by Leigh Witchel
“I struggled a lot with how to adapt my own physicality to balletic form.” Justin Peck said that almost in passing in a short film played at the beginning of New York City Ballet’s All-Peck program commemorating his first decade as Resident Choreographer.
The four ballets on the bill included some of his best works (his best so far, The Times are Racing, was in repertory the prior season). Taken in chronological order, they show Peck’s relationship to classical ballet, and how he not only adapted his own movement to ballet, but how he adapted ballet to his own movement.
In Creases, from 2012, was Peck’s first work for company and it had that look. It was the journeyman work that he needed, demonstrating that he knew the form and could work with an ensemble. But NYCB’s repertory is littered with the carcasses of well-crafted works. In Creases had the ingredients that could land a second commission: energy, ingenuity and drive.
The piece stayed within the house style, with live music, simple costumes that were a twist on the practice-wear aesthetic of the company, and the women wearing pointe shoes. But what places it most as an early work in Peck’s timeline was the vocabulary. There were the beginnings of elements that would recur as Peck’s style. The opening introduced the cast. The steps in Ruby Lister’s long, speedy solo had French names, but the arms didn’t always. She did extensions that retracted and repeated before Jules Mabie rolled to the center for a solo, and did a turned-in cabriole that was a kind of jackknife.
In 2012, Peck was in the corps de ballet, and his work also had that look: he was choreographing on dancers he worked alongside of. He saw the corps both as an ensemble and as soloists. At this performance, Dominika Afanasenkov and Preston Chamblee danced a small duet before Maxwell Read and Shane Williams did a brief double solo, then similarly for Malorie Lundgren and Mary Thomas MacKinnon. Once they left, Mabie reached his arms out to begin to reach and drift in a contemplative solo.
The lights came up low on MacKinnon and Lundgren ticking back and forth in the gloom before a fast, precise duet. Once again, the vocabulary was classical. The women were on pointe and the walls of the temple were not falling down.
Mabie and Williams met the women, and the vocabulary remained classical until the beginning of a brief solo for Read. He jumped forward contracting before a moment that looked most like the Peck we would see later, an unusual manège leading to Read, then the other men, running with high steps through the other dancers laying on the ground like an obstacle course. It was not only unusual, it was something that recalled track and field somewhere in America.
The group regathered before being led by Afanasenkov and Chamblee, who touched each of the others to set them running back and forth into the center before leaving. The two danced at an allegro tempo. The roots of his partnering style were there, the support that allowed the woman to change direction. The group came to the center in a frenzy of steps repeated in double time like an insistent stutter. After returning to couples, the ensemble all walked to position to bend over and pose on each of the final notes.
Mabie’s solo was classical, then there were the glimmers of distortion: a pure retiré pose, then an extension pitched to the side. The solo ended in darkness in contemplation rather than rebellion. Two themes that showed up early in Peck’s career: His affection for, and interest in, youth and his decision to adapt to the system (and adapt it to him) rather than smash it apart.
Peck’s rise was rapid. He was promoted to soloist in 2013, likely less for his dancing than to give extra legitimacy to his choreographic career. The closing, and longest, work on the program, Everywhere We Go, was Peck’s sixth ballet for company. It made its debut at the spring gala in May, 2014. He was named resident choreographer two months later.
Everywhere We Go is a forty-two minute, ambitious work with collaborators Peck would work with frequently including a commissioned score by Sufjan Stevens, whose album, Enjoy Your Rabbit, was used by Peck for his sophomore work, Year of the Rabbit. Karl Jensen designed a great backdrop for the work, layers of shifting cutout shapes. Everywhere We Go started with a sextet of men that showed where two years had brought Peck. The men began with their arms in bras bas, which twisted off-kilter into a free position, then moved into gestures flashing into signals like semaphore. You can almost imagine Peck making it up in the studio, working with how his body moved instead of an academic language.
On a cast ten years down the road from its creation, when Peter Walker and Taylor Stanley danced a duet, you could see Peck’s movement molding to different dancers. Stanley is one of the most classical in NYCB in his arm positions; on tham the arms looked classical. On Walker they looked more spidery.
The women appeared on pointe, racing in to a diagonal formation and holding their hands out beckoning. It recalled a distaff version of the drinking companions in Prodigal Son. Peck’s vocabulary for women at the opening stayed more in canon: bourrées, extensions, partnering and promenades with the men. Then as the ballet went on, there were flashes of a freer content, steps with one arm en haut, but the other circling actively.
But Peck was dealing more with scope and sprawl. A section with Indiana Woodward, Chun Wai Chan and the corps sweeping across the stage was largely classical, though the dancers entered by shuffling backwards, pulling each other in. Peck was asking for risk; Chun didn’t come in to support Woodward until she was almost at the end of her balance. You hear that kind of request whenever someone coaches Balanchine, but it rarely makes it to the stage. Perhaps that kind of risk needs the choreographer, or someone who is willing to share in the responsibility, there to encourage it.
The women came in racing one way and the other, in the change of directions Peck often gives to women. It can seem like a metaphor for uncertainty or indecision; not being sure which way to go. Chun and Woodward posed at the center, then exited to reveal Stanley and Megan Fairchild. They danced, but were joined by Emily Kikta, forming a trio of comrades instead of a love relationship. And here Peck gave one of the most baldly academic steps, single turns from fifth position. He must have had to do them in class that day . . .
