Despedida de Kyra Nichols ABT

ARTS Dance Review, New York City Ballet

33 Years, and Good to the Last Pirouette By ALASTAIR MACAULAY Published: June 25, 2007

Paul Kolnik Kyra Nichols in "Robert Schumann's 'Davidsbündlertänze'" at Lincoln Center, in her last performance with New York City Ballet.

Tears fell on Friday night at the New York State Theater for Kyra Nichols's farewell after 33 years with New York City Ballet, but there were fewer tears than flowers. Who, watching Ms. Nichols take her final bows with arms round the shoulders of her two young sons, could not be happy? There have been other ballerinas who have managed to have children, enduring marriages and brilliant careers and who have left the stage while showing how much dance juice they still had in them — who have proved that "You can have it all" — but none more wonderfully than Ms. Nichols. It's only afterward that one sees the gap she leaves; and I write with a lump in my throat. Of the five ballerinas whom George Balanchine was still helping to bring into flower at his death in 1983 — Merrill Ashley, Heather Watts, Ms. Nichols, Maria Calegari and Darci Kistler — Ms. Nichols sustained the least interrupted and ever more multifaceted career. Her returns from childbirth may have begun that career's autumn, but it was, as Friday's performance reminded us, a season of few mists and infinitely mellow fruitfulness. Let its high summer never be forgotten. During the first five years after Balanchine's death, it seemed his company might enter a richer peak of performance than ever, and it was principally because Ms. Nichols and Ms. Calegari (often together, in ballets as diverse as "Serenade," "The Nutcracker," "Liebeslieder Waltzer" and "Kammermusik No. 2") were feasting off the full range of his repertory. To watch Ms. Ashley and Ms. Nichols alternate in the leads of "Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2" and "Divertimento No. 15" in that period was to see Balanchine allegro technique at a peak it has never reached again. What was astounding was that this virtuoso prowess was matched by these ballerinas' transporting avoidance of showiness or mannerism. For many the role in which the teenage Ms. Nichols first burned herself on their consciousnesses, in the 1970s, was the "Russian" dance in Balanchine's "Serenade." It was perfect of her to choose "Serenade" as the opening ballet of her farewell, especially when her own former role is excellently danced by Ashley Bouder. For some years now Ms. Nichols has danced the ballet's heroine. Watching her in the role on Friday was to marvel again at the full palette of colors she still applies to academic steps. Let us honor some: the bright pulse she brings to the circuit of temps levé jumps for her first entry (a round of applause greeted her); the singing legato current with which she connects a rapid skein of piqué turns (more applause); the devout way her arms rise to en couronne during double pirouettes. Thousands of dancers can do these classroom steps, but who will make us care about them the same way? Ms. Nichols is a great dramatic artist as well. Watching her in "Serenade" I noted, for the first time consciously, how Balanchine, like Shakespeare, makes his characters different each time they return to the stage. Ms. Nichols, in her farewell performance, made those changes more evident than ever: now driven, now innocent, now burning.

Paul Kolnik Bouquets and applause: Kyra Nichols after her farewell performance at the New York State Theater.

She falls headlong at the end of the ballet's Tema Russo movement, and the unfudged dynamics make the moment seem like a tragic thunderclap. On Friday night she did not manage to loosen all her hair while falling — a problem in which she followed in the footsteps of the legendary Suzanne Farrell — but it was instructive to see how unobtrusively she found time to loosen it as the Elegy progressed. Throughout this spring season Ms. Nichols has seemed to find new nuances in her roles, and on Friday she gave a new "dead" inflection to the first moment in which her partner in the Elegy returned her to the floor: She lay there, lifeless on her back, only then to lift her torso and pay him a last farewell before sinking back to the floor. The ballet's ending has always suggested death and transcendence. Ms. Nichols's account of it was, as ever, clean, strict, full: accepting her fate, arching that glorious torso and opening herself to the light from which there is no return. One of City Ballet's witty dancers once overheard two balletgoers and interrupted them. "I hear the words 'bourrées' and 'spiritual,' " he said. "Do I know who you're talking about?" He meant Ms. Nichols of course, and so did they. Bourrées are the tiny traveling steps on point that since the 1890s have often been compared, with a great executant, to strings of pearls. Pearl-like they were again with Ms. Nichols in Friday's second Balanchine ballet, "Robert Schumann's 'Davidsbündlertänze' ": Bourréeing sideways into the wings while drawing in both hands as visors across her face, she was pure spirit, pure drama, pure music, as she was throughout this great dance-drama. Of Ms. Nichols, it is true to say as the critic Richard Buckle did of Margot Fonteyn: She is possessed of a technique not physical but spiritual. Here is another role in which I dare say that Ms. Nichols surpassed its original interpreter, Karin von Aroldingen, but she did so by giving full honor to every gesture, every glance that Ms. von Aroldingen had herself made eloquent, while the beauty of her classical style made this role seem more lyrical and pure than her predecessor did. Ms. von Aroldingen was among the many past and present dancers in Friday's audience, and she had every reason to feel proud; Ms. Nichols has made her legacy radiant and heartbreakingly eloquent. Friday's final ballet was the closing scene of Balanchine's "Vienna Waltzes." Here Ms. Nichols honors the legacy of the great Ms. Farrell, the originator of the solo role here, while always remaining true to herself. Has it ever been more quietly danced? Alone in the great ballroom, now partnered by a man who may be a dream, alone again, and finally one among many. "Gently does it" was Ms. Nichols's manner throughout, and her lyrical delicacy was glorious. No hint of tragedy here, and not even of elegy: just dancing in the moment, rapt and content. We mourn the departure of this greatest ballerina of the last 20 years, but her leave-taking was an exemplary image of dance itself: liquid, bright, a mountain stream.

Copyright by the New York Times 2007