by Leigh Witchel
Once upon a time, Fancy Free was contemporary. Contemporary, or that term so overused it has no meaning, “cutting edge,” is a moving target. New York City Ballet’s triple bill featuring ballets by Christopher Wheeldon, Peter Martins and Justin Peck, each dealt in their own way and time with the question of what makes ballet contemporary.
Twenty years on, Polyphonia’s position in Christopher Wheeldon’s development and his relation to ballet is apparent. Ironically, his most successful essay at creating a contemporary ballet vocabulary was his first.
There were several debuts the night prior. Sara Adams joined the company in 2009. Wendy Whelan liked her early on; she taught Adams her role in Liturgy in 2011. Adams made soloist in 2017, and the pandemic slowed everyone down, but Adams seems to have been in a holding pattern.
Alexandra Ansanelli’s otherworldly role wasn’t the pillar of the ballet, but it was the center. In a duet as stripped down as the simple chords György Ligeti wrote as a transcription of a Hungarian Folk wedding tune, her part was a plum.
Adams, along with her partner Christopher Grant, were new to the ballet. Ansanelli was incomparable, but Adams showed she has sleeper ballerina potential. Her fragile air was dead-on; she got it seemingly instinctively.
She shaded her duet with Grant with ethereal gentleness. Grant left her, but Adams didn’t make a big deal of that. He just wasn’t there anymore. She went to the center to repeat the steps alone. But like Ansanelli, without telegraphing, a story was there anyway. Neither woman had any need to sell it.
Whelan’s part, with Jock Soto, was the pillar of the ballet. Where Whelan was strange and mysterious, Alexa Maxwell’s sophomore outing with Peter Walker was seamless and fluent. Like “contemporary,” “mysterious” is a moving target altered by time. Agon was once strange and mysterious. Thirty years later, stagers had the counts on index cards.
Maxwell found a sea anemone quality in Whelan’s part. She wasn’t angular like Whelan; she used her limbs like tendrils. But when the music threw itself, so did she, arching backwards in Walker’s arms. He partnered strongly and was deliberately unobtrusive.
Maxwell could go from distortion to on-her-leg in a breath and Walker was part of the reason. They made the flip at the end of their final duet smooth and fluid, and it didn’t feel like three poses. Even if she’s not as angular as Whelan, Maxwell has the ability to make choreography look “contemporary.”
A dichotomy flowing through almost all of NYCB’s male dancing is prioritizing force or line. You really saw it in Polyphonia because though the work has a contemporary viewpoint and score, Wheeldon often relied on classical positions and carriage.
You could see the palpable difference in the duet with Sebastián Villarini-Vélez and Davide Riccardo, who made his debut pinch hitting for Aarón Sanz. Villarini-Vélez relies on force and power. But he looked messy next to Riccardo. Riccardo came gliding out with Emilie Gerrity and it looked like Liebeslieder Walzer.
Riccardo’s casting in the duet also made the link from Polyphonia to Agon. Consciously or not, Wheeldon used Agon as a template. He cast four couples and Ligeti’s score occupies a similar sonic universe as Stravinsky’s, veering in and out of tonality and rhythm. Wheeldon also shaped the arc of the ballet similarly to Balanchine, putting the farthest departure from academic form in the big, final pas de deux. Polyphonia’s closing movement has a bit of Agon. Even a motif pose for the four couples, bent over, one leg cocked, hands on floor, recalled Agon and the black-and-white ballets.
Peter Martins’ Barber Violin Concerto was created for the 1988 American Music Festival and had the original cast you never expected to see: Merrill Ashley (Martins, much to Ashley’s disappointment, almost never created roles on her), Adam Lüders with Paul Taylor Dance Company’s Kate Johnson and Taylor alum David Parsons.
Barber’s concerto is lovely, but the original conceit was thin; a meeting of ballet and modern dance as a metaphor for relationships. Martins reacted to the music in a paint-by-numbers way: he worked with what was on its skin: meter and dynamics. When the concerto got loud and sharp, he had Alec Knight move bigger and cut into poses and gestures. It’s a surprise the work has made it for three-and-a-half decades.
