Bolshoi Ballet’s Loss Is American Ballet Theater’s Gain


By DANIEL J. WAKIN and ROSLYN SULCAS
Published: September 10, 2008
Alexei Ratmansky, the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet and one of the dance world’s major talents, said on Wednesday that he would join American Ballet Theater as its artist in residence, a bold stroke for the company and a gracefully placed thumb in the eye of its rival, New York City Ballet.



Hazel Thompson for The New York Times


Alexei Ratmansky, right, artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, plans to leave the company at the end of the year.


Times Topics: Alexei RatmanskyMr. Ratmansky, 40, who will leave the Bolshoi at the end of the year, has agreed to spend 20 weeks each season at Ballet Theater for the next five years. He will choreograph at least one new work or retool one of his older dances each year, but will also take on a more general artistic role.

“It’s a great company,” he said in an interview at Ballet Theater’s headquarters in Manhattan on Wednesday. “The city is exciting. I feel that as an artist it’s important for me to change one’s environment completely.”

The residency gives him a sense of stability, but its terms also grant him flexibility to work around the world, Mr. Ratmansky said. He said that he planned to move to New York with his wife and son next summer.

The last well-known resident choreographer in town was Christopher Wheeldon at City Ballet, who announced at the end of 2006 that he was leaving to found his own company, Morphoses. Mr. Ratmansky said that City Ballet had offered him a contract to succeed Mr. Wheeldon, but that “the timing just didn’t work out.” At the time, last February, City Ballet said Mr. Ratmansky was too busy to take up its offer.

The City Ballet spokesman, Rob Daniels, said on Wednesday that Mr. Ratmansky had made it clear that he would not be able to create a ballet for the company before 2010.

“The thing about the resident-choreographer position is that you want them to be around,” Mr. Daniels said. “To give Alexei the title and then not have him around didn’t seem like the right thing.”

On Wednesday Mr. Ratmansky declined to say why he was joining Ballet Theater but not City Ballet. “I wouldn’t like to go into it,” he said, but Mr. Ratmansky was interviewed in the presence of Kevin McKenzie, Ballet Theater’s artistic director, and Rachel Moore, its executive director. The company declined to make him available without their presence.

Mr. Ratmansky’s position at Ballet Theater will be a major boost for the company, which is sometimes criticized for a conservative repertory focusing mostly on full-length 19th-century classics or imitations of them, particularly during its annual run at the Metropolitan Opera House. Ballet Theater’s annual fall season at City Center offers the company a chance to try out smaller-scale ballets, but even there the troupe has been criticized for a lack of new choreography. Ballet Theater staff members and dancers greeted the appointment with applause and shouts of encouragement, a spokeswoman said.

Mr. McKenzie denied that Mr. Ratmansky’s appointment was a response to such criticism. But he said that Mr. Ratmansky’s presence would inject new works — and new life — into the company. “He’s one of the greatest choreographers working today in the ballet idiom,” Mr. McKenzie said. “Anyone would want to have him.”

Mr. McKenzie said that he would collaborate with Mr. Ratmansky on artistic questions, including future programming. “It’s organically going to develop,” he said. “We are a big national ballet company and meant to be a leader in the field. The field I want to develop is new work.”

Mr. McKenzie, 54, who has led the company for 16 years, denied Mr. Ratmansky was being groomed as his successor.

Mr. Ratmansky also said he would be willing to use his connections to help Mr. McKenzie engage Russian dancers if he wanted to.

Ballet Theater has never had a resident choreographer, although some choreographers, including Twyla Tharp, Kenneth MacMillan and Antony Tudor, have had formal relationships with the company. Mr. Ratmansky’s contract begins in January, but he will not come to Ballet Theater until April, to begin work on his first new dance for it.

Mr. Ratmansky has at least four other commitments over the next two years. He will create a full-length ballet, “The Little Humpbacked Horse,” for the Kirov Ballet, for a premiere in March. He is scheduled to choreograph a work for the Australian Ballet next August and a new piece for City Ballet in the spring of 2010. He has a Bolshoi commission, with the timing uncertain.

Mr. Ratmansky made it known in February that he would leave the Bolshoi at the end of the year, and reports quickly emerged about his flirtation with City Ballet. It was around that time, Mr. McKenzie said, that he called Mr. Ratmansky with the proposal.

Mr. Ratmansky, who was born in St. Petersburg, trained at the Bolshoi Ballet School in Moscow and danced for years with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet in Canada and as a principal with the Royal Danish Ballet. He is credited with restoring luster to the Bolshoi after taking over there in 2004, bringing to bear a more international perspective than previous directors.

During his tenure he pushed the famously stodgy Bolshoi into the modern era by introducing 24 new ballets into the repertory, including his own “Bright Stream” and “The Flames of Paris,” both contemporary reworkings of Soviet-era ballets, as well as works by Ms. Tharp and Mr. Wheeldon.

In the interview he called his five years at the Bolshoi the “most challenging of my life,” and added, “I’m really looking forward to the time when I can just choreograph.”

Mr. Ratmansky has made two ballets for City Ballet, both greeted with critical acclaim. In 2006 he created “Russian Seasons,” and earlier this year “Concerto DSCH,” described by The New York Times chief dance critic Alastair Macaulay as “the most captivating classical ballet premiere I have seen in years.”

None of Mr. Ratmansky’s ballets are in the repertory of Ballet Theater.