One is the loneliest number.

Jacobs, Laura

In 1984, when I began reviewing dance in New York City, I was living in Philadelphia. The commute on Amtrak was an hour and a half each way, with a bus or subway on each side. I was on that train three or four times a week, and sometimes both days on weekends. I was seeing dance at City Center and the Joyce, at DTW, P.S. 122, and BAM. American Ballet Theatre, then under the leadership of Mikhail Baryshnikov, would plump down at the Met in late spring through June; July would follow with an international treat--the Paris Optra or the Bolshoi or the Kirov. The destination that meant most, however, that was the most important and rewarding and demanding, sometimes five performances in one week, was the New York State Theater, home to the New York City Ballet. When I moved to Manhattan in 1987, I rented an apartment eight blocks away.

George Balanchine, the founding choreographic genius Of NYCB, died in 1983, but the ballerinas he left were still his, brought up under his eagle eye, and still giving big performances, each in her own way, the sky the limit. There was Suzanne Farrell in her astral veils, and the harbor twilight of Patricia McBride, Merrill Ashley's bright sun, and Maria Calegari's midnight cloak, Kyra Nichols daydreaming her own Tolstoyan pastoral, and the very young Darci Kistler, a rainbow at dawn (an injured foot would steal her colors, though the iridescence remained). Twenty-three years later, only Nichols and Kistler still grace the roster at NYCB.

Watching these ballerinas retire, one by one, I'm not sure I realized exactly what was leaving. Every year there was excitement on the grapevine about some new girl or girls at the School of American Ballet--new light. A handful of SAB grads would be taken into the company under intense scrutiny, some thrown into the soft spotlight of a Martins or Tanner or La Fosse or Wheeldon premiere tailored to their abilities, others tested in Balanchine roles suited to their type: for glamour, Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream; for leggy aplomb, the tall girl in "Rubies"; for sparkling precision, one of the five pretties in Divertimento No. 15. If a young dancer could get through a role technically, didn't get injured, didn't break down, didn't suffer a hormonal spike that thickened her, and was a type the company was in need of (someone with warmth and wit for the McBride roles, say, or who might someday climb the icy heights of "Diamonds"), well, congrats, take a Chance card. Meanwhile, the following June would hatch a new batch of hopefuls, and balletomanes would again flutter like moths during a full moon: Monique's fouettes, Miranda's gleam, Jenifer's hairline, Maria's long long everything. And during these two decades after Balanchine's death there were celebrations and festivals and projects--respectful, ambitious, dutiful, dubious, and, most of all, distracting. Because the main thing is this: How exciting, how important, is the dancing? Last year, when I counted the number of NYCB performances I had gone to during both winter and spring seasons--less than ten--I saw that I had answered the question without even asking it.

There's an undeniable thrill in watching a fledgling fly loop-de-loops. There's even interest in a gawky, tentative performance, a debut held together by tremulous synapses and the survival instinct (Ruby Keeler, the star who is born in 42nd Street, wasn't very good, but her narrow, self-conscious warble made one protective). Still, these kinds of performances only go so far. They are first dates, infatuations, promises which are often, no, usually, broken. They do not sustain an art form or an audience. That requires fulfillment, the dancer growing into a role, finding her life in its life, leaving a signature upon it--technical, tonal, emotional, theatrical--stresses as intimate and unique as the strangely sculptural wear on women's lipsticks. And fulfillment isn't just one role--though a dancer is lucky to get even that--it is many roles, a repertoire, adding up to something serious, an artist. And fulfillment isn't just great roles in old masterpieces, but new roles, premieres that add a face to history's portrait gallery, knitting the mercurial present into the majestic past.

I do not wish to criticize accomplished, hard-working dancers, but surveying the top of the NYCB roster, I can't help feeling it's now a company in which women never quite come into their own, their dancing not distinct enough to leave a signature or big enough to command our presence--their promise unfulfilled. Of the principal women after Nichols and Kistler, only one, Janie Taylor, comes wrapped in her own atmosphere. Only her appearances have me rearranging my schedule, compelled to the theater. Bohemian kooky, like the strange girl in every high school, this wayward blonde can launch herself over the top or lose herself in dream. When she last danced Afternoon of a Faun, the false eyelashes she wore--so long you could see fringe from the First Ring--amplified the heavy-lidded, heavy perfume that floated her dancing and Debussy's music. Taylor is unquestionably a younger generation ballerina--if she were on Broadway she'd be doing the Mimi role in Rent. There's an interior swan dive to her dancing that seems a response to, an escape from, postmodern urban stress. She's the millennial version of "Midnight in Paris." One wants to see her in anything.

We don't get much of Taylor though. Injury has kept her from the stage, which may be a good thing, considering how overwork can arrest the development of a dancer, can coarsen and demoralize. Overachievers will always see it as a compliment or a responsibility to do more than they should have to do, but artists must say no sometimes, must be as smart about protecting their talent (look at Seabiscuit, his knees shot in all those claiming races before he was even three) as in getting themselves before the public. Admittedly, dancers are not schooled to say no. It's more "Jump" and "How high?"

