by Leigh Witchel
Fifty years ago, New York City Ballet’s Stravinsky Festival was an unthinkable task. In a single week, the company put on 30 ballets, including 20 new ballets. No works got repeated. It was the ballet equivalent of cleaning the Augean stables. Fifty years later, the anniversary festival was twice as long and half the number of ballets, divided into in four repeated programs. It’s still stretching the company’s resources, already hampered by injury and illness, to the limit.
Casting changed multiple times. In Justin Peck’s “Pulcinella Variations,” Preston Chamblee was subbed in for Chun Wai Chan in the first duet. Chan was out . . . until the day before the show when he was listed to replace Harrison Coll in the second pas de deux.
First seen as part of the fall fashion gala in 2017, Tsumori Chisato’s graphic costumes, in the context of the festival, took on echoes of the Eugene Berman’s designs for “Danses Concertantes” but also of Ian Spurling’s Pop Art colors done in 1974 for Kenneth MacMillan’s “Elite Syncopations.”
The choreography is made up mostly of solos and duets, but not every one showed off this cast. The first duet, for Miriam Miller and Chamblee, in his debut, had so much activity – arabesque to soutenu and again, and again – that there was very little relationship or connection. Something was also up with either Miller’s arabesque or her left shoe because her foot sickled repeatedly.
Peck wasn’t trying to create characters; “Pulcinella Variations” is a divertissement. But dancers still want some kind of personality; a reason why they’re on that stage dancing in front of us. In the next solo, Sara Adams was able to create that, spinning with a grin and windmilling arms. The four men stuck only their heads out from the wing like a totem pole. She smiled and saluted them before going into tricky turns, and ceding the floor to Indiana Woodward, jumping and turning round herself.
Emilie Gerrity now seems to be the Happy Ballerina of the company, but is that a bad thing? She didn’t have a pasted-on grin in her solo as she turned and lifted her leg, but what felt like an honest smile. We’re always glad to see her.
Anthony Huxley had been out, and KJ Takahashi went in for him again, acquitting himself well in a breathless variation: jump, developpé, turn, air turn to the knee, get up, pose. Takahashi can do Huxley’s virtuoso roles impressively, but why give him every one of them? Is the company trying to injure him as well?
Daniel Applebaum stayed in the corps a while before becoming a soloist, but that makes him one of the people you trust when he’s on stage: the timing is right, the musicality is right. You’re seeing the ballet.
The frayed edges from overwork seemed to extend to the orchestra. In the opening of the main pas de deux, a gavotte and variations with the melody on the oboe, the oboist had a mini-meltdown. The soloist missed the notes at the end of the phrase, and after that, just didn’t play them.
The Gavotte functioned as a mini grand pas for Tiler Peck and Chan. Chan, making his debut in a role originated by the recently retired Gonzalo Garcia, looked good with her and looks good in quicksilver roles. He’s adept at changing directions on a dime.
Even though she’s not in the shape she once was, Peck is cementing her position as one of the company’s senior ballerinas. This part is one more that is right up her alley, and exactly what’s on that alley is getting even bigger street signs. In her solo, she played several games that define her; flashing switches of direction, or laying out in an arabesque as if to demonstrate that she decides when a balance is over, not gravity. This part was made on her, and it showed. She’s temperamentally the opposite of Sara Mearns (who originally did Miller’s part), but that’s good both for them and the company. Each has her own shticks.
“Scherzo à la Russe” was danced by students from the School of American Ballet. It’s a big corps dance arrayed in two squads on either side of a V, each led by a soloist. It’s good for the kids; it gets a lot of them on stage and it’s a worthy challenge without being cruelly difficult.
The work is short, with an abrupt Stravinsky ending: a sudden pose on a rising phrase, and it’s done. Still, it’s interesting to be introduced to the Russian folk vocabulary Balanchine used as source material – bows with the hand over heart, walks with the hands shading the eyes – and especially valuable to see it on the same program with “Stravinsky Violin Concerto,” where those steps get transformed into that ballet’s finale.
Silas Farley’s new “Architects of Time” has a derivative connection to the festival, a commissioned score, “Variations on a Theme by George Balanchine & Igor Stravinsky” by David Israel. The theme is a 1946 birthday greeting Balanchine sent to Stravinsky that was returned by Stravinsky orchestrated and harmonized. Israel’s score begins by riffing off the fanfare, brassy and fractured.
