by Leigh Witchel
As the season went on, another group of dancers got a shot at the Tanowitz/Wheeldon/Forsythe/Abraham program at New York City Ballet. Yet sometimes it didn’t take different dancers to change how the ballet looked. Love Letter (on shuffle) kept the same cast but switched things up. The same dancers were onstage but some did different sections. Olivia Bell did the killer diva solo that Tiler Peck originally did, ripping from loose to forceful with rapier legwork. Bell was only made a full company member last year, and it’s clear already she has soloist-level technique. When she moved into a duet with KJ Takahashi, they looked good together. She’s an excellent height for him and they have a similar accuracy. Is there a partnership there?
Takahashi did not do his main solo, instead Taylor Stanley did what may or may not have been the same solo, but looked completely different because of the attack; more sad elegance rather than frustration and anger even as he vogued at the end to a pose.
Stanley’s opening solo, shaking with thair upper body in full isolation, is in a completely different language. At least at this point, it’s not ballet and not something that can be assimilated into ballet unless we change ballet’s placement. But then thay did a super clean arabesque. As in language, it was code-switching.
When the group arrived, the vocabulary was ballet, with neat lines, tendus and port de bras but also a head roll. Kyle Abraham wasn’t partitioning who did what, everyone did everything. Interesting to wonder how this will get assimilated, but we’re already about two generations from William Forsythe, who created some of the first really well-known fusions. We’ve already been training dancers, such as Takahashi or Quinn Starner, who can do either. What will ballet, or hip-hop, look like when dancers do both? Concerto Barocco looks different than it did in 1941, and ironically, the original dancers complained the work became less jazzy. What will Barocco look like with the next generation of dancers?
This performance of Love Letters felt more adolescent emotionally than previous ones. Stanley and Jules Mabie danced the long duet of tendus and scooping port de bras near the close of the ballet. Both were acting more, with more longing glances, but it made the duet more pat, more easily explained by mooncalf adolescence. It felt too easy, when Mabie entered with Stanley but left without him, to neatly box the emotions into The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name. Part of that is James Blake’s music, which is sometimes a thumping beat, other times an emo whine.
The switching made it feel as if Abraham approached casting as he approached structure, with an enjoyment of flux. Sometimes this can mean opportunity. This is the first time Bell has looked like a possible soloist. But taking the solo from Takahashi’s part diminished it almost to a cameo. Structurally, when he entered with Bell at the end as a counterweight to Mabie and Stanley, it no longer worked because he had done so little. Sometimes uncertainty and change energizes. Sometimes, it throws things off.
The encore of This Bitter Earth felt slightly shaky, but there was a cast change with Tyler Angle swapped in for Chun Wai Chan. Even though Christopher Wheeldon tends to treat ballerinas as magnificently poseable goddesses, Sara Mearns has little trouble making things look as if they were her idea. Agency for a skilled ballerina is about intention and partnership, and Mearns looked as if she knew what she wanted to happen, and that she was the one initiating the action. Angle shadowed Mearns instead of placing and moving her. Still, he was often the one starting the motion: turns, for instance. But when Mearns went off balance, Angle didn’t pull her off. You saw her stretching her leg in the direction she wanted to go.
Even with a very different approach to the original couple at NYCB (Wendy Whelan and guest artist Kevin O’Day) Peck and Roman Mejia set off plenty of fireworks in William Forsythe’s Herman Schmerman pas de deux. She stepped over into one after another perfect turn; he pulled out the stops in his jumps, rocketing skywards. Though O’Day was a big, strapping, modern dancer who danced for Twyla Tharp, there were still some echoes in how Mejia approached the part. His dancing may have been more refined and virtuoso, but when Mejia returned wearing a skirt and showing off a super-cut chest, it wasn’t masculinity being questioned. It was just masculinity wearing a skirt.
Though it’s over three decades old, Herman Schmerman imagines a far more equal relationship than This Bitter Earth. Peck and Mejia attacked it, as usual, with competitive relish. She wasn’t a goddess . . . well, she was, but . . . he wasn’t her porteur. They were a couple. The contract was written differently, but some of the clauses of support were the same.
