SENSIBLE people go to Italy for the opera, not for the ballet. Italy hasn’t had a major ballet company for more than a century, so the idea of an Italian choreographer is a little like a Caribbean penguin, more likely to be found in a zoo than on the beach.
Yet 47-year-old Mauro Bigonzetti – whose third work for New York City Ballet, “Oltremare,” had its world premiere Wednesday night – is just such a creature.
“Oltremare” – translated variously as “overseas” and, more poetically, “beyond the sea” – concerns early 20th-century immigrants and their landing in the New World. (From Bruno Moretti’s Nino Rota-style score and their dress, they seem like potential extras for “The Godfather.”)
Fourteen dancers – seven men, seven women – trudge on, carrying their pitiably shoddy little suitcases. They form a rough semicircle and dance. They dance their hearts out, with a fervor containing times past, times present and times yet to come.
Bigonzetti isn’t particularly imaginative, but he’s a master of theatrical atmosphere – demanding from his dancers a sense of excitement and the spontaneity of untrammeled passion.
At the work’s center is a series of duets – one very much like the other, in a clutch, grab, clasp and whirl manner calling for more courage than finesse.
The best of these was that between Maria Kowroski and Tyler Angle, both extraordinary in their jagged convolutions of nerve-shattering intricacy.
But all 14 dancers were fierce, somber and darkly dazzling. Andrew Veyette led the ensemble with an amazing, feral ferocity that simply ate up the stage.
Is it a good ballet? By strict standards, not especially – but in the sometimes overpolite context of City Ballet, its energy, daring and freestyle vulgarity is very welcome.
NEW YORK CITY BALLET
New York State Theater, Lincoln Center; (212) 870-5570. Through Feb. 24.