Choreographer Alexi Ratmansky on His Upcoming World Premiere at New York City Ballet
He is staging a suite of dances from Marius Petipa’s Paquita.
Alexei Ratmansky
Erin Baiano
Beginning with 2006’s Russian Seasons, choreographer Alexei Ratmansky has established a relationship of both fruitful collaboration and striking variation with New York City Ballet. A regular presence in the hallowed halls of NYCB’s home at Lincoln Center since becoming Artist in Residence in August 2023, Ratmansky is once again departing from his previous works for the Company by staging a suite of dances from Marius Petipa’s Paquita, running February 6–9, a work Petipa choreographed for the Imperial Ballet of St. Petersburg in 1847 and revised in 1881. “I felt that after Solitude, I needed to go in a very different direction,” says Ratmansky, referencing his 2024 ballet inspired by a photograph from the war in Ukraine. “I wanted to celebrate life, to tell the dancers and the audience, ‘We can have different colors here. We don’t need to expect certain things.’”
This isn’t Ratmansky’s first engagement with Paquita. In 2014, he partnered with historian Doug Fullington on a full reconstruction of this 19th-century ballet for the Bayerisches Staatsballett in Munich. “It was a chance to learn the material—to understand what the choreography consists of, what is its style, and so on,” Ratmansky recalls of the experience. His approach was rigorously academic, relying on extensive archival research centered around the Stepanov notations held at the Harvard Theatre Collection at Houghton Library, created by Mariinsky Ballet regisseur Nicholas Sergeyev, which provided a detailed record of how the ballet was performed in the early 20th century, during Petipa’s lifetime. Ratmansky further researched images, including a unique discovery of 1890s drawings of the Grand Pas principal couple by Mariinsky Ballet premier danseur Pavel Gerdt, from the Bakhrushin Museum in Moscow; reviews, and more; “After you learn all of that, it gives you a sort of freedom to play with it,” he says. “I was very pedantic in my approach, and excited by the idea of recreating the notated steps as closely to those of the original as possible, then. But today, at the NYCB, I feel that a new, freer approach will be more fitting.”
For NYCB, Ratmansky is focusing on two sections from the ballet: the Grand Pas, which Petipa added when restaging his ballet in 1881; and George Balanchine’s Minkus Pas de Trois, which premiered in 1951 on NYCB and was, according to Balanchine, a restaging of Petipa’s own pas de trois with small changes to best celebrate his own dancers. Ballerina Alexandra Danilova, who left Russia with Balanchine in 1924, first staged the Paquita Grand Pas for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1949, and went on to stage the ballet at the School of American Ballet, where she taught for 25 years, and at companies like the Cincinnati Ballet; Ratmansky will also incorporate some details from Danilova’s version, in addition to subtle contributions of Ratmansky’s own.
“I really love the structure of the Grand Pas, that it uses the thematic material and develops it to the fullest, and presents the cast in the best possible way, from different angles, giving them solos, demi solos, entrances, and a coda. My admiration for Petipa’s ability to structure a classical work, beyond the story or the theatricalities of the costumes and sets, is an admiration I share with Mr. B, of course,” says Ratmansky. And for Ratmansky, Minkus Pas de Trois is “an extraordinary illustration of how a master takes the material of the previous times and makes it his own, translating it to his own language.” The juxtaposition of these two titans’ approaches to a single classical work is, for Ratmansky, one of the most compelling aspects. “What is Balanchine’s phrasing compared to Petipa’s? What was novel about his interpretation of the classical steps? And, how do these Balanchine-trained dancers take on the material, what do they do with the choreography, how do they interpret it, how do they phrase it? It’s a theme for a longer conversation, and I’ll be happy if this premiere will spark that conversation.”
Though the language of classical ballet is the foundation for Balanchine’s vocabulary, the original, 19th-century style of Petipa’s Paquita is somewhat foreign to today’s artists. “I’m not trying to make them dance in this very specific way, but I want to see how the two styles merge. Together, from both sides of the studio, and with the help of my repertory director Lisa Jackson, we will find a way that is organic for the dancers. So far, it’s an interesting project that really engages different muscles and a different mentality,” says Ratmansky.
Petipa, Sergeyev, Danilova, Balanchine, the dancers: so many artists are essential to the new work, but the production will be, inherently, Ratmansky’s. “I have all the materials that I’m using, but the result might be something quite different—though true to the original structure, we can say,” he explains. This staging, which will feature costumes by Jérôme Kaplan and lighting by Mark Stanley, represents an opportunity to take the work Ratmansky has done for over a decade and through it, discover something new. “I spent years researching, and now I can go the way that was established by the company’s founding choreographer—old material being presented in a new light. “And, I always wanted to do a tutu ballet for New York City Ballet.”
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