April 22, 2016
“Review: From City Ballet, a ‘Peculiar Marvel’ by Ratmansky”
by Alastair Macaulay
“‘A wonderfully disconcerting aspect of this choreography is its extraordinary mixture of formality and informality. You see patterns, symmetries, geometries, but you also see hurtling force and pedestrian behavior; often these dancers might almost be improvising. Mr. Ratmansky is highly unpredictable in the way he assigns each musical section: A delicate passage for the high notes may go to a man; a low sequence with some brutality may go to a star ballerina.
Mussorgsky’s first picture, for example, is called ‘Gnome’; here it’s given to the gorgeous Sara Mearns. This is the work’s wildest dance, an anti-diva number made for Ms. Mearns, the company’s foremost diva — who laps it up, urgently. With brusque violence, she charges, runs, stops, crouches.”