"Ballo Della Regina," set to the ballet music from Giuseppe Verdi's opera "Don Carlos," is plotless yet inspired by the tale of a fisherman who searches a grotto for the perfect pearl (here, the principal ballerina). Erica Cornejo as that "pearl" is at once steely and luminescent. Her ability to anticipate the music, whether she's spinning into a hop on pointe or stretching into a taut arabesque that seems to originate in her upper back, makes her a physical manifestation of the score rather than a performer dancing to it. Her cavalier, James Whiteside (the fisherman in the opera ballet) traces filigrees in the air with his rapid beats.
The neo-Romantic "La Valse," a dance in two parts to music by Maurice Ravel, emerges from the other side of the moon. It's a tale of doom and decadence, of paying for past and present sins. The piece is imbued with waltzes, but never of a purely joyous type. Indeed, the music and the dancing conjure up carousels run amok or records warped by heat playing on a turntable. The Boston Ballet hits its stride in the scene where the girl in white (Karine Seneca) is lured by Death (Carlos Molina) to dance till she literally drops. Seneca is drawn to Molina as if by a magnetic force she wants to escape but can't. She flings an arm across her face in a gesture of dismissal, but it does her no good. The dance ends with her held aloft, a flurry of women whirling, as in a spell, around her.