That's pretty much what the company director Peter Martins seems to be asking of his dancers lately. Martins's premiere from last season, Friandises, which means "morsels" or "bits," was made to spotlight younger dancers coming up. The composer Christopher Rouse produced a busy score, mostly up-tempo, and Martins responded with a busy ballet--now fast, now slow, now light, now dark, now Balanchine's Stravinsky, now Robbins's West Side Story. The piece ended in a spectacle of hyperactivity--jetes, tours en Pair, fouettes--everybody whipping faster, jumping higher, holding longer. The dancers themselves were reduced to morsels, bits, for there was no long line, no arc to fill in this ballet.

One can't go deeply into Martins's recent ballets because he himself doesn't go deeply into them. Clearly, he's an exceptionally successful fundraiser--NYCB's endowment is flush, the envy of American ballet companies--and perhaps this achievement has released Martins from angst over his own work, a need to prove himself. Back in the 1980S and 1990s, when Martins was trying to prove himself (in an unenviable no-win situation), and sent out zeitgeist ballets fashionably tinged with violence and a little kink, you felt he was engaged in his choreography, that what he had to give (like it or not) was in his work. Not anymore. Martins's premieres now leave me wondering, Why does he bother? The ballets look hastily made, thrown together, as if he'd picked his dancers by pointing "you, you, and you" without knowing their names. And the scores he chooses--episodic, mutating, bombastic--end so far from where they begin that musical structure doesn't register on the listener, and doesn't impose any formal obligation upon Martins, force him to envision a world, to create a place, to see or say something. Martins has been through a lot of contemporary composers--Adams, Torke, Wuorinen, Rouse--and at the company's spring gala this May it was John Corigliano's turn. Martins premiered The Red Violin, choreographed for eight dancers to Corigliano's violin concerto of the same name, an award-winning score for a movie, but a mess of a score for a dance.

Call it what you will, an ADD ballet because of its incessantly shifting, aggressively percussive moods, fraying near the end, or simply Martins in his comfort zone, doling out favorite strategies and devices. There's the female dancer contorted by her partner into an ungainly pose on the floor, and then left in that pose when he withdraws from her. I suppose we can blame Balanchine for this trope, his Episodes and some Stravinsky ballets. But in Mr. B's day it meant something--it was a Dada joke or a Cubist truth. Now it's tired, shorthand for "mind games." Then there's Martins's use of multiple couples doing the same adagio in unison or close canon. In his Friandises, in the slow movement, Martins spun an eloquent skein of intimacy in a quiet, measured duet. But he spun it on three couples. Why would three couples be intimate in exactly the same way? It was baffling, and you didn't know where to look. Why not give the duet to one couple, and make something more of them by letting us look only at them? This refusal to put the focus on one woman or one couple is bad for a ballet. It doesn't make everyone equally interesting; it makes everyone seem anonymous, displaced. In The Red Violin, Jennie Somogyi, a principal, and Sara Mearns, a soloist, are the leads, and yet they're never differentiated from each other or from the other two girls. Why then should we care about their portentous clinches and flitting, shifting relationships? All cats are the same in the dark.

The other premiere on the gala program was Christopher Wheeldon's Evenfall. Wheeldon, the resident choreographer of NYCB, has been churning out ballets in America and abroad, the most in-demand young choreographer since Mark Morris. He's the new octane in the old arts-marketing engine, and like Morris before him he's getting more pressure to be "It" than is good for any artist. But is non-stop, jet-set ballet-making really the way to go? Thus far, his many ballets aren't adding up to much. I repeat, sometimes it's saying no that makes you an artist.

Evenfall. I hate that kind of title, so precious ("evenfall" means "dusk"). When the curtain came up, however, revealing girls in tutus, I nearly fell out of my seat. Real live tutus, a dusky, pale blue. Okay, I thought, be precious. The music is Bela Bartok's Piano Concerto No. 3, from 1945, and it's a score with an elevated pulse, very brisk. Tonally, you hear Hindemith in there, and also Bartok's influence on Brian Easdale, the English composer who worked on the movies of Powell and Pressburger, most memorably 1948's The Red Shoes. Wheeldon has always been a quick study with the choreographic styles of his forebears. In Evenfall, he's channeling Frederick Ashton, not a bad idea seeing that this score, a bit pixilated, is something Ashton might have tried. Wheeldon keeps his attention on the corps for a long time, playing with a triangle formation, stringing symmetries like city lights in mist, and plying an arch, Ashtonian vocabulary: those chitteringly knowing pizzicato bourrees; the off-kilter, ecole-meets-Escher punctuation of 1948's Scenes de ballet, where poses are canted into witty refractions, over-bright winks. This over-animated, pins-and-needles quality of excitement in the corps is Ashton's, and it's nice to see someone pull--and so beautifully--from the late master across the pond.

