New York City Ballet: One giant leap for America

The New York City Ballet has triumphed this season, with six world premieres announced for spring. Nadine Meisner applauds its innovative director, who stepped so gracefully in Balanchine's shoes

Long perceived as the heir apparent, Peter Martins has been New York City Ballet's director (or "Ballet Master in Chief") ever since George Balanchine died in 1983. It is a uniquely magnificent inheritance. Except what, exactly, do you do with a company that was the embodiment of 20th-century ballet's greatest imagination? Do you turn it into a dance museum, each exhibit becoming more ossified and exaggerated with time? Of course not. Even during Balanchine's own time, the company's style shifted and the ballets themselves were modified.

Martins has been reviled and admired in equal measure. You can criticise some of his changes, but you can't deny that he has done his utmost to stir choreographic creativity and stretch his dancers with a cornucopia of ballets: 49 for the 2001-2 season, including six world premieres and four New York premieres. No other company has such a large, effervescent repertoire. (The Royal Ballet has less than half the number for the same period.) Nor – as befits a country where coffee comes served 20 different ways – such luxuriously flexible programming, able to offer as a matter of course the same ballets in pick'n'mix combinations.

The six world premieres, announced for spring, belong to the company's Diamond Project, a biennial festival started 10 years ago to encourage new work by choreographers from inside (eg the principal dancer, Albert Evans) and outside (eg the Australian Stephen Baynes). Last year's NYCB visit to the Edinburgh Festival focused on pieces produced by past Diamond Projects and, similarly, this spring's showcase on home ground will include a retrospective of 15 previous commissions to celebrate the 10th anniversary. But even without this, in a normal February week when I was there, the quantity of recent work was remarkable.

Most of this came from Martins. The two programmes I saw included his 1991 Ash (classical dazzle to a hackneyed score by Michael Torke), and two New York premieres – Viva Verdi, Hallelujah Junction – created in Europe last year. Viva Verdi, originally presented by NYCB for Parma's Verdi Festival, is a pas de deux for Martins' wife Darci Kistler (returning after serious injury) and Charles Askegard (one of NYCB's tall, but less forceful men). A female trio frames them as prettily as the Three Graces and the outcome, using Marc-Olivier Dupin's Variations on Verdi's Traviata, is fluent and rather shallow. But then, Martins is best with modern music and Hallelujah Junction, which takes its name from John Adams's score for two pianos, stands among his best. The pianists face each other on stage as part of a playful black and white symmetry that extends to the dancers' costumes.

The dance draws on canon and counterpoint, the cast led by a couple in white (Janie Taylor and Sébastien Marcovici) and a man in black (the splendidly named Benjamin Millepied) who appears like a deft wild card, inserting himself among the couple. The structure has an immaculate legibility and, after the couple has danced their central pas de deux, the eight supporting dancers follow with their own brief successive ones, each offering vividly contrasting motifs.

Hallelujah Junction was made for the Royal Danish Ballet, where Martins started his dance career before moving to New York. He has transferred the clarity of Danish training to his choreography, but at the same time he bears the deep imprint of years immersed in Balanchine's sophisticated musicality and lean, airy sweep. The resulting patterns of all his pieces have such a transparent logic you feel you could grasp them in your hand. They criss-cross the New York State Theatre's wide stage with a conquering breadth that is wholly American. They reveal that the choreographer has done his homework meticulously, unpicking a score's melodic and rhythmic threads and translating them into dance.

This is music visualisation of a high clinical order. You find none of the soul, or sexiness, or evocativeness that you would in Balanchine. I always have difficulty telling one squeaky-clean woman from another. It is the men who seem to dominate, in both individuality and virtuosity, their techniques combining surging power with a knife-like precision.

Martins may dominate the main repertory's contemporary work, but there is a clear will to bring in other choreographers via the Diamond Project and other channels. Most prominent among these is Christopher Wheeldon, ex-Royal Ballet and recently promoted to being NYCB's first Resident Choreographer. (The Royal Ballet has a knack for mislaying its best talent and keeping the remainder.) Wheeldon's Variations Sérieuses, created last year, offers a neat glimpse of ballet backstage, with a seething tale of temperamental ballerina, fraught choreographer and understudy who leapfrogs to fame. It reveals young, beautiful Maria Kowroski as an unexpectedly effective comédienne. But it is also a novelty ballet based on a concept, not on choreography, and although it makes sharply observed points, the jokes are clichéd.

Wheeldon's skill and invention at step-making have been proved by numerous other pieces for NYCB and elsewhere. For NYCB, he has the advantage of coming from a different school without it being the wacky outer reaches, so that, in theory, he can bring freshness without disruption. This freshness has largely eluded the far more "Balanchinised" Martins. In appointing Martins, the company's board rightly saw someone who would, as a choreographer, provide evolution not revolution. But evolution inevitably means he will remain in the shadow of Balanchine's genius.

So, is Wheeldon the true torchbearer of America's modern ballet? Probably, sadly, not either. His "freshness without disruption" is probably what the company thinks it needs, except that this very quality cancels out the radical originality on which greatness depends. Wheeldon needs to be more disruptive, the way Balanchine was when he pushed ballet over the horizon, creating the future as well as remembering the past.

For details of New York City Ballet's programmes: www.nycballet.com