But this larger ballet family situation is not strained in any way. In my dancing days at NYCB, I was frequently asked if we thought of ABT dancers as our enemies. I would always answer firmly in the negative, because the two companies have such different aims. To compare them is like comparing apples and oranges, or abstract expressionism and realist portraiture; they hang together broadly as fruit and paintings, but they have very little in common otherwise. The troupes are only rivals in the sense that they are competing for general market share, which is like acknowledging that the MOMA is competing against the Frick Museum for visitors. The products, in both cases, are completely different. And whenever people ask me what that difference is, I say that at NYCB, the music is the driving force, while at ABT it is technique and storytelling.

Yet lately, there have been some surprising reversals. For example, the NYCB’s annual Fall Fashion Gala is an event in which the costumes are the top priority—a premise that would probably make more sense at ABT. And though one would think that Marius Petipa’s “Paquita” would be an ABT staple, it is the NYCB that has lately been tending that ballet’s flame (under Ratmansky’s watchful eye; he’s been crossing the streams more than anyone, to quote Ghostbusters). 

On opening night, ABT pulled “Paquita” (with choreography by Natalia Makarova after Marius Petipa) out of mothballs after a 30-year absence. Actually, like the NYCB, they only danced the Grand Pas Classique from Act II of the full-length “Paquita.” But they are just calling it “Paquita,” and they might as well: nobody bothers with the full length nowadays. Consensus has it that the Grand Pas Classique, added some 35 years after the narrative was first choreographed by Joseph Mazilier (by a different choreographer, Petipa, to a different composer, Ludwig Minkus) is the best part. But ABT nodded to the story with an elaborate set and costumes by Jose Varona: hanging lamps on a wrought-iron trellis in a manicured nighttime garden, and frilly tutus with roses on the bodices. Like NYCB’s streamlined take on “Ballet Imperial,” Ratmansky did away with the sets and toned down the tutus in his 2025 version at City Ballet.

In keeping with the NYCB ethos, Ratmansky’s “Paquita” was more musically attuned. ABT preserved Petipa’s clunkier phrasing, which bothers me at times—though the dancers’ strong technique carried them through. Petipa often painstakingly links technical challenges step-to-note, as in Yoon Jung Seo’s solo in which she had to hold long balances à la seconde with a heavy segue into split leaps. She did this exceptionally well. Sierra Armstrong, one of ABT’s most musical dancers, faced this problem in her variation too when she performed a slow à la seconde jump into a double stepover, landing in frozen arabesque—she hit this labored combo two out of the three times, which is pretty darn good.