Classical meets contemporary: Balanchine’s one-act adaptation of ballet's beloved classic precedes Alexei Ratmansky’s abstract embodiment of Wassily Kandinsky’s bold watercolors, which set the stage as projections behind the dancers.
Balanchine’s distillation of Swan Lake into a single-act ballet was inspired by Lev Ivanov’s choreography for the original lakeside second act, including the luminous pas de deux between the mysterious swan at the center of the plot and her smitten swain. The ballet is also notable for its flock of black swans, a striking departure from the traditional white. Composer Mussorgsky’s most famous piano composition, Pictures at an Exhibition, became the basis for Alexei Ratmansky’s fourth ballet for the Company, a suite of dances that embrace the music’s changes in tenor and tempo as it moves between light and dark passages.
Distilling the classic story ballet Swan Lake into a drama-packed one-act work, Balanchine expertly depicts the rapture, heartache, and woe of two doomed lovers and the evil that thwarts their romance.
George Balanchine preferred The Sleeping Beauty to Swan Lake, the first of Tschaikovsky’s three full-length ballets, so when asked by Morton Baum of the City Center of Music and Drama, both Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein hesitated at staging Swan Lake for New York City Ballet, and finally did so only as insurance that they would be allowed to mount a more daring piece in the future. Balanchine’s one-act version, which premiered at City Center in 1951 with Maria Tallchief and André Eglevsky in the leading roles, is based on Lev Ivanov’s choreography for Act II, and uses music from both Acts II and IV, the lakeside acts. Balanchine often praised the almost-forgotten genius of Ivanov, whose musicality served as an inspiration for the young choreographer.
NYCB’s first production of Swan Lake was designed by Cecil Beaton, who created calligraphic scenery and costumes, white ink on black grounds, following pen and ink drawings by 16th century German painters. In 1964, with NYCB’s move to Lincoln Center, Rouben Ter-Arutunian created a new set for the larger stage, which replaced Beaton’s designs with a painted landscape. In 1986 the production was redesigned once more by Alain Vaes who created an icy landscape instead of the traditional Gothic lakeside, and dressed the corps of swans in black, which Balanchine may have been planning in 1981 when he mysteriously ordered 400 yards of black tarlatan. When asked to justify this odd request, Balanchine merely said, “There are black swans as well.”
Like the ever-changing Wassily Kandinsky watercolors that set the stage, Pictures at an Exhibition’s ten dancers move in varying combinations to display a plethora of emotion, from raw and wild to solemn and soulful.
Created for New York City Ballet during the fall of 2014, Pictures at an Exhibition was Alexei Ratmansky’s fourth work for the Company. Using Modest Mussorgsky’s famed piano score, Pictures at an Exhibition, the ballet includes lighting design by Mark Stanley and projections of Wassily Kandinsky’s Color Study Squares with Concentric Circles, designed by Wendall K. Harrington. The 10 dancers are costumed in designs by fashion designer Adeline Andre, a frequent collaborator of Ratmansky’s.
In his 1874 work "Pictures at an Exhibition", Modest Mussorgsky, the most radical representative of the group known as "The Five", expressed an overflowing fullness of life and visionary sound images.
Writing in The New York Times after the ballet’s premiere, critic Alastair Macaulay stated, “‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ is surely the most casually diverse work Mr. Ratmansky has created, but it gathers unstoppable momentum. The 10 dancers—five women, five men—started out in informal home-theater mood, almost as if they were playing charades. Some dances, including the first solo (by Sara Mearns), had a wild, improvisatory, part-stumbling, part-inspired quality. (The tailor-made nature of the ballet’s solos reflects one of Mr. Ratmansky’s greatest gifts: Dancers are vividly, individually, intimately revealed.) In certain numbers the dancers—here on all fours, there gesturing—seemed to enact or refer to private stories. Other sections shifted toward a classicism of long lines and academic steps. Some ensembles were largely about camaraderie; others about geometry, harmony, meter.”