Like most of the contemporary ballet on the show, Tobias’s creation is anything but inventive. (Much of it is by Marguerite Derricks, but there are also contributions by Christopher Wheeldon.) After the new version is finally performed — complete with portable ballet barres in a derivative William Forsythe touch — Tobias dashes onto the stage for a passionate kiss with his lead dancer. This was unforgivable. “Étoile” went Hallmark.
But the show has something crucial going for it: The guiding star that is Cheyenne (Lou de Laâge), the French étoile traded against her will from the Paris company to the New York one. She’s a bulldozer, a climate activist-ballerina who has been sent away, to her horror. “They’re going to make me do ‘Stars and Stripes,’” she says, referring to Balanchine’s patriotic 1958 ballet.
She rejects dance partners without even bothering to swipe left. “You think I don’t know what I need?” she asks Jack. “You think I am a baby ballerina new to the world, stumbling around, stuffing lamb’s wool into my shoes to stop the pain? There is no stopping the pain.”
De Laâge, chin lifted like the Degas ballerina, is a tender tornado. The best part of “Étoile” is how ruthlessly serious Cheyenne is about ballet.
Wise and irritable with an inability to lie, Cheyenne possesses the vulnerability that comes from passion. She may be Parisian, but she also seems like a real New Yorker and is reminiscent of another City Ballet principal, Sara Mearns, who isn’t in “Étoile” but whose spirit seems to be part of the moral fiber of the series. Cheyenne, who sometimes appears to be styled like Mearns with her loose hair and baggy clothes, shares with her a raw, absolute dedication to ballet’s expressive truth.
“Étoile” has no connection to the ballet horror of “Black Swan” or, worse, the backbiting, eating disorders and sexual abuse found in “Tiny Pretty Things” and “Flesh and Bone.” While it makes reference to “Fame,” the Alan Parker film, and “Ballet,” the Frederick Wiseman documentary about American Ballet Theater — even lifting dialogue from both — “Étoile” shows, at its base, a kind of fortitude that reminds me of “Billy Elliot.” For Billy, as for Cheyenne, dancing is breathing.