Opposites Who Reveal Ballet’s Expressive Range

In a ballet season of six or eight weeks, some artists change fast — and the proscenium arch becomes a magnifying glass through which, before our eyes, a dancer becomes a heroine. So it was this spring with two young American Ballet Theater principals who have ascended through the company’s ranks: Isabella Boylston and Devon Teuscher.

The transformation in them is not yet absolute. And who knows? Perhaps they will lose what they have gained. Both perform in August at the Vail International Dance Festival, making debuts in new roles; it will be good to see how they look there.

Certainly, there were weeks this spring in which Boylston and Teuscher seemed to have grown immeasurably, weeks that built upon others the year before. These two are interestingly — and increasingly — unalike.

Boylston, 31, is an engaging, winning personality; Teuscher, 29, is movingly impersonal, dancing objectively as if serving the choreography rather than herself. When you find room in your heart for both — too many fans like to back favorites and types — you start to see the range of expression ballet itself can have.

Though ballet’s formal vocabulary is capable of multiple speeds, classroom tradition divides it into two: adagio and allegro, slow (and sustained) or fast (and intricate). Both Teuscher and Boylston blaze through the 32 fouetté turns of “Swan Lake” and take to the air impressively; but Teuscher’s natural domain seems adagio, Boylston’s, allegro. (Fouetté turns are revolutions on one leg in which the propulsion comes from the whiplike action of the other, which stays raised.) Teuscher’s dancing draws attention to shape, contours, sequences; Boylston’s to sparkling footwork and effervescent jumps.

Boylston is bubbly, exuberant, finely musical. She has an exceptional leap, an ebullient soubrette quality (“Champagne on the stage” as they said of Lydia Lopokova a century ago), and a touch of laughter in her movement. She’s in many ways already a complete star (with 240K followers on Instagram).

She has also become a maker and shaker in the ballet world. She joined Ballet Theater’s Studio company in 2005 and became a principal in 2014. Recently, when Jennifer Lawrence played a Russian ballerina in the film “Red Sparrow” (choreography by Justin Peck), Boylston was her well-publicized dance double. This July and last, she has brought ballet to her hometown, with the festival Ballet Sun Valley, in Idaho, to which she invites European and American artists. (At Vail, on August 6, she’ll be in the premiere of Peck’s next creation.) When Alexei Ratmansky staged his new production of Marius Petipa’s “Harlequinade” (1900) for Ballet Theater this June, she was first cast as the irrepressibly high-spirited heroine Columbine, beside her close friend James Whiteside as Harlequin. In Act 2, Columbine dances at her own wedding as, literally, a lark — a spot-on vehicle for Bolyston.

Yet she’s by no means without seriousness or depth. Her tragic parts include the title role of “Giselle,” Odette-Odile (the double heroine of “Swan Lake”) and Juliet: She dances them all with fervor. Whether her quick, light style can reveal the larger dimensions of “Giselle” and “Swan Lake” is the challenge she keeps addressing. Certainly her footwork — now piquant, now feathery — brands many of their incidental details onto the memory.

The torrential intensity of her acting as Juliet was one of her breakthroughs this season. She was playing opposite the superstar David Hallberg, who charmingly indicated his role’s emotions as if understanding the role without immersing himself in it. She, by contrast, lived her part with reckless intensity. When she came to Kitri in “Don Quixote,” the quality of laughter often shown by her dancing returned with a newly heroic defiance, as if assertively making huge claims on life itself: She both ate up space and made her music glisten.

Teuscher, who joined the Studio Company in 2006, is firmly dramatic, coolly decisive, enigmatic, often mysteriously calm. When Ratmansky made “Serenade After Plato’s Symposium” (2016), he cast Teuscher as its sole woman: It was implied that she was the seer, Diotima, whom Socrates consults about the nature of love — the sage who knows the mysteries the men hope to understand.

