Boston Ballet @ Lincoln Center

Friday June 27th, 2014 – Boston Ballet have been celebrating their 50th season with performances at Lincoln Center this week. Tonight’s programme looked so tantalizing on paper, and it turned out to be a magnificent evening overall: Vaslav Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun, George Balanchine’s Symphony in Three Movements, Jorma Elo’s Plan to B and Jiří Kylián’s Bella Figura were all superbly danced by the Boston troupe.

When visiting companies bring Balanchine to New York, I sometimes wonder if it’s a good idea. Can’t you bring us something we don’t see all the time? But understandably, other companies are proud of their Balanchine and want to show off their abilities. Boston Ballet did a great job with The Master’s Symphony in Three Movements, even bringing their own orchestra to play the score. And Boston Ballet has strong Balanchine ties: he became Artistic Advisor to the Company in 1963, gifting them with more than seventeen of his ballets as a gesture of support.

Curtain up, and I immediately found Shelby Elsbree in the diagonal. The ballet surges forward, with delightful performances by Misa Kuranaga and Jeffrey Curio – the high-bouncing couple – and Rie Ichikawa and Bradley Schlagheck. In the ballet’s central pas de deux, Lia Curio and Lasha Khozashvili excelled. The audience, fortified by a contigent of Bostonians, gave liberal and much-deserved applause to the dancers.

Boston Ballet had brought their production of Vaslav Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun to Fall for Dance in 2009 and I was mesmerized by it. Seeing the Leon Bakst backdrop and costumes again this evening provided a tangible link to the history of ballet and to that scandalous night over a century ago when Faun set Paris on its collective ear. Tonight, Altan Dugaraa embodied the exotic beauty of the Faun, his mystique and his longings, and Erica Cornejo was the Nymph, miming with stylized perfection. So grateful to have had another opportunity to see this production.

In 2006, I experienced Jorma Elo’s work for the first time at the New York City Ballet’s premiere of Slice to Sharp. Slice received the longest ovation of any new work I’ve encountered at the ballet over the years: endless curtain calls and a state of euphoria among the crowd. Boston Ballet‘s performance of Mr. Elo’s Plan to B had something of the same a dynamic pungency about it. Illuminated by a large glowing screen stage right, six dancers reveled in fantastical choreographic patterns, flinging themselves into off-kilter leaps and flying across the stage, arms whirling like windmills in a tornado. Dusty Button, Whitney Jensen, Bo Busby, Jeffrey Cirio, John Law, and Sabi Varga danced thrillingly and were deservedly cheered for their jaw-dropping virtuosity.

Alas, I am afraid Jiří Kylián’s Bella Figura was not really to my liking. Returning from the intermission, we find the dancers already onstage…warming up? Or is it a choreographed passage to start the ballet? Either way, it’s pretentious. Purgatorial and several minutes too long, the Bella Figura seemed to be more about the staging than anything else: black curtains endlessly re-arranged, a complex lighting scheme, flaming braziers bringing a taste of Hell to the stage, dancers coming and going almost randomly. The dancing was of course remarkable, and there are some very attractive passages, most especially when the topless dancers in long red skirts dance in unison. But it seemed to go on and on.