The American Ballet Theatre at the Metropolitan Opera House on Tuesday, June 7.
Lady of the Camellias might be one of the most elegantly conceived ballets I’ve ever seen—a flawless marriage of music and movement, beautiful use of dance as dramatization—which made the experience of seeing it for the first time not only delightful but also humbling because, beforehand, I considered it woefully misbegotten. Instead of using a single unified musical work, ideally composed particularly for the ballet, Camellias pulls together a diverse assortment of works by a single composer, an approach that often feels disjointed, with music and story never quite coming together. And instead of dramatizing a simple, elemental story, one that won’t require much in the way of exposition and plot work, Camellias takes a complicated narrative and, instead of stripping it to its foundations, embraces the complications, using a frame around the main story as well as a recurring ballet-within-the-ballet, an approach that easily could have resulted in a muddled, overweighted slog. No doubt these elements did impose challenges for choreographer John Neumeier, but Camellias, which premiered in 1978, overcomes those challenges with stunning artistry. What seemed to me like madness turns out to be genius.
Much Review About Nothing 