When Alexei Ratmansky’s Bright Stream was presented during the Bolshoi Ballet’s 2005 engagement at the Met, it was New York’s first good look at his work. A full-length ballet set on a Soviet collective farm (“tractor ballet,” this genre was called), Bright Stream possessed a first act of charming manners and a toylike scale, which was ingratiating. The ballet lost its way in Act Two, devolving into a barnyard farce, a cross-dressed switcheroo so lumbering and unfunny it trampled the charm. And it wasn’t just that. In this act as well, one saw that Ratmansky had trouble focusing his more classical pas, having a penchant for dualities that split the stage, frustrating the eye—for instance, two duets danced simultaneously. And yet, Bright Stream received raves, as if it had answered something quite a few critics were hungry for. What that was, though, I couldn’t say at the time.
Looking back on Bright Stream, I think of it as a modest work, a ballet that was not only less than the sum of its parts but seemed, as it drew to a perfunctory conclusion, to know it. Was the ballet’s dark and unfunny history working on Ratmansky, flattening him? The original Bright Streampremiered in 1935, with choreography by Fyodor Lopoukhov and music by Dmitri Shostakovich. It was banned by Stalin, who no doubt saw mockery in its comic treatment of collective farms. The librettist, Adrian Piotrovsky, paid with his life. Reviewing Ratmansky’s re-do, at least two critics,