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1066 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
February 17, 2008 Sunday

Correction Appended

Late Edition - Final
Master Builders Of Ballet's Future
BYLINE: By ALASTAIR MACAULAY
SECTION: Section AR; Column 0; Arts and Leisure Desk; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1411 words
BY the end of the last century ballet was looking more like a museum art than it had in more than 400 years. With the deaths of George Balanchine, Antony Tudor, Frederick Ashton, Kenneth MacMillan and Jerome Robbins, the ranks of world-class choreographers specializing in ballet looked thin or just empty. The three biggest names creating new ballets were Twyla Tharp, William Forsythe and Mark Morris: each, by ballet standards, in some way controversial and offbeat.

But the new millennium has brought to the fore two young men who are full-time exponents of ballet as an art both traditional and new: Christopher Wheeldon, the Anglo-American who has been resident choreographer at New York City Ballet since 2001 but is giving up the post this month, and Alexei Ratmansky, the Russian who announced just weeks ago that he was leaving the artistic directorship of the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow to focus on choreography.

New York has been the best place to watch them. Mr. Wheeldon created ''Polyphonia,'' the ballet that pushed him into the big time, for City Ballet in 2001. Mr. Ratmansky made his breakthrough with ''The Bright Stream'' at the Bolshoi in 2003 but produced his next major work, ''Russian Seasons,'' for City Ballet's Diamond Project in 2006. All of which suggests that City Ballet, so inseparable from the artistic legacies of Balanchine and Robbins, is again becoming the world's liveliest fulcrum of new ballet choreography.

Now Mr. Wheeldon, 34, is leaving City Ballet to run his own company, Morphoses. For a time it seemed that Mr. Ratmansky, 39, would succeed him. But now, it turns out, he is coming here just to make two ballets over the next three years. Why does it matter who takes these positions? What exactly does a resident choreographer do? How does the job differ from that of artistic director?

The matter is especially ambiguous at City Ballet, which, unlike most companies today, employs not an artistic director but a ballet master in chief, Peter Martins. And there is a built-in risk at City Ballet: What if the resident choreographer or ballet master guides the company into a new style at odds with its inheritance?

Artistic directors are often not choreographers at all; they deal with fund-raising, casting, daily classroom teaching, commissions, repertory and (not least) the board of directors. If a company wishes ballet to remain, at least in part, an art of the new, it will try to employ a resident choreographer (assuming any is suitable, available and affordable). The person in that role will produce at least one new ballet a year, draw new qualities out of the company's dancers, shape new roles to which other dancers aspire and develop some style that becomes part of the company's identity.

At City Ballet, Balanchine filled all those roles and more. He took the title of ballet master in chief because the foundation of his work was his classroom teaching, in which he developed aspects of academic ballet to new intensity. His teaching began at the student level, as the basis of what was and is taught at the School of American Ballet.

Ballet master, or maitre de ballet, had been the standard title of teacher-choreographers from the 17th to the 19th century, and it applied to the makers of the greatest surviving 19th-century ballets: August Bournonville in Denmark and Marius Petipa in Russia. The ballet master, now as then, takes the academic language of this impersonal and traditional art, with its turnout of the legs and its five positions of the feet, and develops in the classroom a style that is vitally connected to the idiom of the new ballets he choreographs for the company to dance onstage. He trains dancers to his specifications and then gives them new vehicles in which they may reveal themselves.

City Ballet had other resident choreographers in Balanchine's lifetime, notably Robbins, who was named a company ballet master though he was not a teacher. (To make matters more confusing, he had at one time been artistic director of his own company, Ballets U.S.A.) But it was Mr. Martins who eventually succeeded Balanchine as ballet master in chief. He led and leads the classroom teaching through the school and the company, and he has continued to choreograph.

The task of running a ballet company is far more onerous today than it used to be. There are now a number of such leaders whose initial talent for choreography (which helped to get them the jobs) has lost its inspiration. Mr. Martins is one; David Bintley at Birmingham Royal Ballet and Helgi Tomasson at San Francisco Ballet are two more; there are others. They deliver premieres, but not works of art the audience can inhabit.

