by Leigh Witchel
New York City Ballet’s quadruple bill featured four different choreographers’ hits and rarities, and dealt with Peter Martins’ legacy as well as Balanchine’s and Robbins’. Like it or not, Martins has one.
Megan Fairchild has done speed-demon roles since even before she entered the company. She led the School of American Ballet workshop in 2001 with the lead in Divertimento No. 15, and then danced Ballo della Regina the year after.
Twenty two years later, she still handles the notoriously difficult Ballo well. No step got missed. In her final solo, with the treacherous arabesque turns done in a blur, she kept them low and tight to control them, and preserved a jump that Merrill Ashley, the role’s originator, threw in as a lark and Balanchine liked, a stag leap she had seen Maya Plisetskaya do.
Dancing opposite Fairchild, Anthony Huxley’s excellence is always in his attack and phrasing. His differentiation of the beats and turns was beautiful; he’s gifted at showing threads of intricate movement.
In the four variations, Alston Macgill’s first solo was smooth and clean, neatly riding the oompah rhythm, while Emma Von Enck followed in what might have been a test-drive for her doing the lead later in the season. Ashley Hod has a good jump, essential for the third solo, and Olivia MacKinnon ate the space in the final one.
But what felt missing in Ballo’s first outing was fizz. It’s got perhaps the happiest finale ever, with more emboîtés than you can shake five sticks at. But instead of bright, high spirits, too often it just felt correct. Fairchild showed wit in her first polka variation but the “tongue-twister” combination later on was too clear, like someone showing how a magic trick is done.
Ballo is now 45 years from its source, even though Ashley was brought in to coach. But the context, Balanchine playing stump-the-dancer with Ashley, is harder to recover. You’re supposed to chuckle from Ballo; you’re supposed to look at the tongue-twister step and think, “What was that?” Ballo was built on technique, but it’s not enough. There has to be sparkle.
Programming In a Landscape was an interesting bit of archiving: It was choreographed by Albert Evans, a former principal dancer who died in 2015 and the age of 46. Made for Wendy Whelan and Philip Neal in 2005 for an opening night gala, the score is two works by John Cage for violin and piano, both with an inscrutable serenity that recalled Debussy. Still, the duet was done that time only and had to be painstakingly restaged from a grainy video by Rebecca Krohn.
The work began with a dim glow at the side. Ava Sautter was pulled in by Gilbert Bolden III, using the same sliding device used for the Sugar Plum Fairy in The Nutcracker. Instead of suspended on pointe, she was lying on her side like a resting odalisque.
Sautter, who is tall and leggy, only got into the company in 2022, and this was her first major break. Bolden’s height once again cemented his usefulness to the company. Both were costumed discreetly in black, she in a plain leotard and tights, he in a long sleeved top and pants.
The atmosphere of the piece is also one of inscrutable serenity. Instead of coming back in where he left, Bolden made a backstage cross to reenter from where he originally came in, came up beside the woman and offered his hand. He carried Sautter like a parcel, bent over, legs splayed, and flipped her from hanging upside down up onto his shoulder.
Evans only made three works for NYCB, and In a Landscape looked very much of its era. NYCB’s contemporary vocabulary post-Balanchine was indelibly shaped by Balanchine’s concept of what modern ballet might look like: sharply angular, and as in Third Theme in The Four Temperaments, Rubies or Symphony in Three Movements, a man manipulating a sphinx-like woman.
This was arguably Balanchine repackaging Orientalism for a mysterious quality, where the connotations of anything ethnic about the movement had long since lost, replaced by something that read as generically exotic. Martins was marinated in that vocabulary, and took it up when he began to choreograph. It got passed down to Evans.
Bolden carried and swung Sautter round the stage, setting her down on her knees in the center. They drifted and turned off balance before walking towards the back. She curled round him, bent over with her legs scissored apart, repeating the move until the thought was more than exhausted. Finally, he deposited her back lying down in the place she began. He continued to walk across the stage and she was pulled along behind him as the lights dimmed.
Martins created his choreographic style less by departing from Balanchine than by adding on top of him: Faster, more angular, more jazzy. Hallelujah Junction, originally made for the Royal Danish Ballet in 2001 and staged by NYCB at the beginning of the next year, typified his approach: the women were curled and tucked into hyper-Balanchine modeling poses. The men moved farther from the Balanchine norm, often crouched while skidding around the stage. It’s a reasonable guess that the women being on pointe (and Martins knowing more intimately the movement possibilities in his own body) permitted him to experiment more with the men.
