New Stagings of Classics Highlight American Ballet Theater Season

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Wayne McGregor will make his choreographic debut at American Ballet Theater next spring with a new setting of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” the company announced on Thursday.

Mr. McGregor’s work, “Afterite,” will have its premiere on May 21 at Ballet Theater’s spring gala, ushering in the annual Metropolitan Opera House season, May 14 through July 7 at Lincoln Center.

“Afterite” is his first dance for Ballet Theater, but Mr. McGregor’s work has been around New York in recent years: He has a piece, “Outlier,” in repertory at New York City Ballet; “Tree of Codes,” his collaboration with Olafur Eliasson and Jamie xx, was at the Park Avenue Armory in 2015; and the Royal Ballet, where he is the resident choreographer, performed “Infra” when the company visited in 2015.

The Ballet Theater gala performance will also include excerpts from Alexei Ratmansky’s “Harlequinade,” a new production that Ballet Theater announced earlier this year. On other nights, “Afterite” will be on a double bill with “Firebird,” Mr. Ratmansky’s 2012 setting of the classic Stravinsky score.

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“Harlequinade” will have its premiere on June 4. The two-act comic ballet, Mr. Ratmansky’s latest staging informed by studying historical dance notations, follows the original by Marius Petipa in 1900. (Other Ratmansky ballets in this vein have included “The Sleeping Beauty” at Ballet Theater and “Swan Lake” in Europe.)

Repertory story ballets for the season include “Giselle,” which on May 18 will feature the guest artist Natalia Osipova, a star of the Royal Ballet in London, performing opposite David Hallberg. The other works are “La Bayadère,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Swan Lake,” “Don Quixote” and Mr. Ratmansky’s beloved “Whipped Cream,” which had its premiere last spring.

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