Ballet Hispánico, Ailey, ABT, NYCB and Dance Theatre of Harlem go toe-to-toe

It’s called the Subway Series, pitting New York baseball arch-rivals, the Mets and the Yankees, against each other for a handful of games every season. Since COVID, amid the struggles to bring live performance back, dance has had its own Subway Series, under the moniker ‘BAAND Together,’ with five classically-influenced companies emblematic of New York’s cultural crucible appearing together for a week each summer. This season, the casual outdoor setting at Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park has been ditched and the festival moved indoors after innumerable logistical headaches wrought mainly by climate change.

Unlike baseball, no one keeps score in ballet.

Well, actually, we do. This season, Dance Theatre of Harlem hit a home run with Blake Works IV by William Forsythe, originator of the superstretchy-bendy-spiraling-hip-skewing brand of ballet. It’s an iteration of The Barre Project – conceived initially for digital streaming in pandemic as Forsythe’s homage to ballet dancers who fought to stay in shape while theatres and studios were shuttered, setting up makeshift ballet barres in their living rooms or kitchens. Reimagined for the proscenium stage, the ballet unfolds as a series of tightly coiled solos and duos anchored to then drifting away from a metallic length of barre that floats in a space so stark it’s disorienting. James Blake’s spare, haunting music reverberates in waves, lyrics intelligible only in fragments, further distorting the sense of space and time.

The DTH ensemble take no prisoners, and look like they’re having a blast. Basic ballet movements spool and unspool with startling embellishments and in a dizzying sequence of directions, as if the dancers are patrolling an unseen perimeter. A spin or series of turning jumps will freeze suddenly into a virtuosic balance on one leg, tilted at a dangerous angle.

Lindsey Donnell and Derek Brockington crushed the alternately sinuous and quietly explosive movements in the opening duet. Delaney Washington in an astonishing solo turn reached for the barre as if striving to reach a distant horizon; buffeted by invisible ocean waves she repeatedly resurfaced like an elegant sea bird.

Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s Sombrerísimo was the other big group piece for Ballet Hispánico. Originally created for an all-male ensemble sporting bowler hats, it became a tour de force for an all-female cast. At BAAND, with an ensemble of five men and one woman, its sly take on the surreal paintings of Magritte projected a sinister vibe – rather like the bowler-hatted detectives hunting down a gangster in Magritte's L’Assassin Menacé. Terrific ensemble work in the passages where dancers clambered and balanced on each other in precarious formations. Omar Rivéra gave a particularly vivid account of a man possibly hiding a dark past.

Balanchine’s Duo Concertant felt inert in this program. This despite the electrifying presence of violinist Sean Lee onstage, working out a thorny relationship with pianist Elaine Chelton. Things between New York City Ballet veterans Megan Fairchild and Anthony Huxley seemed inordinately chummy rather than the complicated and sometimes strained artist/muse relationship suggested by Stravinsky’s score and conveyed by other casts, starting with the original duo of Peter Martins and Kay Mazzo. In the emotional final scene, Huxley’s grief and bewilderment at his partner’s vanishing barely registered. We were sad for him the way we’re sad when two teens break up in a 1980s John Hughes movie.

Olympian Ailey dancers Chalvar Monteiro, Yannick Lebrun and Patrick Coker – individually powerful and magnetic – spun a tiresome piece of choreography, Solo by Hans van Manen, into gold. A pair of sprightly Bach partitas triggered a rash of skittering, punctuated by virtuosic spinning sequences, hair-raising plunges into arabesque, shrugs and head waggles. Joy came in that final moment when all three slid into the Vitruvian man stance, creating three disparate images of the ideal symmetry of man.

Divine in another sense was the pairing of ABT's Chloe Misseldine and Thomas Forster in Night Falls, set to Chopin’s E-minor nocturne – serene, wistful, with a faint undercurrent of restlessness. From the moment she sailed onstage in a billowy overhead lift, it was apparent why Misseldine is today’s ballet “It girl.” This nocturne was reportedly written when Chopin was only 16, the dance choreographed by 19-year-old ABT Studio Company member Brady Farrar. He’s in choreography's major leagues now.

In a recent television interview, City Ballet’s artistic directors Jonathan Stafford and Wendy Whelan admitted, “You feel like you start at zero every single year… You have to build the excitement every year, constantly keep pushing to enhance the company.” The buzz around BAAND suggests that a deeper collaboration might do just that. Right now it’s a side hustle for these companies. Imagine the audiences they’d attract if two or more of them merged their dancers and their rep for one season a year, embodying the proudly pluralistic and inclusive image of New York City.