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DANCE REVIEW
MANONAmerican Ballet Theatre at Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center at 65th Street. (212) 362-6000. Season runs through July 15.
LIKE a triumphant player running the bases after hitting a home run, Julio Bocca has finally reached a metaphorical if flower-bestrewn dugout, on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House.
This season, the 20th and final American Ballet Theatre stanza for the retiring 39-year-old dancer, Bocca has been revisiting for the last time some of the roles that made him famous.
Last night, he gave what might be called his final finale, dancing the baffled hero Des Grieux in Sir Kenneth MacMillan's "Manon." In the title role was the ballerina with whom he's been most closely associated - Alessandra Ferri, who joined ABT just a year before Bocca himself.
Seeing "Manon" with Bocca and Ferri at the revival's first performance Monday night (call it the penultimate final finale), I was struck once more by the remarkable passion these two dancers could ignite onstage.
During the past half-century and beyond, perhaps only Fonteyn and Nureyev had quite the same abandon, fervor and seemingly total immersion in the other's personality.
It's a chemistry that goes beyond sex, beyond acting and certainly beyond dancing. Doubtless, one day we'll see it again with another partnership. But we may be quite a time waiting.
MacMillan's 1974 "Manon," absent for many years and presumably now revived with Bocca/Ferri and their last, as Shakespeare would put it, "gaudy night" in mind, is a shabby little ballet, enlivened only by the sexy grab-gasp-and-grasp duets of its principal dancers.
As such, with its pleasing Massenet score and high-pitched histrionics, it has become a popular vehicle for star dancers with a taste for emotional display.
For this, audiences must forgive - and often do - ensemble dances as unimaginative as cheaply patterned wallpaper, and choreographic images where familiarity replaces imagination.
Yet it remains an efficient vehicle - then again, so is a subway car - and it does attract class talent. At Wednesday's matinee (and scheduled again tonight), the leading roles were beautifully taken by two of ABT's Russian contingent, a quintessentially seductive Diana Vishneva, who is step by step before our eyes becoming a great artist, partnered by the ineffably romantic Vladimir Malakhov.
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