Alexei Ratmansky Makes a Ballet about Love

If there’s one thing that you could say about Alexei Ratmansky, American Ballet Theatre’s artist in residence, and nobody would argue with you, it’s that he manages to combine hard steps and an easy, natural look. This man loves steps—not just movement or dance or even ballet but the steps themselves, the exact putting of one foot here and the other there. Two years ago, in preparation for mounting his revival of Marius Petipa’s 1890 “Sleeping Beauty,” Ratmansky and his wife, Tatiana Ratmanskaya—she is also his régisseur—spent two months in the Harvard Theatre Collection, teaching themselves to read the choreographic scripts for “Beauty” that were written down in the early years of the twentieth century in a now obsolete system called Stepanov notation. That is, Ratmansky learned to read the language of late-nineteenth-century ballet before the revisions set in. This is a little bit like reading the Rosetta Stone. “It opened a treasury room for me,” he told Gia Kourlas, of the Times. “When I run out of steps, it gives me steps.” Steps, steps: he wants more steps. This can be a problem. Sometimes his choreography is too complicated, too full—clogged. But a lot of today’s ballet choreographers would do well to develop such a problem. It’s like dinner. Eating too much dinner is not a good idea, but it’s better than having no dinner.