What, or who, is Paquita? Unlike the eponymous heroines of Giselle, Manon, or Cinderella, the character Paquita has mostly faded from the collective memory of even the keenest ballet fans, her name now associated with a few spirited solo variations and excerpts presented at galas or on triple bills. So when “Paquita (World Premiere)” appeared at the top the “Innovators & Icons” program at New York City Ballet—known for its fast, athletic and sometimes jazzy neoclassical repertoire, not for resurrecting nineteenth-century museum pieces—it hinted at an intriguing collision of styles, with the company’s founder George Balanchine (1904–83); its current artist in residence, Alexei Ratmansky; and the French-Russian master Marius Petipa (1818–1910) all receiving credit. The result of this experiment, spanning three centuries, was thrilling: a vibrant and layered Paquita injected with rocket fuel.
The first iteration of Paquita opened at the Paris Opera in 1846 with choreography by Joseph Mazilier and music by Édouard Deldevez. The plot was simple melodrama: a gypsy girl saves the life of a French officer in Napoleon-occupied Spain, only to discover that she is in fact of noble birth, enabling the pair to marry. The following year, a young Marius Petipa—who went on to create The Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty, and La Bayadère—staged a version at the St. Petersburg Imperial Theaters (now the Mariinsky). Petipa continually tweaked the story ballet and, for its 1881 revival, asked the Austrian composer Ludwig Minkus to provide music for an updated pas de troisin the first act and a new grand pas de deux classique in the third—both suites of pure dance with solo variations and dances for a trio and pair respectively. While the full-length Paquita fell out of favor, its story too naive even for nineteenth-century tastes, the popular pas de trois and grand passections, brimming with Spanish-flavored moves, entered the repertoire of many major companies—which now include NYCB at last.
This “new” Paquita is a two-part affair and is really a mix of new and old, consisting of a revival of Balanchine’s Minkus Pas de Trois (1948, revised in 1951) running straight into a Grand Pas by Ratmansky that riffs on the original steps of Petipa. Placed beside one another like a dance diptych, these sibling works show two artists at play, each echoing Petipa while mischievously testing the limits of dancers trained for quick tempos and complex rhythms. Both featured beautiful mirrored steps and excessive repetition, with an emphasis on virtuosic footwork, as well as that rarity among new ballets: a sea of classical tutus, designed by Jérôme Kaplan.
Minkus Pas de Trois, last performed by the company in 1993, is a sparkling eight-minute showpiece for three dancers, two female (Erica Pereira and Emma Von Enck) and one male (David Gabriel). Wearing wonderfully garish colors—bright red and pink tutus and black tights for the women—the trio moved in unison across the stage in triangular formation or holding hands, performing jetés and leg beats and sharp little kicks with brio. In their duets Pereira and Enck performed identical steps in reverse, sometimes crisscrossing in front of each other, and in their equally precise solos navigated many crisp jumps and balances. Gabriel, a newly minted soloist, displayed marvelous sequences of alternating double tours (a jump with two revolutions) and pirouettes or held arabesques.
In the Grand Pas, a work for sixteen dancers, it was the lines of the corps de ballet that shone above all, echoing and amplifying the steps of the featured pair, Chun Wai Chan (the sole male dancer) and Sara Mearns, who took the places of the French officer Lucien and Paquita, for whom Petipa’s grand pas was first envisioned as a wedding celebration. And while Ratmanksy’s version is an abstraction, this celebratory spirit—a stark contrast to Solitude, the choreographer’s last work for the company, about a father mourning his child in wartime Ukraine—persisted from the entrée to the jubilant coda. It is also a return to Paquita for Ratmansky, who in 2014 reconstructed Petipa’s full-length version for Munich’s Bayerisches Staatsballett using archival dance notations.
In his new Grand Pas, Ratmansky nods to the past without being shackled to it. The dancers frequently spotted to the front while turning—a signature of Balanchine technique, to engage the audience—mixed with some spotting to the wings and corners. There were many deep backbends and extra-high arabesques, with one arm nearly touching the back leg, Russian-style, along with traveling jumps. The ensemble was used to create beautiful visual effects, for instance, crossing the stage in layers of horizontal lines or holding sweeping lines of penchées with their arms raised and upper bodies tilted forwards dramatically.
Central to the work were six solo variations. Here the choreography sometimes verged on the comic—Ratmansky gave the brave Indiana Woodward an absurdly long series of extremely rapid leg beats that traveled downstage with her arms held firmly in first position, a sequence that looked so fiendishly difficult that her smile seemed tinged with irony. Others were more delicate, with Mearns’s variation showing off her softly fluttering, winglike arms. Chan’s solo was an entertaining addition—in Petipa’s version, the male dancer merely partners the lead ballerina—which included repetitions of a little-seen turning jump propelled by a single foot touching the ground, the other used to swing the body around.
Apart from a world premiere, the night was also notable for giving audiences the opportunity to admire in three very different roles the now-seasoned principal dancer Unity Phelan, who, in addition to dancing featured roles in Paquita and Jerome Robbins’s In the Night as scheduled, took on one of the three female leads in Balanchine’s complex Symphony in Three Movements at the last minute, covering for a colleague. In Robbins’s ballet set to four Chopin nocturnes, depicting three contrasting couples lingering after a ball, Phelan and her partner Andrew Veyette gave color to the most tempestuous pair’s relationship with seemingly reckless lifts and remorseful glances. In Balanchine’s large-scale Symphony, set to Stravinsky’s piece of the same name, Phelan’s unique hypermobility exaggerated the angular shapes created in a complex, intertwining duet with Aarón Sanz, her presumed fatigue undetectable.