Perhaps Mr. Martins admitted as much when he appointed Mr. Wheeldon resident choreographer in 2001. Or perhaps not: this job, though new as a position at City Ballet, was effectively the same one Robbins had done for decades.

Neither Mr. Wheeldon nor Mr. Ratmansky is known as a teacher, but each looks more like a true ballet master than anybody else currently on the scene. That is, they build ballets that find accents and life within the traditional vocabulary of ballet. This is why both ''Polyphonia'' and ''The Bright Stream'' caused such stirs. Both men have since been in demand to create ballets for the world's foremost companies.

Mr. Ratmansky is also the most promising Russian-born choreographer since Balanchine. Perhaps others in the intervening years began with as much talent, but the aesthetic constraints of the Communist era either nipped several choreographic blooms in the bud or perverted them into agitprop apparatchiks.

Unlike any other Russian post-Balanchine dancemaker I know of, Mr. Ratmansky choreographs from a broad and unclouded command of the classical-ballet lexicon. And despite his work in the West, he seems, so far, very much a Russian artist.

He has choreographed to Shostakovich music that was composed during the Soviet era and then fell out of favor (''The Bright Stream''); to a Prokofiev score that succeeded in Stalinist Russia and has won international success ever since (''Cinderella,'' for the Kirov); to a score by the emigre Stravinsky (''Jeu de Cartes,'' choreographed for the Bolshoi as ''Go for Broke''); and to music by two composers of the post-Communist era, Yuri Khanon (''Middle Duet,'' choreographed for the Kirov and danced by City Ballet since 2006) and Leonid Desyatnikov (''Russian Seasons,'' for City Ballet).

It's quite possible that, as Mr. Ratmansky matures, he may develop a style that would clash with the Balanchine precepts still pursued at City Ballet: tight closed positions contrasted with stretched open ones; weight placed over the front of the foot; simple delivery; complex musicality. At the Bolshoi he has taken steps to revive ballets by the Moscow-born Leonide Massine, whose symphonic ballets in the late 1930s and '40s were seen by New York dancegoers as the antithesis of Balanchine.

Today, nonetheless, the Ratmansky and Balanchine styles look congenial. And I can't help speculating what connections would arise between Balanchine's emigre-Russian classicism and Mr. Ratmansky's new-Russian idiom if he eventually were to take the City Ballet post.

In the years that Mr. Wheeldon has been the resident choreographer there have certainly been links between his oeuvre and Balanchine's. Although I don't see that his work has shown anyone how to dance Balanchine better, he has often spotted those who are dancing Balanchine with distinction and given them a new bloom in his own choreography.

Perhaps Mr. Ratmansky could do as much, or more. His 2008 and 2010 premieres for City Ballet will be keenly watched. Could he yetbecome resident choreographer?

While Balanchine was alive, modernity took precedence over tradition in City Ballet's repertory; his choreography was the living epitome of New York Modern. Now Balanchine is tradition, and it has been hard for anybody to know how to be modern in his (still radical) wake. Yet Mr. Ratmansky has not, to date, looked inhibited by his great precursor, and his ballets have more sheer authority than Mr. Wheeldon's.

Like Balanchine, Mr. Ratmansky draws on his complex sense of Russia like a great well. New York, where Russian emigres are as influential a part of dance as they were in Balanchine's era, would be an exciting place to watch him at work. Roll out the next Ratmansky premiere at City Ballet: May 29.
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: ARTISTS & PERFORMERS (90%); FUNDRAISING (78%); BOARDS OF DIRECTORS (73%); MILLENNIUM (73%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (69%); BALLET (92%)
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, NY, USA (90%); MOSCOW, RUSSIA (56%) NEW YORK, USA (94%) UNITED STATES (94%); RUSSIA (87%)
LOAD-DATE: February 17, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
CORRECTION-DATE: March 2, 2008

CORRECTION: An article on Feb. 17 about the ways in which choreographers have shaped the New York City Ballet misstated the post that George Balanchine held while at the company. He was ballet master -- not ballet master in chief, a title created after his tenure.
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: George Balanchine in 1958, when he was ballet master in chief of the New York City Ballet, working with Maria Tallchief. (PHOTOGRAPH BY MARTHA SWOPE) (pg.AR1)

