by Leigh Witchel
The Swan Lake II mixed bill at New York City Ballet fielded some new casts and some nerves, as well as brisk tempos from conductor Andrew Litton. It looked as if the newbies on their maiden voyages in “The Four Temperaments” were trying a little too hard and fixating on the externals, as if the entire point of the ballet was to push your pelvis off its axis.
The first theme was sometimes punchy like a cakewalk. Jacqueline Bologna looked back at Jonathan Fahoury in their debuts in a way both romantic and sharp. Her final dipping turn felt as if it ended early, as did the exit of the second theme, which left the stage bare for too long. In the third theme, Miriam Miller pushed hard at the pictorial moments in her bends and poses. The same when Alec Knight braced her in arabesque; she popped her leg up until she was inverted. Still, all the exaggerations seemed to be from the same hand, so that the themes felt more than usual like a single duet broken into three.
Gonzalo Garcia is in his glide path to retirement at the close of the season. He was acting more and pointing his feet less, but he could get away with it in Melancholic. His take was more about how he crumpled to the ground than how he presented a tendu.
Ashley Hod’s and Peter Walker’s debuts in Sanguinic were both fast and emphatic: did one prompt the other? The slow lifts flew like two laps around the park, but the phrases felt as if they ended with an exclamation point.
Amar Ramasar slowed the pace in Phlegmatic. He has done the part before, and seemed less lazy than leisurely, until he picked up his foot to hold it in front of him and it seemed to keep wanting to go down. Emily Kikta got her first shot at Choleric. The tempo picked back up and she charged through it, retaining small intricacies, such as the circles in her gargouillade jumps. Those details seemed smudged elsewhere in this performance.
The gossamer “Sonatine,” had its premiere during the Ravel Festival in 1975. It was created for two stylish French dancers, Violette Verdy and Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux. To start, the dancers are poised, listening to the piano as it ripples. It recalls the more famous work Balanchine crafted for the Stravinsky Festival three years prior, “Duo Concertant,” only the dancers and the pianist are on the opposite sides of the stage.
French style is academic style, where form is content. Balanchine’s gloss on that was to skillfully fashion the building blocks of danse d’école into a dance: hands being offered, feet being placed and presented. Taylor Stanley beautifully collected the enchaînements, and made the turns in the final section into a garland. He cuts loose brilliantly in contemporary choreography, but he’s also one of the best classical stylists in the company. They’re both his type. He was an interesting counterweight to Ashley Laracey, who’s almost impossibly long-limbed and got wristy because of that.
Doing the “Black Swan Pas De Deux” in excerpt is an odd choice for a company that avoids bonbons. Still, it’s a salvage of the originally projected revival of Peter Martins’ full-length production, and a consolation prize for those slated to learn those leads. It was mounted in a bare-bones staging: a lone set element was used, the wooden throne that isolated looked like a bookshelf. Von Rotbart observed and interacted, but the Queen evidently had business elsewhere.
Mira Nadon served Nina Sayers realness with her eyeliner-heavy tribute to the film “Black Swan.” Her Odile was predatory and kept up with the quick tempos, but Black Swan isn’t her jam. She’s tall, extended and flexible: a natural Odette. She got to use that line in her solo, taking an exaggerated renversé, holding the balance as she curled back. Classical showpieces are Chun Wai Chan’s jam. He rolled out the tricks with ease: jumps with beats, multiple pirouettes, air turns as tight as a pencil.
Things got rough for Nadon where you might expect: in the coda. She’s not the kind of tightly-wound dancer you’d expect to crack out 32 fouettés. She started with singles to doubles, but the axis wasn’t there; things fell apart because the center could not hold. At the end she commended her soul to God, pulled in for a barely-controlled spin and didn’t fall down.
In her debut in the one-act Balanchine version, Tiler Peck was also not in her element but she had more resources to fake it or make it. Like Sara Mearns, she didn’t take a different approach for this version. By now the leads just repeat the adagio from the full-length production. After all, it was originally largely lifted from Balanchine’s version, but with time and Odettes, it’s become slower and more like the standard version. How to define “standard” after close to 130 years of evolving performance traditions and diffusion across the globe will have to wait for another discussion.
Both versions at NYCB use the fast coda to the adagio, which worked better for Peck than the slow melt into Siegfried’s arms. Especially after her neck injury, Peck can’t sustain an extravagant line, so she spent less time in positions and more in transitions, showing off her speedy footwork. As usual, she had an unbudgeable axis; in the closing fast turns of her solo she looked most like herself. Her climactic entrechats were rapier sharp and she literally put her back into her pose at the music’s massive crash before she exited forever. Her Siegfried, Joseph Gordon, wasn’t working against type in his debut. He has used his presence to take ownership of princely roles. He’s even got princely hair that flops about with a Byronic passion.
Peck is senior to Nadon, otherwise it would be confusing why they were cast against type and didn’t swap slots. Except that both of them were shortly cast right to type . . . stay tuned.
copyright © 2022 by Leigh Witchel
“The Four Temperaments” “Sonatine,” “Black Swan Pas de Deux,”“Swan Lake” – New York City Ballet
Lincoln Center, New York, NY
February 15, 2022
Cover: Joseph Gordon and Tiler Peck in “Swan Lake.” Photo credit © Erin Baiano.
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