, a single performance of Nuts annually pretty much satisfied my own Xmastide cravings. Come the new year, repertory programs would resume, and I, like many avid followers of the company, was eager for them.

This year, the Nutcracker marathon will be followed by two unbroken weeks of Peter Martins's speeded-up version of The Sleeping Beauty. Whether or not you care for this take on the Petipa/Tchaikovsky classic--I don't, as it happens--is almost irrelevant. The issue at hand is that, with this scheduling tactic, the NYCB suggests that repertory programs, its mainstay for over half a century, have taken another step toward becoming an endangered species.

This move has got to be entirely about money. Program-length story ballets with an emphasis on elaborate costumes and scenery sell tickets. They are what the general audience wants to see. The specialist audience is too small to support a big classical company's season in any meaningful way. Which accounts for American Ballet Theatre's programming of its yearly spring run at the Metropolitan Opera House: a week of back-to-back swans followed by a week of star-crossed lovers, and so on. This modus operandi gives the ballerinas, their cavaliers, and a handful of soloists a chance to rotate in the featured parts. It makes the corps de ballet feel suicidal. It makes the specialist audience stay home.

I'm not done with the NYCB programming yet. When the company finally gets around to doing repertory--three or four ballets per performance, usually by an assortment of choreographers--it will now confine said repertory to set "packages." In other words, if you want to see Balanchine's Serenade, you're going to get his Stravinsky Violin Concerto on the same combination plate even though you're more interested, at the moment, in his Agon--and you've got to buy into the Robbins Dybbuk as well.

Each of the ten repertory programs has been given a title, and most of these titles are both vague and fatuous: "A Banquet of Dance," "Visionary Voices," "For the Fun of It." Apparently the idea behind the strategy is that it will make the occasional ticket buyer feel more secure. Marketing stays up nights devising these ploys. They may well encourage commerce, but they don't do a helluva lot to advance the (lost?) cause of art.

The NYCB will perform its rigid repertory programs from January 16 through the end of the season on February 25. In other words, for six weeks--merely a few days over the length of the Nutcracker run, about two weeks less than the siege of Nuts and Beauty combined.

None of this is specifically Peter Martins's fault. The NYCB's present methods of recruiting and maintaining an audience are employed everywhere. They are both a symptom of (and a causal factor in) a malaise prevalent in today's culture. ABT, for example, had a ludicrously tasteless advertising campaign a couple of years back that I railed against in the Village Voice. I bring up the policies evident in the City Ballet's brochure because I was genuinely shocked by how far the commercialization had progressed on that turf. And because this company was the first great classical troupe that I saw, because it shaped my aesthetic, and because I used to love it so much.

© 2006 Tobi Tobias