E-Mail This Article to a Friend Sex and suggestiveness More days and nights at Boston Ballet BY JEFFREY GANTZ

The reviewing of dance, like that of most artistic endeavors, is itself more art than science. Witness the reaction to Boston Ballet’s presentation of the premiere of Peter Martins’s Distant Light last weekend. Writing in the Boston Globe, Christine Temin described Martins’s choreography as "a well-crafted compromise between European angst and American athleticism" and concluded, "This is a draining work even to witness, never mind to dance." In the Boston Herald, on the other hand, Theodore Bale said he "felt like he was seeing the emperor’s new clothes." Both Temin and Bale focused on the Martins premiere; Bale gave just three sentences to the performances of the program’s flanking Balanchine pieces, Divertimento No. 15 and Rubies, and Temin just a short paragraph to Divertimento No. 15, her review looking as if a concluding Rubies paragraph had got lopped off. (It’s probably just a coincidence that said review was hedged in by a large advertisement for the touring production of the Rockettes’ Radio City Christmas Spectacular that this year has evicted Boston Ballet’s Nutcracker from the Wang Theatre.) Marcia Siegel, whose Phoenix review you can read opposite, noted that on opening night "the happy voyeurs in the audience screamed their approval" for Distant Light but not for Divertimento No. 15 or Rubies. They were also on their feet at the final performance, Sunday evening, as Anna Kisselgoff reported in Tuesday’s New York Times; she concluded that the work "is not a masterpiece but it is an exceptionally charged ballet."

I saw Distant Light four times last weekend (including the dress rehearsal), and the audience reaction on Friday evening and Saturday afternoon was pretty much the same. I’d attribute that in part to the music, 58-year-old Latvian composer Peteris Vasks’s Tala gaisma ("Distant Light"), his 1997 concerto for violin and string orchestra. Bale described this half-hour one-movement work as a "wandering score for strings" and "cheaply cinematic"; to me, it’s an appropriate response to the horrors visited on Latvia by World War II and the Soviet Union, a work that earns both its dissonances and its pathos (which recalls Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending) and doesn’t lack for wit (the two waltz sections) or mystery (its aleatory conclusion). And Boston Ballet’s violin soloist, New England Conservatory graduate Jason Horowitz, was more composed and no less emotional than John Storgårds on his hectic, hyper Ondine recording. (I haven’t heard the recording for Elektra/Asylum by Gidon Kremer, for whom the work was composed.)

Music aside, Martins’s work panders to sex in a way that Balanchine never dreamed of. Watching Distant Light, which opens with a supine woman thrusting her pelvis upward, I was reminded of Suzanne Farrell’s remark, apropos of what Balanchine’s Bugaku is not, about movement "played only for its sexual suggestiveness." The sexuality — forget suggestiveness — was more evident in Lorna Feijóo’s graphic portrayal than in the ambivalent one Pollyana Ribeiro gave Saturday afternoon; I got the feeling that Ribeiro is too much of a woman to do what Martins appeared to have in mind and Feijóo too good an actress to do less. The three-men-and-a-woman scenario is an obvious inversion of Balanchine’s Apollo; the men, not always in the same order, have three cycles of dancing with her, each cycle shorter than the previous one, passion giving way to indifference. At the end, she seems to reject two of the men before being rejected by the third. The primal energy of Yury Yanowsky, Roman Rykine, and Nelson Madrigal sorted well with Feijóo’s; dancing with Ribeiro, Raul Salamanca, Chris Budzynski, and Mindaugas Bauzys were less violent but not less virile. Four viewings did not disclose much distinctiveness in the way each man relates to the woman or make the ballet’s finding its end in its beginning seem any less predictable. Mark Stanley’s lighting, night giving way to dawn, at least moves forward, and so does Distant Light to the extent that it explores feelings and not just sex. The piece does Martins more credit than his remark to the Globe about there being no story for women without men.

Set to the Divertimento in B-flat for Two Violins, Viola, Double Bass, and Two Horns, Divertimento No. 15 finds Mozart and Balanchine of one mind: both the seemingly simple music and the choreography are divine when they’re done just right, but there’s the devil to pay when they’re not. Boston Ballet needed to pay for another rehearsal or two: the violins struggled with the stratospheric B above high A, and when on Saturday they once again failed to negotiate a descending passage in the opening Allegro, a gentleman sitting behind me let out a sigh of dismay. Balanchine’s design for the first movement looks innocuous enough, with three couples backed by a corps of eight women; then he brings on two more lead women and the sexual equilibrium goes out the window. Everyone gets a solo in the Theme and Variations and the corps gets its turn in the Minuet; the Adagio has two of the men doubling up for duets with the women, and the Allegro molto (Balanchine dropped the second Minuet and the Andante introduction to the finale) finds the partnering in a fluid state. Friday night when Nelson Madrigal strolled out with Heather Myers and Sacha Wakelin, the Beach Boys line "Two girls for every boy" popped into my head.