The most striking and original aspect of the ballet is the simple but effective idea of placing the two pianos playing up on a platform at the back of the stage. John Adams’ eponymous, dyspeptic score churned as the action began with a couple, Joseph Gordon and Alexa Maxwell, in white, and a soloist, KJ Takahashi, in black.
Four subsidiary couples entered, the men in white, the women in black. First the women danced with Maxwell in the center. Another reasonable guess I’ve made before, that the biggest influence on Martin’s choreographic style was the 1972 Stravinsky Festival. This choreographic device, from Stravinsky Violin Concerto, became a favorite of Martins.
The men entered, racing into a crouch. First Takahashi did packed phrases, all of which he dispatched, then Gordon did fast beats. Though the originator of the role was the RDB’s Andrew Bowman, you would have sworn the part was intended for Martins’ son, Nilas, whose roles were largely composed like this.
Gordon went into a duet with Maxwell, filled with steps and packed phrases, well-crafted but airless. Takahashi was put through his paces, nailing one turn after another. Though we should be glad he isn’t, it would have actually helped him put this over if he were a little cheaper.
Takahashi partnered both Maxwell and Gordon in penchées, which was awkward because of the height issue. He wasn’t tall enough and they were throwing themselves around.
Maxwell ended up draped upside down on Gordon’s shoulder and Adams’ score became a rhythmless farrago. The couple went into a long, complicated but formless duet, which they made what they could out of. All three leads brought virtuoso skills; Gordon added panache. Maxwell ended up once again draped across his back, then on her knees.
The leads whirled off as the corps entered one couple at a time for featured duets, that’s Martins cribbing a device from one of his best works, Ash. Victor Abreu and Macgill posed, hunched skidding, dropping. The tempo got even faster for Andres Zuniga and Nieve Corrigan, ending with Zuniga spinning wildly. Mary Thomas MacKinnon and Kennard Henson had a jumping duet and finally Jules Mabie popped Jacqueline Bologna into split jetés. After a zillion tendus, the cast assembled for the final pose of a proficient performance.
Hallelujah Junction made sense to bring back in many ways. It’s a good length to team with another short ballet, it’s visually striking and it has several featured parts to show off rising dancers in the corps. If it doesn’t show Martins at his absolute best, it shows him at his most typical, obsessed with form and a hermetic definition of contemporary ballet – as if the way to make ballet modern was to make it harder.
The Concert ended a fizz-less night with a flat performance. The Mistake Waltz was as hilarious as always, but the timing was off for the chair jokes in the opening. It could have been because there were plenty of debuts – most of the cast. Andrew Veyette and Meghan Dutton O’Hara as the unhappily married couple were the vets and they knew their bits, especially Veyette. The pianist, Elaine Chelton, did all her routines, but the dour persona she affected felt too real.
Mira Nadon, like Maria Kowroski before her, is a tall, lush beautiful woman who’s also a natural comedian. She can dip into a gorgeous arabesque penchée and still be funny. She helped salvage the ballet, delivering both ballerina and zany creature with lush footwork and her hair flying wildly.
She also has a gift for knowing when to play for the laugh and when to act as if what she was doing were the most normal thing in the world. Nadon played the hat shop sketch with perfect timing and physicality, slumping over dejected when someone else wore her hat. She was funny enough that even her accidents were funny; when she surreptitiously dropped the fake hand into the piano, she somehow managed to have the thing hit the piano strings with the loudest sproing.
David Gabriel was also funny as the shy, terrified boy in the yellow vest, but the joke, clouting the woman over the head with a stick and dragging her off like a caveman felt . . . prehistoric. So many of the jokes in the piece, now almost 70 years old, felt as of that time as The Honeymooners or The Seven Year Itch.
So sadly, opening night of this program was a letdown. But stay tuned, again. Things got better on subsequent outings.
copyright © 2024 by Leigh Witchel
Ballo Della Regina, In a Landscape, Hallelujah Junction, The Concert – New York City Ballet
Lincoln Center, New York, NY
February 9, 2024
Cover: Mira Nadon and New York City Ballet in The Concert. Photo © Erin Baiano.
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