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New York City Ballet dancers trickled onstage in mismatched sweatshirts, down vests, practice tutus and leg warmers at the start of a rehearsal for Alexei Ratmansky\u2019s \u201cPaquita.\u201d They disappeared, then reappeared in sleek leotards and tights, crisscrossing the stage to mazurka-like music. Soon the whole coalesced in a great diagonal stretching downstage to upstage, headed by a haughty ballerina and her cavalier. Quirky New Yorkers had found the majesty of imperial St. Petersburg.<\/p>\n
\u201cPaquita,\u201d which has its <\/em>debut on Feb. 6<\/a>, offers a sort of echo-chamber that allows 19th-century Russian classical ballet to coexist \u2014 to resonate \u2014 with today\u2019s City Ballet dancers.<\/p>\n Ratmansky has paired two pieces of Marius Petipa\u2019s 1881 ballet classic \u201cPaquita\u201d: George Balanchine\u2019s 1951 restaging of a first-act <\/em>Pas de Trois, followed by Ratmansky\u2019s own restaging of the <\/em>grandiose last act (the Grand Pas Classique). So: Petipa through the lens of Balanchine, then Petipa through the lens of Ratmansky, both further refracted through these young dancers and their ways of inhabiting the steps.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt\u2019s like a collider, where opposing forces come together,\u201d Ratmansky, 57, said in an interview. He offered another metaphor. Through working on Petipa, he said: \u201cI started to understand this Japanese cake. Cr\u00eapes over crepes, this texture of ballet.\u201d All the layers colliding in a new taste.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Both Ratmansky and Balanchine \u2014 New York City Ballet\u2019s founding choreographer \u2014 grew up with the heritage of Petipa, the Franco-Russian genius who worked at the Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg from 1847 to 1903. Both trained in something like the style from Petipa\u2019s era, though for Ratmansky it was Sovietized; both absorbed versions of the Petipa classics (\u201cThe Sleeping Beauty,\u201d \u201cSwan Lake,\u201d \u201cRaymonda\u201d) into their bodies. And both left the Russian sphere as young dancer-choreographers, then went on to make their art more relevant \u2014 even revelatory \u2014 for new times and new places.<\/p>\n But Ratmansky, born in 1968, is two generations farther removed from Petipa than Balanchine, who was born in 1904. Balanchine tweaked, twisted, subverted, sped up, syncopated and enhanced Petipa\u2019s steps and Petipa-era training methods, doing it all seemingly organically. Ratmansky, even in the midst of a distinguished career as a modern ballet choreographer, has felt compelled to return to Petipa in a more literal way.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cFor me, Sergeyev\u2019s notations are the base,\u201d Ratmansky said. The notations \u2014 a ballet\u2019s moves, gestures and formations written down in complex symbols and musical staffs \u2014 were brought out of Russia in 1919 by Nikolai Sergeyev, the Imperial Ballet\u2019s chief rehearsal director, and ended up, after a complicated journey, in the Houghton Library at Harvard.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIf you\u2019re digging down into ballet history as an archaeologist,\u201d Ratmansky said of the notations, \u201cyou\u2019re getting to the high point of classicism in ballet.\u201d And Ratmansky\u2019s done that for 10 years, restaging, on different companies, many of the old ballets in something like their original form. Some of these, including a lavish \u201cSleeping Beauty,\u201d were for American Ballet Theater, where he was artist in residence<\/a> for 13 years.<\/p>\n