So the ballet begins with a bright burn. We wonder--as we always do with Wheeldon, whose ballets never fail to begin with authority, a stylistic flourish--where he's going to go with it. And then he goes nowhere. Wheeldon so overemphasizes this corps they become something to see past or through. He keeps bringing them back into V formation, that triangle pointed at the audience. But should we really be the point? The lead couple, Miranda Weese and Damian Woetzel, when they finally do come on, have none of the corps' choreographic interest, so pretty in their pale blue tutus (Weese's tutu is aubergine--eggplant, for heaven's sake). Wheeldon gives Weese her own Ashton motif, the jackknived sous-sus, upper body tipped over her pointes. Ashton often used this in moments of heightened sensuality; for instance, Titania dancing with Oberon. Here it's brittle, more an exclamation, the fashionista's "darling." There's also a passage in which Weese circles her arms over Woetzel's head, and then he slides sideways out of the circle, which hangs empty in the air. It's another trope, a shrug at romance. Maybe Wheeldon should have pushed it, twirled up, turned Weese and Woetzel into Bright Young Things--brittle, exclamatory lightweights. But Wheeldon hasn't a clue who this couple is or what to do with them or how they connect with the corps. Whole phrases in their partnering look recycled from previous Wheeldon works. And when Weese suddenly does Italian fouettes in a thicket of circling girls--the dance hall gone bad--it's that moment, all too familiar in Wheeldon ballets, when the fizz goes and a frantic throw-it-and-see-if-it-sticks takes over.

What reward is it for any of these principal women to be in new ballets that sell them short, that use facsimile phrases and ersatz structures, and don't seem to see who they are or might be? Wheeldon's work at NYCB has focused on two principals, Weese and Wendy Whelan. He's used Weese as a kind of mother-of-pearl eternal feminine who is manhandled by history (the brutish Shambards), or whose quiet sophistication absorbs cacophony but never reacts to it. As for Whelan, he has made her the unofficial star of City Ballet, their unofficial partnership in some ways resembling Martins's earlier collaboration with Heather Watts, one of the last Balanchine ballerinas. Like Whelan, Watts was wiry, flexible, more sinew and bone than air and curve. Rangy yet lyric, she had a wild-flower freedom in the right roles. Martins used her to explore weedy urban edges, the cracks in the pavement. He allowed her more open delight in the power play, located a tender animus in her somewhat passive-aggressive plastique. Watts loomed large in his work, much like the ballerina in Balanchine's Variations pour une Porte et un Soupir ("Variations for a Door and a Sigh")--perhaps the most static ballet he ever made, but one that reads like a gigantic footnote on the dynamics of creation. Lincoln Kirstein called it "a visual poem in a big frame." Door, the woman in a Louise Brooks bob and a trapeze artist leotard, wears a train-like skirt of black silk that fans out hundreds of yards, wafting and billowing to fill the entire State Theater stage from wings to fly. Sigh, the man, rolls weakly at her feet, bewitched, bothered, and bewildered, to say the least, until finally he is absorbed. As with all of Balanchine's jests--this one a big-top turn on Expressionist theater--it held a truth: Every artist needs a door. Heather Watts was the Door to Martins's Sigh. He did his truest work for her.

I vividly recall Wendy Whelan in the late 1980s, just out of SAB, a young thing in Divertimento No. 15. She was longer limbed than the others, and she had a stratospheric lift in her attitude, made possible by her superb turnout. She worked her technique every second, never lost it, and she looked huge, like the biggest, freshest sunflower in the field. A few seasons later, she was thrilling in Union Jack (the regiment MacDonald of Sleat), thinner, but with a hungry, nether energy. And then she got thinner still, like an Egon Schiele, and lost scale too, as if her tight technical focus, in a kind of warp distortion, was sucking her energy, her projection, inward. She didn't bring air or atmosphere onstage anymore, only her tightly contained self She's the most quotidian ballerina in NYCB history.

Wheeldon has done some of his best-received work for Whelan, and she has been called his muse. But I don't think she operates that way in his ballets. Rather, she steadies him. There's less see-if-it-sticks when Whelan's in the work. I think Wheeldon is comfortable with her containment, doesn't feel she needs anything from him, needs to be anything other than she is. In his acclaimed ballet of last year, After the Rain, he even took her out of toe shoes. The ballet is as tightly aligned to Arvo Part's music as Whelan herself is tightly aligned, which gives the work a feeling of completion, a statement concisely made. But what is the statement? After the Rain suggests a ritualized romantic ennui. The final pas de deux feels post-coital, post-love, a jaded erotic routine. It's Wheeldon at his slickest and emptiest. In her pink leotard, her hair down and her legs bare, Whelan looks a lot like the actress Sarah Jessica Parker--another Schiele, sinew-thin. I'd swear that's what the audience responds to, Carrie Bradshaw onstage in a "Sex and the City" ballet (don't forget, the HBO show's author is married to the NYCB dancer Charles Askegard). I respect Whelan's dancing. It is honest, it is unstinting, it is unlike anyone else's. But its poetic power is small. Did her anatomy predestine her to this? Or is it Martins, Wheeldon, and all the other choreographers who no longer sigh, and cannot open the door?

Editor's note: Readers are reminded that The New Criterion does not publish during July or August. Our next volume will begin with an expanded, twenty-fifth anniversary issue in September. Readers are invited to visit The New Criterion's weblog at www.newcriterion.com, where we plan to post new material throughout the summer.