Alexei Ratmansky Comes to NY (from The Nation)

A piece in The Nation from 2009, when Ratmansky announced he was joining  American Ballet Theatre. See the piece here.

And here is a short excerpt:

“But perhaps the biggest surprise of the ballet was Olga’s fiancé, danced on the first night by David Hallberg. If the other characters are one-dimensional, he is even more so, yet Ratmansky gives him two of the ballet’s most vivid moments….At the end of the party, the fiancé stands alone in the center of the stage and explodes with frustration: he turns on his own axis and jumps with one long leg out to the side, then does a series of small leaps in a circle, jumps from side to side and hops backward, kicking one leg forward over and over. He swings his arms uncontrollably. He stares at the ground, then at the audience. The stage fills with his disappointment. 
”Why is this happening to me?” he is saying, and we feel it in our bones. Ratmansky clearly saw a wildness in Hallberg–usually a gentle, noble dancer–that he wanted to set free, and did.”