1xbet Review: Mercurial Moves Take Over the Stage in a Stark, New Ballet

For ballet to grow, it has to stretch, so there’s hope when two new ballets couldn’t be less alike. On Wednesday at Lincoln Center, American Ballet Theater began its fall season with premieres by Gemma Bond, a former company member, and Kyle Abraham, a contemporary choreographer. This was Abraham’s first commission for Ballet Theater, and it was a triumph.

The program, however, opened on a tepid note with Bond’s “La Boutique,” a ballet for 26 dancers set to music from “La Boutique Fantasque,” as arranged and orchestrated by Respighi, after Rossini. In 1919, Léonide Massine created a one-act ballet to this music about a toy shop that came to life; Bond has made a plotless ballet with tutus and an emphasis on elegant classical technique. Bond’s low arabesques are pretty, the mood is pleasant. If only this ballet would move. The dancers acted as if the stage were small.

“La Boutique” opens with three couples, with the central pair of Devon Teuscher and Aran Bell, guiding the gentle steps that prize a certain delicacy and restraint. Teuscher, despite a fall in her first solo, was in statuesque ballerina mode. It would have been hard, if you’d never seen her before, to understand what makes her dancing so special, the way her power mingles with unpretentious innocence.

ImageSunmi Park, held by Robare (obscured) and Joseph Markey, with Cory Stearns bowing in Gemma Bond’s “La Boutique,” another premiere.Credit...Erin Baiano for The New York Times

Bond, clearly guided by structure, sweeps the dancers off and on the stage in lines that start to land in recital territory as the ballet goes on. At times, group choreography seemed unfinished at the edges. Clearly Bond is invested in épaulement and reacted accordingly, with careful attention placed on the angles of the shoulders, the arms. But repeated movements kept cropping up: arms held low in first position that jutted open in quick spurts; arms raised like goal posts; and, most ubiquitous, a single arm swooping overhead to a high fifth, which looked more pasted on the body than initiated from the back.

Teuscher and Bell possessed a majestic air, while Skylar Brandt and Carlos Gonzalez, less self-conscious, let more brightness in. Sunmi Park, the only dancer with a semblance of an inner life, and Cory Stearns had moments when they cut through Bond’s generally dry atmosphere to create a bit of mystery — however disconnected it was from the greater whole.

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