Last year, Teuscher became a principal. She’s not yet fully a star; she doesn’t invariably give off light. She is, however, naturally, serenely grand. Though the word “ballerina” really means only “dancing woman” in its original Italian, it has been inflated by over a century of Russian ballet mystique to acquire multiple connotations of authority, many of which Teuscher seems to exemplify, quietly but surely.

This spring, her account of Myrta, the spectral queen of the otherworldly siren wilis in “Giselle,” had more luminescence than some of the ballerinas playing Giselle. In the season’s second week, she succeeded the illustrious Alessandra Ferri as the heroine of Wayne McGregor’s new “AfteRite” (which returns in Ballet Theater’s fall season at the David H. Koch Theater). Remarkably, she showed much the same capacity for poignancy as Ferri, whether protesting angrily or merely walking slowly.

After that came a gorgeous debut as Nikiya in “La Bayadère.” Nikiya, an Indian temple dancer, has a glorious slow entrance with a veil over her face — glorious because the High Brahmin then tears the veil away, revealing her face like a rare work of art. Teuscher gave the moment real impact: Her cheekbones, large eyes and beautifully held head register powerfully through the Metropolitan Opera House as few others do. And she moves the way she looks: Her line has amplitude; her phrases unfold smoothly, like thick cream. That face radiated with similar power at a famous moment in Act 3 of Kenneth MacMillan’s “Romeo and Juliet” as Juliet sits on her bed upstage: Teuscher lifted her head as if addressing destiny.

It was in this season’s “Swan Lake,” a role she first danced in 2017, that Teuscher ascended a further step into ballerinadom. And she did it by means of sweepingly irresistible purity. Where many other dancers say, “This is how I do it,” Teuscher says, “This is how it has to be.” It applies to the formal positions of her body when dancing the ballet vocabulary; it also applies in mime gestures.

In the final lakeside scene, Odette repeatedly announces, “I here will take my life”: Teuscher did this with bleak, tragic inevitability, as if making plain that Odette had no alternative. Her Odette and her Odile were like that throughout: inviolable, mysterious, inscrutable, ultimately the strongest characters in the ballet.

Years ago, she impressively danced Merce Cunningham’s “Duets” (1980) with Ballet Theater. This August she’ll dance at Vail in an ensemble from his “Scenario” (1987). She’s the kind of dancer who can reveal the classicism in Cunningham — not by keeping a ballet accent but by revealing the choreography’s character as sheer form.

It’s a credit to Ballet Theater that it has been advancing the careers of two women so dissimilar. Properly showcased, such contrasting dancers should enlarge the art. (Properly marketed, they’ll enlarge the audience. As yet, neither Boylston nor Teuscher can be relied upon to pack the Met Opera House — but they deserve to.) There’s plenty more they have to learn: Neither knows enough about looking out and up to the sides and heights of an opera house. Though their dancing projects, their eyes do so only intermittently. But each has been growing fast.

Ideally, Ballet Theater should grow with them. None of its ballerinas can ever be a great interpreter of “Swan Lake” in the company’s tawdry production. At many crucial points, they’re given showy, superficial Soviet revisions of the original choreography, depriving the opposite heroines of ambiguity and depth.

Though these woman share a number of roles, their differences turn each ballet into a wholly separate form of drama. Those contrasts are just as evident outside the theater. Boylston uses social media with the same glee with which she takes the stage. It’s part of today’s ballet climate that Boylston and her fellow principal Whiteside (probably the most gay leading dancer today) tell their publics that they call each other “Cindy.” When teamed, as in “Harlequinade,” they’re “the Cindies.”

Teuscher, by contrast, is more guarded. Not invariably: This spring, she and her fellow principal Cory Stearns let it be known that they were a couple. After their “Swan Lake” in June, she posted on Instagram a photograph of them kissing at the curtain call, with the words “Definitely not your average date night! Kisses onstage and off! It was such a gift to perform with my real life love.”

Onstage, Boylston gives the impression she’s vibrating even when she’s immobile. With Teuscher, we sense that still waters run deep. This spring, you could feel the Ballet Theatre audience’s idea of womanhood widening as each of these two heroines became more fully herself.