Review: An Old Ballet Is Kissed Into New Life

MIAMI — Alexei Ratmansky’s latest ballet, “The Fairy’s Kiss,” feels like skillful, page-turning prose that opens in each scene into different forms of poetry. It’s also a completely clear piece of storytelling, carrying the audience through the four scenes of Igor Stravinsky’s fast-changing 1928 score “Le Baiser de la Fée.” (The music abounds in Stravinsky’s arrangements of items by Tchaikovsky, to whom it’s dedicated.)

Mr. Ratmansky’s most remarkable images deepen the narrative; eventually, they transform it. Its choreography will repay multiple viewings, both to find further detail and to sense its overall coherence: How do its prose and poetry subsequently fit together in the mind?

Mr. Ratmansky, 48 and staggeringly prolific, has already tackled “Le Baiser de la Fée” in two previous productions in other countries. This version had its premiere on Friday with Miami City Ballet at the Adrienne Arsht Center; his second creation for this wonderfully vivid company, it shows the dancers’ energy, musicality, charm, enthusiasm and gifts for communication. (I saw Saturday’s performance.)

In the first scene, when the fairy (Simone Messmer) has claimed an orphaned baby boy as hers, she does multiple fouetté turns, revolving on one leg. But fouettés, the most famous virtuoso steps in ballet, occur in lots of different works, from “Swan Lake” to “Who Cares?” So what’s the big deal here? Two things. The music keeps changing, so that she seems not propelled by it but to be overriding it. And while she turns, other characters fill the empty space behind her. Other things change; this Fairy just keeps on turning.

The ballet is attractively, economically designed by Jérôme Kaplan in modernist style. Scene changes occur without fuss — and the orphaned hero’s growing up is easily shown. As the second scene starts, he pops out twice from a group of villagers: first, as a little boy with dark, curly hair, and then as a young adult with dark, curly hair (Renan Cerdeiro). This hero already has a sweetheart, his Fiancée (Jeanette Delgado). They, too, do fouetté turns, but on alternating legs (ballet’s equivalent of a tongue-twister). Mr. Ratmansky achieves, with seeming effortlessness, a folk-like style for the villagers that feels wholly unlike that of the Fairy and her retinue and yet (in certain pouncing jumps, landing on both feet, called assemblés) feels fascinatingly related.

Mr. Ratmansky always allows Stravinsky’s music to speak. Gary Sheldon was conducting the Opus One Orchestra: Sometimes nothing happens onstage while the score lets the atmosphere change; sometimes Stravinsky builds up a giddying momentum beneath a seemingly straightforward incident. In each scene, the Fairy returns in a new disguise, tempting the Young Man from his Fiancée.

Stravinsky planned “Baiser” on two levels. He adapted Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Ice Maiden,” the story of a boy who is claimed as a baby by the immortal maiden of the glacier. Reappearing on the eve of his marriage, she whisks him away from his bride. The title character becomes Stravinsky’s Fairy; “Baiser” also suggests that Tchaikovsky’s muse singled him out for a life of art rather than of joy. In Mr. Ratmansky’s version, the Fairy, beginning as Andersen’s violent and cruel spirit of the glacier, gradually becomes his muse, who separates the Young Man from ordinary mortals.

And Mr. Ratmansky makes the final scene a world beyond space and time where the Young Man is alone among works of art — indeed, tableaus of choreography. This is Mr. Ratmansky’s boldest and most beautiful masterstroke. You see imagery from historic ballets (“Giselle”; Nijinska’s “Les Noces”; Balanchine’s “Apollo”; and others), but the point is not any Spot the Ballet Quotation — though I’ll enjoy that on later visits to this work. Its great achievement here is to show a realm of timeless art, with the Young Man amazed in its midst. You watch the formations cohere, melt and change, fluently and enthrallingly, like sand patterns changed by successive sea waves.

Quite possibly, Mr. Ratmansky implies here that the Young Man becomes a choreographer. Probably, he means a touch of self-portraiture: No choreographer is more steeped in ballet history than he. Above all, though, as this scene unfolds like a dance equivalent of a walk through a great museum, it establishes the idea that T. S. Eliot made famous in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”: that old works of art are changed and enriched by the arrival of new ones, and that new ones, however radically they are transformed, draw from tradition. To find this transfiguring apotheosis at the end of this ballet is astonishing.

Along the way, a few weaknesses emerge. In that opening scene, the Fairy fixes her gaze on the baby for far too long, as if she knew only one way to indicate obsession. In the final section of the bridal pas de deux, she replaces the veiled Fiancée. He rips off the veil and — perhaps — before he knows what he is doing, kisses her, with tragic effect. The way the Fairy has replaced the Fiancée isn’t quite satisfying. But the contrast between Ms. Messmer’s imperious force and Ms. Delgado’s warm-blooded pathos is perfect, and Mr. Cerdeiro, keenly impulsive, becomes the ballet’s heartbeat.

“The Fairy’s Kiss,” just under 50 minutes long, occurs at the end of a triple bill. Balanchine’s “Walpurgisnacht Ballet” (1980, to music from Gounod’s “Faust”) comes first; its dancing on Saturday was shot through with the vivifying freshness of musicality and texture that makes this an exceptional troupe, by Balanchine standards, anywhere in the world. The centerpiece is Christopher Wheeldon’s “Polyphonia” (2001, to Ligeti piano pieces — played here by Francisco Rennó), a work so abundant with striking detail and compositional intricacy that I’m sorry to say that it does not reward more than a few viewings.

My guess is that any flaws in “The Fairy’s Kiss” will fade. Already, it proves grippingly imaginative.