George Balanchine’s ‘Prodigal Son’ as performed by Ballet Arizona. (Photo by Alexander Iziliaev)
It’s a Friday afternoon in one of Atlanta Ballet’s rehearsal studios and visiting répétiteur Paul Boos is teaching dancer Ángel Ramírez how to crawl.
“You need to crawl through the music, not to it,” he says, as a brief section of Sergei Prokofiev’s score for George Balanchine’s ballet Prodigal Son plays. Angela Agresti, one of Atlanta Ballet’s répétiteurs, sits quietly nearby, taking notes and cueing the music each time Boos asks Ramírez to repeat a phrase. Boos is a stager with the Balanchine Trust, in town for 12 days to teach the company this iconic ballet.
Ramírez drags himself slowly forward on his knees, clutching a large stick for support. Boos stops him again and again to describe the quality of the movement and to explain what the character is feeling in this powerful closing scene. He adjusts a gesture and reminds Ramírez to listen carefully to the music before moving.
Prodigal Son is one of three ballets that will open Atlanta Ballet’s fall season September 12 through September 14 at Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre. Ramírez will perform the lead role on Friday and Saturday nights. New company member Sayron Pereira takes over Saturday afternoon, and Júlio Santos has the role on Sunday at 2 p.m.
Also on the bill are Emeralds, an Atlanta premiere and one of the three ballets in Balanchine’s evening length Jewels, and Justin Peck’s In Creases, first seen here in 2022.
The final scene in Prodigal Son is one of the most psychologically raw in the ballet repertoire. The Son is returning home, shamed and exhausted. He is terrified his father won’t forgive him for leaving his family responsibilities for a life of adventure and debauchery that ended badly. All that, Boos reminds Ramírez, needs to be expressed through these most basic of physical movements.
When dancers approach this section for the first time, Boos says after the rehearsal, they often give it too much heart and soul. He recalls that Balanchine would tell dancers to imagine that the Son had experienced that kind of dramatic pain miles earlier after being brutalized and humiliated. By now he is drained and desperate. Dancers have to do “some soul searching” here, Boos says. “I want there to not be a dry eye in the house.”
Boos danced Prodigal Son many times during his 13 years with the New York City Ballet but never in the titular role. “I was a good dancer, not a great one,” he says. As one of the drinking companions or “goons” who ply the Son with alcohol and rob him of everything he owns, Boos watched dancers such as Victor Castelli inhabit the role in dozens of performances. It was an opportunity to absorb the nuances.
Mikhail Baryshnikov performed the work when he joined New York City Ballet in 1979. Boos remembers that period well. He was part of the team that flew to Nashville, Tennessee, that same year to film the ballet for the PBS Great Performances: Dance in America series. Baryshnikov was nursing an injury, Boos remembers, and Castelli was there in case he had to step in.
Boos knew that Balanchine and Castelli had lengthy discussions about the role during the filming — the angles, the characters and what various sections of the choreography meant. This was unusual because Balanchine’s reticence to describe his works’ motivation and meaning is legendary. Years later, when Boos first was assigned to stage Prodigal Son, he asked Castelli to tell him everything he learned during those conversations. It was one of the many ways Boos researched the ballet so he could stage it faithfully on companies such as Paris Opera Ballet, Russia’s Mariinsky Ballet, La Scala in Milan and several American companies. (Boos joined the Balanchine Trust in 1992 and has staged more than a dozen Balanchine works nationally and internationally.)
Balanchine created Prodigal Son for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1929 when he was only 25. Prokofiev was commissioned to write the score; Georges Rouault designed the sets and costumes. Balanchine was inspired not by the biblical parable in the Gospel of Luke but by Alexander Pushkin’s short story The Stationmaster about a humble stationmaster and his runaway daughter. In that tale, pictures of the parable hang on the wall of the small station where the father works.
Neither that tale, nor the New Testament story, however, include the Siren. She was Balanchine’s invention; a manipulative seductress who treats the Son as both sexual prey and a business proposition — it is she who orders her goons to strip and rob him. She seduces and overpowers the eager young man, towering over him in choreography that is sparse, menacing, even triumphant in its cold simplicity. It’s the complete opposite of the sweet comedy and virtuosity of Balanchine’s Coppélia, which Atlanta Ballet performed earlier this year, and of Emeralds, which will open the upcoming program.
As John Martin, The New York Times dance critic from 1927 to 1962, wrote of Prodigal Son: “The Balanchine of the classic idiom is nowhere in evidence . . . It is gauche and cruel, funny and naïve, lascivious and tender . . . It moves with direct and sweeping dramatic force, through fantastically perceptive and daring episodes, to a conclusion of irresistible emotional conviction.”
When Balanchine revived the work for New York City Ballet in 1950, Jerome Robbins danced the Son, with Maria Tallchief as the Siren. In the years since, those roles have been brought to life by some of the most renowned City Ballet dancers, including Suzanne Farrell, Karin von Aroldingen and Diana Adams as the Siren, and Edward Villella and Helgi Tomasson as the Son.
Tomasson went on to lead San Francisco Ballet, which is where, in 2000, Atlanta Ballet Artistic Director Gennadi Nedvigin danced the by-then iconic role. “It was one of the most emotionally and physically challenging roles I have ever danced,” Nedvigin told ArtsATL in a recent interview.
Every male dancer in the role has had to master the closing scene, where technical virtuosity is of no use.
There is a video of Balanchine, in his mid-70s, rehearsing Baryshnikov (Misha). Ballet historian Jennifer Homans describes it in her book Apollo’s Angels: “As Misha falls to his knees and begins the long journey across the stage, Balanchine falls to his knees, too, and the old man and the boy are holding on to each other, inching along side by side. As these two sons arrive collapsed at the feet of the father, Balanchine, still in Misha’s role, climbs into the father’s stiffened arms, showing the son how to do it, where to place a shoulder, just how to lift a knee.”
Boos has studied that poignant video and no doubt has it in mind as he coaches Ramírez during the last few minutes of rehearsal.
“Every day without you, your father has looked for you,” he tells Ramírez, who drags himself closer to Denys Nedak as the Father. “You see he is now blind, and you take responsibility for that. You are so upset that you have done this to him.”
Ramírez’s crawl is probably truly painful now, after an hour on his knees. Boos watches. “I always get choked up at this point,” he says, and the catch in his voice confirms it. Finally, he teaches Ramírez, the repentant, terrified Son, how to collapse face down in front of Nedak, before demonstrating how to pull himself up Nedak’s body, one aching limb at a time, to be held in his father’s forgiving arms.
There is not a dry eye in the studio.
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Gillian Anne Renault has been an ArtsATL contributor since 2012 and was senior editor for dance and art + design from 2021 to early 2025. She has covered dance for Early Music America Magazine, Atlanta Magazine, Los Angeles Daily News and Ballet News, and on radio stations such as NPR affiliates WABE and KCRW. Many years ago, she was awarded an NEA fellowship to attend American Dance Festival’s Dance Criticism program.