Farley’s work is a kitchen sink of ideas. In the opening, trios turn into group circles, and move from trio to trio. Things continued solo to solo, which finally cleared for a single soloist onstage, but that quickly became a duet. It felt as if Farley were trying to show off everything he has learned, but he put it all on stage at the same time and it was hard to know where to look.
Farley was in the company before retiring early at 26, and quickly becoming the dean of the dance institute at the Colburn School in Los Angeles. You could almost tell that he was in the corps by how the piece was cast: a group of 12 dancers with no corps, each dancer featured in solos or duets, and many in parts they wouldn’t ordinarily get.
Lars Nelson and Emma von Enck danced a big duet to plucked strings that recalled Stravinsky’s score for “Orpheus.” She has gorgeous bourrées and did lots of them, tight little ones even as she was tipped over sideways. Farley’s busyness calmed down in the pas; von Enck and Nelson stared at one another and she briefly leaned on his chest. The duet ended with the two of them kneeling, her head on his knee.
Jovani Furlan entered, then two more dancers, and another two, then they dispersed two by two leaving Furlan to finish out with beats and turns. Women entered in fast pointe work, then men sped through. The packed steps were a reminder that Farley had begun his tenure in the company in the company under Peter Martins.
The best moment in the ballet was the adagio Farley gave Claire Kretzschmar: a slow, drifting solo that presented her the most like a ballerina that she’s looked. This is what a dancer-turned-choreographer can do for another dancer, show them in a light they might have seen in class or rehearsal, but we haven’t.
The worked massed to a full cast that moved into and out of the wings, then a slow reverence. That wasn’t the end, though. It kept going, trios, and then packed again before the actual slowly revolving finale. Farley is still quite young, and has had a career that has moved almost as fast as the speed of his ambition. He could use Balanchine’s “Apollo Moment.” The simplest sections, where you could see what he was doing, were the best.
“Stravinsky Violin Concerto” got a performance that was often messy and exaggerated. The corps looked as if it had rehearsed in separate rooms, with everyone attacking the steps differently. The ballet was at its best in the two duets. Unity Phelan looks completely at ease in glamorous tutu roles, but she was first cast in Wendy Whelan’s repertory. Whelan was a spicy dancer with an unconventional body. Phelan made the back bends in the first duet look easy. She has a long back, but also long legs, which makes her proportions work for a large segment of repertory. Partnering her, Amar Ramasar took a leaf from his short solo in “Agon” to figure out a similar short burst of crazy shapes.
Joseph Gordon and Ashley Laracey looked great together in the second duet, but Gordon often tries to overpower his roles. Because of casting shuffles, there was no height difference between the two of them, so the imposing dynamic that the original dancers (Martins and Kay Mazzo) had was lost. But Gordon was supposed to dance with Sterling Hyltin, and Phelan’s slot was originally given to Sara Mearns. Phelan and Laracey meshed well, but Ramasar and Gordon have wildly different temperaments: Ramasar chipper to the point of mugging to the audience, Gordon deadly serious as he snapped through turns. Surely there’s something in between.
This is still a good part for Laracey, who may have danced more leads in the past season than she was given in years. She was a complete character as she knelt down, glanced at Gordon, then turned away. She also pushed into the folk-influenced third movement. Gordon loosened up a little, but the corps didn’t get the steps (the elbow is held at eye level, shading your gaze, not at neck level warding off a draft), and we’d just seen them done correctly in “Scherzo a la Russe.”
Musical chairs casting started early in the spring season. If you see the company regularly and you’re used to it, the tendency is to bleep over the shortfalls and concentrate on the better moments. But we look forward to when the company is doing more than getting the ballet up and on.
copyright © 2022 by Leigh Witchel
“Pulcinella Variations,” “Scherzo à la Russe,” “Architects of Time,” “Stravinsky Violin Concerto” – New York City Ballet
Lincoln Center, New York, NY
May 7, 2022
Cover: New York City Ballet in “Stravinsky Violin Concerto.” Photo credit © Erin Baiano.
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