In Ashley’s role, Sara Mearns didn’t have Ashley’s Amazonian quality. Mearns interpreted the part as Mearns is wont to: as a Big Ballerina role. God knows Ashley would not have wanted the pressure of representing all of ballet when she stepped out on stage. Mearns seemed just fine with that. Her opening à la seconde pirouette was almost a metaphor. Despite Knight being beside her, she was going it alone.
Gilbert Bolden III was Parsons to Emma Von Enck’s Kate Johnson. Bolden wisely didn’t try to dance as if he were doing Taylor with a capital T; he danced it like a ballet dancer doing contemporary work. They were both actually more Taylor-ish than less – at least they both can contract. Mearns almost managed a contraction.
As often in Martins there was a partner swap. This is one of the bigger ones in his canon; it’s the point of the two duets. If Mearns can’t contract, she is mistress of the hair release, and there’s one in the middle of this duet. This time, in a good choice for Bolden and Mearns, they didn’t make it the point.
The effect seemed so when it was first done by Ashley and Parsons: whoosh, I’m free! It was reductive, but also too close to the effect Balanchine added late in his career to Serenade, and it was one of the things that made Barber feel derivative. Here, Mearns and Bolden placed it on an arc. They shaded the pas de deux as a love duet, rather than the symbol of classical ballet needing to loosen up: the plot of so many bad Hollywood dance movies.
Knight was very different than Lüders, who ignored Johnson, lost in his own funk. Knight engaged Von Enck and allowed himself to become flustered by her. Johnson was also gnat-like, but Von Enck was more so: less quicksilver, more of a poking irritant.
For Justin Peck, the idea of contemporary ballet isn’t based on vocabulary. When he’s going contemporary he tends to dump academic vocabulary out the bottom like ballast. His take on “contemporary” is topical. He’s looking at how we move, live, and think today.
Now seven years old, The Times are Racing is holding up very well. Dan Deacon’s score, which oddly enough was originally made for Adult Swim, has a massive, epic quality to it, and that’s something Peck responds to. It makes Times feel bigger, like the statement of a generation.
Where Polyphonia made him look raw, Villarini-Vélez looked great here. Polyphonia was more concerned with line and shape than force; Times was more interested in energy. It used Villarini-Vélez’s force and those kind of force dancers have their day in Peck’s work.
Harrison Coll was also having his day. His punchiness worked so well and it was beautiful to see him in repertory that fit him like a glove. Chopping and skidding, he looked more like himself than in any other part he does.
Coll and KJ Takahashi took the roles originated by Robert Fairchild and Peck himself. The duet between them looked brotherly; Takahashi gave a quick glance back to Coll to make sure he was ready to go. Their temperaments, Takahashi cool and Coll hot, still meshed.
The buzz was on Ashton Edwards, a nonbinary guest dancer from Pacific Northwest Ballet, taking the role originated by Tiler Peck, wearing that same outfit, a speckled gold long-sleeved leotard and black briefs designed by Humberto Leon. Small in frame and easy to partner, Edwards sliced through space.
The performance was a paradox. Edwards danced it like a ballerina – down to the floating quality and lingering hesitations in developpé, as if those mannerisms were integral in a piece where they aren’t. The ballerina as an archetype may be one of the most extreme examples of gender being literally rooted in external performance. Going for those externalities as meticulously as Edwards did seemed, rather than questioning of gender roles, to affirm them.
Taylor Stanley made a debut a few days prior in the part originated by Amar Ramasar. Stanley had done the same role as Edwards, and was now covering Roman Mejia. Stanley, also nonbinary, looked thrilled to partner Edwards and was solicitous. The shading went beyond playful again to almost a love duet – or maybe just something that for them had been a long time in coming: There’s a place for us.
copyright © 2024 by Leigh Witchel
Polyphonia, Barber Violin Concerto, The Times are Racing – New York City Ballet
Lincoln Center, New York, NY
January 28, 2024
Cover: Taylor Stanley and Ashton Edwards in The Times Are Racing. Photo © Erin Baiano.
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