Alexei Ratmansky of Russia was negotiating to become resident choreographer with the New York City Ballet. (PHOTOGRAPH BY NICOLE BENGIVENO/THE NEW YORK TIMES)

Jerome Robbins rehearsing ''The Concert'' (1956) with members of the New York City Ballet, where his legacy remains strong. (PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY NEW YORK CITY BALLET ARCHIVES) (pg.AR7)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

1067 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
February 17, 2008 Sunday

Correction Appended

Late Edition - Final
Harlem Pas de Deux
BYLINE: By TRYMAINE LEE
SECTION: Section CY; Column 0; The City Weekly Desk; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 2322 words
THE boy pressed his face to the window of the men's salon, his breath fogging the glass. He stood there, on a wintry day, staring at the sharply dressed men swathed in hot towels.

After a few minutes he walked in, his tattered sneakers squeaking on the gleaming hardwood.

''He asked what we did here,'' said Tony Van Putten, who owns the year-old jewel of a shop, called BBraxton, at Fifth Avenue and 116th Street in Harlem. ''And when I told him that we cut hair, he gave me this look. And he asked if it was O.K. if he could get his hair cut here, too.''

The boy seemed more accustomed to the streets than to a place like BBraxton, Mr. Van Putten said, but inside the shop he saw men who were black like him although they were wearing slacks and sweaters and shoes that shined as if they'd been dipped in pomade. Twice. The boy's eyes seemed to ask: Am I good enough to be in a place like this?

For the past decade, Harlem has been gentrifying rapidly. But while affluent white professionals are the visible symbol of that change here and everywhere else, the fact is that often the well-off arrivals, like the patrons at BBraxton, are black.

Gentrification in any color makes similar impacts -- rising rents, high-end merchants, displacement, home renovations -- but black gentrification has an emotional texture far different from the archetypal kind, both for residents and for newcomers. This is particularly true in Harlem, the historic capital of black America.

Some local residents, like the boy peering through the window, are a bit uncomfortable with the well-off set but aspire to join it. Others resent the incursions on their turf and feel that the newcomers, like other affluent professionals, are interested mostly in maintaining property values and their comfortable lifestyles.

The black arrivals, in turn, may feel a special duty as blacks to help Harlem and its people, or they may feel ill-treated or wrongly labeled by them, or they may feel guilty knowing that others of their own race are in need -- and often standing right outside the polished doors of their new brownstones.

The truth is elusive and ethereal, with opinions based on a mere glance, a perception, a nuance. But given the blistering pace of Harlem gentrification -- the average sale price of an apartment in the last quarter of 2007 was 93 percent higher than in the same period of 2006 -- the black-black issue is both very real and very complex.

''There are black people here in Harlem who share physical residence,'' said Howard Dodson, general director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the major repository in Harlem of books and other artifacts of African-American cultural life. ''But saying 'a community' is another thing. The question is: Can community be built across these racial and class lines in the new Harlem, in this new reality?''

'A Lot of Anger'

A few months after 9/11, Leah Abraham, a 47-year-old woman of Eritrean and Ethiopian descent, along with her Italian-born husband, Nino Settepani, opened a bustling cafe and bakery called Settepani at Malcolm X Boulevard and 120th Street. They had purchased two vacant storefronts in 1999, broken down the dividing wall and pumped about $1 million into the business.

''The morning we opened, I had a sign on the door saying that we would open at 9 o'clock,'' Ms. Abraham said as she sat at a little square table across from the glass dessert counter in her shop one afternoon last fall. ''About 8:30 I realized there was a line of people outside. So I came out and I said: 'You know, you have to wait. I've been working on this for a year and I want it to be perfect when I open these doors.' ''

Then her eyes widened as she recalled the moment, the remnants of an accent rolling easily off her tongue. ''A woman standing on line looked at me and put her hand on her hip and she said, 'Well, we've been waiting for you for 30 years,' '' Ms. Abraham said. ''So I had to open the doors.''