It was made clearest at the end: when she moved, or was partnered, it was her decision and choice. Peck motioned Mejia over. He put his hand out, she noticed it, then decided to take it for the final overhead turn. It wasn’t an argument, a reconciliation, or an expression of worship. It was more of a late-night post-workout discussion.
Law of Mosaics, Ted Hearns’ fragmented score, felt like slicing off a layer of a specimen, placing it on a slide and putting that under a microscope for examination. Tanowitz doesn’t bother with ballet composition; composition is something to be questioned. This is deconstruction, so a “well-made dance” is pointless.
Even so, the dancing didn’t feel clinical. The cast was able to give the movement a full quality, kicking and jumping full out, something they couldn’t do with her first commission, Bartók Ballet. Miriam Miller can be reticent. Here, she swung her arms wildly in chaînés or repeated sissonne after sissonne, all full out. There is also no way to be musical here in the way the company is wont to (something that flummoxed the dancers in Bartók Ballet). Here, they’ve realized it and stopped worrying.
Mira Nadon went into the lead for Mearns a few days earlier; she raced round Adrian Danchig-Waring on pointe. When the score fractured Bach, Nadon and Danchig-Waring’s dancing was rhythmic, but still looked independent of the music. With Mearns not at full speed in the season (she was often swapped out of works) Nadon quickly became central to the repertory.
Mearns is also, first and foremost, a star. It’s hard for her to leave the stage without it being An Exit. Nadon left, pointing, a pungent reminder of one of Balanchine’s most personal stereotypes, the woman who inspires. But instead of pointing a path to an unknown point offstage, she pointed inward inscrutably, leaving Danchig-Waring crouched or twisting, a lone figure almost out of Kafka or Beckett. Danchig-Waring isn’t given to emoting, so Tanowitz’ postmodern equanimity works for him, and he looked his best here.
Another dancer flattered by the piece was Preston Chamblee, who strolled to the center to pull off a chain of turns in second. That virtuoso moment came out of nowhere, but the audience glommed on to it (yay, tricks!) and applauded.
Later, Miller slowly traveled across the stage with a dragging walk that looked purloined from Union Jack. When she reached the other side, she slowly dropped into a split, and was pulled off by invisible hands. Danchig-Waring had a brief moment, ending with a salute to an empty stage, ceding it to Nadon, perhaps the biggest convention of hierarchy.
Nadon is one of those ridiculously fortunate stage animals who could read the phone book (if such a thing still exists) and you’d happily pay admission. She had removed her pointe shoes and was barefoot for the work’s final solo, a long slow section to slashing chords. Alone onstage, Nadon was “not acting,” or perhaps acting in a vacuum where acting was removed from motivation. No matter, she was gripping.
The solo was full of signs and wonders. Nadon drifted on high half toe with both hands lightly touching one shoulder, intimating that a pointe shoe was just an accent, not the thing that created that ethereal effect. Loosely, she extended her leg with her hands behind her back. Tanowitz had anatomized legends of the ballet canon in the solo. There were things that fit right into the category for NYCB, such as Suzanne Farrell’s pious opening solo from Mozartiana. But not just female roles, a slow walk to a plié in fourth position looked like the male solo in Square Dance. And not just Balanchine, there were Odette’s pleading and refusing port de bras.
And as Nadon backed up, Myrtha’s commands. Die and then . . . Dance. It was up to us to decide which. Nadon lay down on a plucked note and the lights went out.
Like all of Tanowitz’s works, her avoidance of judgment is both interesting and sometimes disorienting. She is fascinated by dance’s conventions, like a child taking apart a toaster. But to continue the metaphor, why must she be interested in whether toast is good or bad? It’s toast.
copyright © 2024 by Leigh Witchel
Law of Mosaics, This Bitter Earth, Herman Schmerman pas de deux, Love Letter (on shuffle) – New York City Ballet
Lincoln Center, New York, NY
May 24, 2024
Cover: Tiler Peck and Roman Mejia in Herman Schmerman pas de deux. Photo © Erin Baiano.
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