See all in Dance

Photos: Boston Ballet's The Nutcracker (2010)

Dance

Theme and variations

At least, that’s my narrative. Boston Ballet artistic director Mikko Nissinen must have his own version, since he’s chosen to start “Ultimate Balanchine” with The Four T’s and then go to Apollo. Never mind, what counts in Balanchine is not the story but the sensibility. And, opening night, dancing the solo part in the last of The Four T’s, Choleric, Kathleen Breen Combes had it, exploding from her gut into all four limbs and shimmying through Paul Hindemith’s spiky score as if there were no bar lines. It was the evening’s Parnassus but by no means the only peak on a program of works that, even by Balanchine standards, can fairly be called “Ultimate.”

The Four T’s has its own mini-narrative: a three-part Theme and then four Variations — Melancholic, Sanguinic, Phlegmatic, Choleric — each treating the Theme’s three parts. (When, back in 1977, The Four T’s was taped for PBS’s Dance in America series, the cyc backdrop was color-coded: blue for the first part, yellow for the second, red for the third. These days, everything is blue.) The Theme posits a war between the sexes, each part with its own couple, the men standing behind the women, in control — perhaps. As in so much of Balanchine, it’s also a war between point and flow (or particle and wave); of the three couples last night, it was the third, Megan Gray and Sabi Varga, who managed to give us both.