Longtime residents appreciate not just the pastries at Settepani, but also its other amenities, like not having to pass their money under a pane of bulletproof glass. For all the local warmth, however, there have been chilly moments.

''I have found more hostility over the last couple years,'' Ms. Abraham said. ''There is a lot of anger.'' People have come into the shop and kicked furniture and chastised customers for patronizing the shop, she said; last summer, one man stood outside shouting, ''This is my neighborhood.''

The anger has dismayed Ms. Abraham, who moved to Harlem from Westchester about a year ago. ''I feel like I have done something very positive,'' she said, ''but I also feel that the biggest sacrifice is made by us. We put a lot of money into this place.

''We are not investors,'' Ms. Abraham continued. ''We came in, and I'm putting my face at the door every single day.''

Noting that the shop had been robbed twice, she said: ''I have had a gun pointed to my head. I have really committed to this neighborhood. I moved here. It's a whole different commitment when you buy and you fix and you rent or if you come and you live in it.''

A Tradition of Amity

Black entrepreneurs like Ms. Abraham may encounter hostility, but in the opinion of Kevin McGruder, a Harlemite who is a co-owner of Harlemade, a Harlem-centric gift shop on Malcolm X Boulevard, black residents are generally more accepting of the black newcomers than of white ones.

''People focus on the white people and that's more the fear,'' Mr. McGruder said. ''There is a feeling that a black person, even if he or she is upper-income, many or most will be able to identify with things that are happening in Harlem. Some of them are only a generation removed from where other people in Harlem are.''

Warner Johnson, a 45-year-old Internet entrepreneur who recently started a Web site called Fabsearch.com that gathers travel articles from high-end fashion magazines, suggests that tradition also helps to smooth black-on-black relations.

''You always had people that had means and people that didn't have means in Harlem,'' Mr. Johnson said. ''If you were black back in the day and had money, there was nowhere else you could live. So we never looked at that as something of a dividing point.''

Mr. Johnson, who moved to Harlem in 1993 (''when police helicopters were still flying outside of my window''), also says Harlem's role as the nation's black capital helps ease black-black tensions. ''Being a culture mecca,'' he said, ''supersedes all the notions of the affluence component.''

Some observers, however, argue that today's black newcomers to Harlem are seen as much different from their predecessors.

''There was some kind of turning point where black people coming back could be seen as a revitalizing force in the community,'' said Monique M. Taylor, a visiting sociologist at Al Quds University in Jerusalem and the author of a gentrification study called ''Harlem: Between Heaven and Hell.'' ''Then, they got mixed in with white gentrifiers.''

The changes over the last two decades have deepened black-black tensions. Today, Ms. Taylor said, skeptical residents often wonder: ''Can I believe what you say when you say, 'I'm here to help you, brother'? Or are you simply making the rent higher?''

Dr. Dodson, of the Schomburg Center, summed up the new, wary assessment of black newcomers another way: ''They did not come here to slum.''

The Property That Got Away

A signature New York emotion, real estate envy, may be another source of local ill feeling.

On a recent tour of some prized Harlem brownstones, Willie Kathryn Suggs, owner of a local real estate firm that bears her name, said that in the 1970s and '80s such properties went for a fraction of today's prices.

Back then, the city took over many crumbling buildings abandoned by slumlords, and eventually it became the biggest landowner in Harlem. In the early '90s, the Dinkins administration set up a lottery to sell the properties to Harlemites at below-market prices, but many residents simply didn't seize the opportunity. Now that housing in Harlem is too costly for most residents, Ms. Suggs said, there is much regret.

''It's about blacks who own and blacks who don't own,'' she said. ''Their grandparents were smart enough to own their house, and the grandchildren lost it for whatever reason. The blacks whose parents owned and left are not happy.

''A lot of them don't like being told that they blew it,'' Ms. Suggs went on. ''Now what you hear are a whole bunch of should've, would've, could'ves.''

Among others, like Evette Rolack, a 48-year-old security guard, the sore feelings have less to do with regret than with paying their dues during the hard years.

