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Revisiting ‘The Fairy’s Kiss,’ a Ballet About an Artist’s Destiny

Simone Messmer, a Miami City Ballet principal dancer, held aloft during a “Fairy’s Kiss” rehearsal.Credit...Rose Marie Cromwell for The New York Times

There are ballets that choreographers return to again and again, fine tuning and recalibrating, as if trying to get at something essential they missed before. The Russian-American choreographer Alexei Ratmansky first tried his hand at “The Fairy’s Kiss,” a ballet based on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Ice Maiden,” in 1994, when he was in his 20s. He has just completed his third version, this time for Miami City Ballet, where it will premiere on Friday.

It is a curious tale: An infant boy is saved from a blizzard by the kiss of a fairy. He grows up to be a strapping young man, falls in love. Then, on his wedding night, the fairy returns to claim him, sealing his fate with an icy kiss. Igor Stravinsky, who wrote the music in 1928, saw it as an allegory of the artist’s destiny, an idea that has resonated with choreographers ever since.

“It’s a nice metaphor, a skeleton, about the realm of art,” Mr. Ratmansky said recently in New York. “At the end there are four minutes of white-on-white music” — an almost translucent, evenly paced descending figure in the strings — “it really shows you the land without time or space.” It is reminiscent, in some ways, of the ending of Stravinsky’s other ballet from the same period, “Apollo.”

To achieve a more abstract effect, Stravinsky simplified the particulars of the story in his scenario. He also dedicated the music to Tchaikovsky, a composer he greatly admired and associated with his youth in St. Petersburg. In the dedication, he wrote that he related the fairy to Tchaikovsky’s muse, “for the Muse similarly marked him with her fatal kiss.” He wove a dozen or so Tchaikovsky songs and piano pieces into the score, as if channeling the older master.

The ballet has had a complicated performance history. The original was the result of a commission by the dancer-actress-impresario Ida Rubinstein, a patron with lofty aspirations and deep pockets. Rubinstein’s house choreographer was Bronislava Nijinska, sister of the famed dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky. Reviews of the Parisian opening were mixed, partly because Rubinstein, who performed the role of the Fairy, was no great shakes as a dancer. As the historian Lynn Garafola, who is working on a biography of Nijinska, put it recently, “It was primarily a mime role, but there Ida was, in her tutu and pointe shoes.” Reviewers scoffed at her bent knees and poor posture.

The score, too, came in for scorn from the Parisian critics, who pooh-poohed its evocation of Tchaikovsky as sentimental and uninspired. (Tchaikovsky was unfashionable at the time — not advanced enough for the smart set.) The ballet producer Serge Diaghilev — who was, it must be said, a competitor of Rubinstein’s — dismissed the music as “tiresome” and “lachrymose.”

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Simone Messmer, center, and Renan Cordeiro, right, rehearse “The Fairy’s Kiss” with fellow members of the Miami City Ballet.Credit...Rose Marie Cromwell for The New York Times

And yet it’s the music, melodic and brimming with yearning lyricism, that has given the ballet a lasting afterlife. Many have tried their hand at it, including Frederick Ashton, George Balanchine (more than once), Kenneth MacMillan, John Neumeier and, most unlikely, the bombastic French dancemaker Maurice Béjart.

It’s the music that keeps drawing Mr. Ratmansky back, too: “The music is so divine, and it’s never done anymore, it’s not in the repertory.” Even after two attempts, he said, “there were still parts I thought didn’t work.” So when Miami City Ballet came calling, he decided to give “The Fairy’s Kiss” yet another try.

Mainly, Mr. Ratmansky said, he has added more detail, more steps, more complexity. He has even borrowed a sequence from the 19th-century choreographer Marius Petipa and hidden it away in the Fairy’s choreography, like a balletic talisman. But while Mr. Ratmansky draws from the classical canon, he also shapes the movement with his own accent, with the aim of telling the story with greater immediacy.

At one point during a recent preview at the Guggenheim, Mr. Ratmansky asked Renan Cerdeiro, the dancer playing the Young Man, to “be more daring,” to “give the feeling of standing on the edge, and then add a little darkness, just a shadow, here.” At times he seemed to request the impossible: “suspend a little longer in the air to show how high you are on the wave of love.” With a few gestures, he showed the impression he was trying to achieve. Mr. Cerdeiro immediately got it.

Later, the dancers discussed their work with him in the studio. “It’s not like the old classics,” Mr. Cerdeiro said, “where it’s either just pantomime or just dancing. He incorporates the pantomime into the dancing so it tells the story.”

During that “white-on-white” music at the end, the dancers return to the stage, now in spare, almost transparent costumes. The Young Man draws them into familiar images from various ballets: “Giselle,” Nijinska’s “Les Noces,” Balanchine’s “Apollo” and “Serenade.” The Young Man is almost like a choreographer at work, creating something new out of the past.

Reflecting on the ending, Jeanette Delgado, who dances the role of the jilted bride, mused: “To me, it’s almost Ratmansky’s story too, in a way.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: For an Icy ‘Fairy’s Kiss,’ Maybe Third Time’s the Charm. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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