Four of the company’s arrivals were on view in this piece, most notably new principal Carlos Molina, from Colombia and most recently a soloist at American Ballet Theatre; he has ballón and an easy grace, plus 720-degree (as opposed to the popular 630 variety) doubles tours, though at times what Mozart and Balanchine wanted was easier (that is, harder) still. New corps member Tempe Ostergren gave a buttery sheen to Variation II; I was more taken, though, with Melanie Atkins’s olive oil. New first soloist Sacha Wakelin had, I thought, an artificial-looking port de bras (arms moved into place by the brain rather than directed by the body) in Variation III, whereas corps member Lia Cirio looked more grounded; both were steady on pointe in their Adagio duets. In Variation IV, new first soloist Karine Seneca suffered a little by comparison with newly promoted second soloist Rie Ichikawa, who has found some line to go with her technique; well paired with Pavel Gurevich in the Adagio, however, Seneca looked rapt. New first soloist Romi Beppu found more flow than Larissa Ponomarenko did in the flashy footwork of the lead lady; among the other women, Kathleen Breen Combes and newly promoted second soloist Heather Myers were solid, and Misa Kuranaga was more, Mozart light but not lightweight. None of the other men — Mindaugas Bauzys, Jared Redick, Nelson Madrigal, John Lam, and newly promoted second soloist Sabi Varga — let the side down either.

Rubies is the second part (with Emeralds and Diamonds) of Balanchine’s 1967 evening-length Jewels. Boston Ballet’s three previous performances (in 1984, 1986, and 1998) were under the title Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra, the title of the Stravinsky work to which the ballet is set, and with a black-and-gold design and costumes replacing the original red-and-gold. Written in three movements, the music is one big scherzo, and Balanchine’s lead couple need to exude a teasing, knowing, American-as-seen-by-a-European sexuality. Romi Beppu and Yury Yanowsky didn’t fill that bill on Thursday: Yanowsky, perhaps miscast, or drained by Distant Light, was too puppy-doggish, and Beppu, in "I Enjoy Being a Girl" mode, looked too ’50s for Stravinsky’s sour-sweet sensibility. They didn’t relate well to each other either. Friday, Pollyana Ribeiro and Christopher Budzynski (filling in for injured new principal Reyneris Reyes, whom the company is hoping to have back for this week’s The Taming of the Shrew) showed how it’s done, Budzynski conjuring the cowboy-up theatrics of former company principals William Pizzuto and Paul Thrussell, Ribeiro doing the steps and at the same time slyly undercutting them — just what Stravinsky does in the music. As Beppu’s partner Saturday afternoon, Jared Redick did the steps but had no better luck making a connection. As the leader of the Lippizaner ladies, Melanie Atkins caught Ted Bale’s eye but not Marcia Siegel’s. I like Atkins’s Balanchine sensibility, but like Beppu, she can be a little overarticulated (both ladies were steelier in Divertimento); she has the body and the beauty of a woman who doesn’t need to overdo the make-up or the facial gestures. Friday night, Karine Seneca was a more voluptuous presence who recalled both the Siren of Prodigal Son and the Melancholic ladies of The Four Temperaments, though her elevation wasn’t always the equal of her sensibilities. Saturday, Sacha Wakelin was too straight-faced for what’s both multi-faceted music and multi-faceted choreography. The eight ladies and four men of the corps looked tight and tentative Thursday; by Saturday afternoon, they’d tightened up.

Among the notable new presences, there was one even more notable new absence: former soloist Barbora Kohoutková, who has accepted a principal position with Hamburg Ballet. Kohoutková was earthy and classy at once, with Old World charm but also savoir faire, a Jeanne Moreau of the dance. If Boston Ballet had promoted her to principal, would she have stayed? It’s also sobering to look back at the company’s 1998 production, when Patrick Armand was paired with Ribeiro and Robert Wallace with Jennifer Gelfand and Kyra Strasberg was the lady. Those were dancers with personality as well as talent. The talent has been replaced; the personality is still pending.