''We've been here for a long time and have struggled with drugs and crime, for good schools,'' said Ms. Rolack, who remembers when Harlem had few banks or supermarkets, and crack cocaine was king. ''Now, I feel like we have a lot of people coming into the community who don't come with anything to help those of us who have been here through it all.''

Ms. Rolack also bristled about the attitude she senses in some of the newcomers. ''It's the way they act,'' she said. ''Like, don't touch me, like they are so much better than me. But really, it's like, I'm black and you're black.''

Spikes on the Wall

Sometimes black-black relations come down to turf. Just ask Paula Sheppard, 43, product manager for a women's clothing catalog. She was born and raised in St. Nicholas Houses, a public project on the neighborhood's western flank, but she suspects that local residents, misled by her middle-class lifestyle, do not know she's a homegrown Harlemite.

When Ms. Sheppard and her family moved to a white limestone house on a corner lot surrounded by a four-foot concrete wall, she also inherited a bunch of young guys who, she said, used the wall as their hangout. They would leave the litter of their idle time -- liquor bottles, trash -- along her family's property.

In the beginning, Ms. Sheppard asked them just to keep the noise down and clean up, and she donated a trash can for their convenience. When that didn't work, she began installing spikes on the wall to discourage sitting. But then, halfway through the project, someone pried the spikes from the wall. Workmen eventually finished the job, but the young loiterers simply got more creative, she said, and used tape and cardboard to make cushions to put on top of the spikes.

Last summer, Ms. Sheppard marched to the corner and confronted the young men.

''The leader of the group said, 'We have always sat here and' -- in other words, you just got here,'' she said. ''I've been here almost all of my life, but he saw me as an outsider. He was staking his claim because he lived across the street.''

Sound of the Drummers

In its traditions and the names of its streets and its parks, Harlem is so filled with homage to African-American heroes that, said Sheila Bridges, a local interior designer, ''I always joke that you have to know your black history to know your way around Harlem.''

But Ms. Bridges does not take this history lightly.

''I always want that to be a part of where I live,'' she said. ''My concern is that the people who are coming here and the developers that got breaks for buying real estate here, in addition to those who moved here because the D train is an express, don't care so much about the history. That is part of what contributes to people feeling the way they do about this.''

Last summer, a mild drama unfolded over these African and African-American themes. The cast included traditional African drummers who for decades have been playing on Sunday afternoons in Mount Morris Park, in the heart of Harlem, and some new residents of the renovated brownstones and condominiums that surround the park. The drumming often persists into the night, and some neighbors -- largely whites but also a few blacks -- complained that it was an annoyance and a violation of noise ordinances. Claims of racism and cultural insensitivity followed.

''If you set up 20 people playing drums in front of your window from 1 o'clock to 10 o'clock, you would want it to stop,'' said one complainer, a black resident who declined to give his name because of the delicacy of the matter. ''And all those people pushing this thing to make it a cultural thing instead of a noise abatement thing, they are playing into the race-baiting and the newcomer versus the old-timer issue.''

For a time, the drummers moved to a hill in the center of the 20-acre greenspace, which is also known as Marcus Garvey Park, but the steps there proved troublesome for many elderly drummers and spectators. So the drummers returned to the edges of the park, nearer to the brownstones and to the complaints.

When Kim Martin-Shah, a 31-year-old stay-at-home mom, looks out from her plush Harlem condominium apartment, she sees a world that saddens her. She sees black mothers struggling to feed their children while she and her husband, who works for Merrill Lynch, and their 22-month-old son, Ameer, live the American Dream.

Ms. Martin-Shah said that she, too, has been shunned by the new black bourgeoisie in Harlem, who have mistaken her for a longtime resident, perhaps, she said, because of the way she dresses on weekend play dates and story time at the library, in her ''Timberlands and a North Face bubble jacket and big gold hoop earrings.''

''Gentrification is definitely not just a black-white thing,'' she said. ''It's an economic thing.''

Still, she is hardly unaware of her racial kinship with the less fortunate outside her window.

''I don't think I have done anything wrong, nor do I feel I am responsible for the dire situation many of my neighbors are in,'' Ms. Martin-Shah said. But she added, ''These are my people, even though I might not relate to some of their financial woes.''

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