DRESDEN, Germany — Alexei Ratmansky’s new “Tanzsuite,” created in June for the Semperoper Ballett here, is breathtakingly inventive, formally rigorous and gorgeously dancey. From the opening moments, as a bank of lights ascends to form a modernist chandelier above the neat lines of dancers, to the final heart-in-mouth swirled lift, the ballet captivates. As you watch, you feel slightly desperate about continually losing sight of the elusive felicities onstage.
In the last decade, Mr. Ratmansky has become the most sought-after ballet choreographer on the planet, and one of the most prolific. It’s no surprise to hear that a new Ratmansky is being created in Denmark or Canada or Russia — or Dresden — even though he is also artist in residence at American Ballet Theater. That productivity means that his work is often uneven (although never uninteresting); it’s not always possible to produce a masterpiece in a limited time for unknown dancers.
But “Tanzsuite” is as fine a ballet as Mr. Ratmansky has yet created — that’s saying a great deal — and confirms the increasing international attention that the Dresden company is beginning to receive. The work is set to Richard Strauss’s adaptation and orchestration of some of Couperin’s pieces for harpsichord, composed from 1713 to 1730. Together with Stijn Celis’s visually impressive, choreographically and conceptually all-over-the-place “Josephs Legende,” the ballet was part of an all-Strauss evening commemorating the 150th anniversary of his birth and celebrating his association with Dresden, where nine of his operas had premieres.
Since the Strauss estate allows only the five works he created for dance to be used for new choreography, Mr. Ratmansky can’t have had much choice in score. Nonetheless, with its ceremonious dance forms, overlapping melodies and wonderful rhythmic dynamics, “Tanzsuite” seems to have been specially formulated to display his gifts.
He has retained the musical structure that Strauss created for a 1923 ballet at the Vienna State Opera, where it was choreographed by Heinrich Kröller. (Paul Taylor and Robert LaFosse have used music from an extended version, Divertimento, Opus 86, that Strauss composed in 1941.) There are eight sections — “Pavane,” “Courante,” “Carillon,” “Sarabande,” “Gavotte,” “Wirbeltanz” (Pirouette dance), “Allemande” and “March” — and while Mr. Ratmansky makes reference to these courtly dance forms, these allusions are embedded without embellishment in a fleet succession of dance imagery that evokes the past while remaining resolutely in the present.
The opening section, “Pavane,” presents all 18 dancers, and Mr. Ratmansky immediately establishes both the lovely geometries that characterize “Tanzsuite,” and the unpredictability of his structure. As the curtain rises, the women, dressed in short off-white dresses that hint at 18th-century ball gowns, stand in three lines. The male ensemble, in white tights, short white boots and closefitting jackets (the costumes were by Yumiko Takeshima) run forward to lift them briefly, then drop into a courtly kneeling position at their sides before running off, leaving the women to dance alone.
The intricate footwork and the constant bending and stretching of their upper bodies are punctuated by the simple folk-dance elements and quirky gestures that often permeate Mr. Ratmansky’s work. Dancers may do complicated small beats of the feet while their upper bodies change direction and their arms switch position, but they also skip and gallop, and bounce on their heels. The effect, right away and throughout the ballet, is of an infectious danciness.
Wonderful images remain in the mind’s eye. In “Courante,” Elena Vostrotina poses center stage with 18th-century delicacy, her supporting leg bent, arms held low, wrists angled up. On each side sit two lines of men, studiously turned away from her like multiple incarnations of Michaelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam.” In Carillon, Mr. Ratmansky responds to the bell-like orchestration of celesta, harp and glockenspiel with a line of six women, who pick their way across the stage with swiftly alternating, often idiosyncratic movements. (This recalls his gloriously eccentric corps of Louise Brooks look-alikes in “Namouna.”) Later, he offers a line of men, then all 12 dancers together, evokings childlike games as they jump into one another’s arms.
Later, in the moonlight blue-washed “Sarabande” (the lighting, superb, was by Patrik Bogardh), Julia Weiss and Julian Lacey perform a pas de deux in which she seems to be repeatedly eluding him. Images from Balanchine’s “Serenade” filter in here but are not lingered upon; they recur in the “Allemande” in an elegiac duet for Ms. Vostrotina and Raphaël Coumes-Marquet.
Small stories seem to infuse every part of “Tanzsuite.” At the opening of “Gavotte,” Gina Scott and Denis Veginy blow kisses to each other from across the stage, before Ms. Scott begins an enchanting solo full of intricate footwork that is contrasted against the mobile, plasticity of her upper body. This combination of precision and fullness is part of what makes Mr. Ratmansky’s choreography so wonderful to watch, and it’s to the credit of the Semperoper dancers that they fully embody the physical reach and musical accuracy he demands.
“Tanzsuite” constantly engages the eye; the mind, too. Nothing about its structure is predictable; everything is thrilling. Ballet heaven.