With unshakable continuity, Alexei Ratmansky determines the discourses of the dance world.
But at the end of the year he increased again.
On the day before Christmas Eve, he announced that after thirteen years he did not want to extend his position as house choreographer at the American Ballet Theater beyond the end of his contract in June 2023, and with the premiere of his "Tchaikovsky Overtures" at the Bavarian State Ballet he brought a work by himself according to his standards extraordinary beauty to the public.
In the case of the dancer-choreographer, who was trained at the Bolshoi and lives in New York, it makes sense to see it as the result of years of training, masterful dance practice and studies.
But this piece is unmistakably different from all the post-neoclassical-contemporary craft practiced elsewhere, the smooth,
It is fantastically unusual in its irony, drama, historicity, allusions to classical ancient sculpture and its impact on nineteenth-century theater and, of course, choreographic originality, without ever being pretentious.
It contains so many ideas that other choreographers would make ten pieces out of it.
It is daring, it represents an excessive demand – not for the dancer, but for the spectator.
It cannot be grasped at once.
Because while Ratmansky's movement language captures the music calmly, so that it appears clearer, more plastic, more understandable than would be possible without the dance, he has 8 bars, which should be enough for other choreographers to have 32.
Five couples surround Hamlet
The "Tchaikovsky Overtures" have only one flaw: the costumes and sets by Jean-Marc Puissant, a kind of artistic misunderstanding of what the choreography means aesthetically.
Believing he could find a visual equivalent for Ratmansky's declaration of being somewhere between abstraction and narrative, he invented silly pink tie-dye tops with black tights with neon-colored suspenders, tutus that bob in the wrong places, and finally uniform dresses for Men and women in corsages with fringes of fabric hanging down.
The decorative panels are painted like watercolors with organic structures or sandstone blocks - modernity as kitsch.
But Ratmansky's play is so good that ultimately not even Puissant's ineptitude can take away from its magnificence.
The choreography sheds this decorative conventionality with the first seconds of the "elegy" from Tchaikovsky's incidental music to Shakespeare's "Hamlet" and the first battered leaps of Shale Wagman like a racehorse from a clumsy jockey.
Five couples surround this drama-loving prince in this somber prologue.
It's his black thoughts that won't let go of him, but also Elsinore's court society.
Then the actual Hamlet ballet begins with the "Fantasy Overture based on William Shakespeare" and thus the first part of the evening, which Ratmansky follows with "The Tempest", a "Fantasy for Orchestra", before the evening with the "Romeo and Juliet Vocal Duet” and the Fantasy Overture ends.
The cleverness of the choreographer
Each part follows its own approach.
In "Hamlet" Osiel Gouneo embodies a prince burning up with revenge and pain, whose dance is so eloquent because the destruction of all is inevitable.
Tchaikovsky's freedom to fantasize about musical motifs is matched by Ratmansky's lavish phrasing.
No one can deal with Tchaikovsky like him.
Unusual constellations make it immediately clear that we are in the 21st century, in a century that despises nostalgia for the wrong reasons and only sporadically shows the ability to empathize.
Ratmansky exhibits them without fear of emotion.
Shakespeare's actors are four men who sink into deep arabesques and then form four pairs with other men.
"Der Sturm", the music of which is perhaps the most beautiful and most reaching for the symphonic stars of the future, focuses on the corps de ballet and shows a male solo that is unparalleled in terms of virtuosity: António Casalinho is a reference to Nijinsky's Spirit of the Rose , he is the spirit of dance itself. He embodies what has to be called the spiritual side of ballet.
Here in “Storm” an inkling of reconciliation between classical and contemporary dance becomes manifest.
Suddenly, and that is contemporary and in this case absolutely no loss, the boundaries between gesture and leap, pure dance and narrative actually blur.
Ratmansky's ability to both dream and plan translates into a sense of confidence and future viability.
Ariel Leaping is a character that slices through the air while floating in the past and future at the same time.
“Romeo and Juliet” begins with a coup, Ratmansky tells of the end, of death, as in a film – how fitting for a ballet that follows the supposed end of the ballet story with something brilliant.