This led into one of the ballet’s best sections, a tender duet for Walker and Miriam Miller to harp and piano that managed to co-mingle design and meaning. In the middle of their dance, Miller drifted away from Walker into the arms of a man from the ensemble at the side. Then she came back. Then she left again, for another man, but before Miller could completely leave, Miller grabbed her wrist. It was a choreographic exercise; with Peck both playing with echoing and shifting focus to the sides of the stage, and it upended expectations both about the structure of the pas de deux. Even more satisfying, and as allusively as Serenade, without insisting on telling a story, it told a huge story.
The final step Peck gave Walker was both very simple and a striking departure from classicism, a simple jump in parallel with the accent down. Not only is classical ballet turned out, not parallel, the accent is almost always up. The moment is a nothing, but a very meaningful nothing. Brandon Stirling Baker, another frequent collaborator, lit the moment perfectly: the jump into the floor immolated the stage with light.
The ballet moved into duets and groups led by Chan and Woodward, then Stanley and Fairchild, where Stanley passed Fairchild across tham to the side, echoing another recurring theme in Peck’s work, the playfulness of youth. To end the section, Fairchild echoed Walker and did the same jump down.
We were well into the ballet, and Peck was heading farther into vocabulary that felt personal; a jeté with arms that tossed en haut, but then out, seemed like a fusion of Peck’s training and what would come out of his body. As Everywhere We Go went on, those traits filtered from the men to the women. That seemed less tied to an examination of gender typing and more about what, when, and how Peck could transfer movement from his own body onto different bodies.
Peck was pushed early, still had things to prove, and the scale and ambition of Everywhere We Go felt like his gauntlet, thrown down. Woodward led a phalanx of men, Chan led the women as the music soared. As the ensemble leaped and collapsed with legs shooting out and windmilling arms, we saw Peck’s conversation with ballet and academic form.
Emily Kikta danced the solo female role, moving through the ensemble, then throwing her leg up and back riskily into the highest attitude she could, recalling her solo part in Rubies. She raced out as Walker and Miller raced in for moments that felt both classical and suspended: yearns and huge reaches as if they were drifting free. As sprawling as Everywhere We Go is, it helps to view it as a panorama rather than a structure. We are looking at so many lives.
Peck and Baker inserted a lighting trick that felt influenced by David Parsons’ Caught, where the lights go on and off at the apex of jumps. Here, it was at the crest of lifts. They’re harder to do as a light cue; the Caught lifts are triggered by the dancer, not by a timed cue or a light board operator trying to see the dancers in the shadows. This time, the lights went on a hair too early, as Walker was hauling Miller up, not at her height. Their duet ended with them not leaving, nor even fronting the ensemble, but slotting themselves into a formation at the third row on the side. Peck sees most of his ballets as ensembles rather than tiered hierarchies, a viewpoint both Millennial and American.
The three couples did an adage to plangent horns, and the full cast rose up on their toes, but melting to the floor one by one as others raced over and break their fall. They hovered over and tended to those on the ground, another echo of Serenade. The group formed two sides of a square slowly traveling to stage left, while a couple at a time, the women were lifted of in flying jetés, an echo of the finale of The Four Temperaments. Peck isn’t a rebel. He refers to much of NYCB’s repertory in his own work; his attitude towards his antecedents tends to be institutional.
The lights extinguished, but Peck set several finales before the real one. The lights came up on a double solo for Stanley and Walker, which reincorporated the tossed jeté and ended with Walker covering Stanley’s eyes.
The ballet climbed towards its final conclusion; Kikta was spun into fouettés by Walker to start her big solo. All the lead dancers did recapitulations, but the music and the ballet was on a symphonic scale, it was satisfying to see the themes return.
After a large unison section and a grand allegro the music went soft and the piano started to die out. The ballet ended – finally – with a repeat of the melting section with Fairchild the last one down helped by Stanley as the lights went off. This is a ballet that took several views to see beyond its sprawl. Everywhere We Go is long; too long if you have an editor’s soul. But like Alexei Ratmansky’s Namouna or William Forsythe’s Impressing the Czar, sometimes choreographers need to ramble long enough to discover what was on their minds.
Work number twenty-one, Solo, was made in 2021 for the Spring Digital Gala. It was, as the name suggested, a solo made for Anthony Huxley, and a pandemic piece where ambition wasn’t nearly as important as just doing . . . something, anything. The music, Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, may have been obvious, but recorded music for a filmed performance was a given, and it suited the mood of the time.
The piece has been reworked a few ways since then. For the live version, done at the Fall Fashion Gala in 2022, Raf Simons designed a costume that was simple, but with spotted tights and red elements, far noisier than the score. The costume here was all-black and without tights. The piece’s casting is gender-neutral; both Huxley and Sara Mearns have done it. At the end of the season, Naomi Corti made her debut doing the piece for the company.
Corti, who’s carved out an essential place in contemporary work, is a big mover with long lines. Peck’s choreography tilted more to allegro than adagio, but she has a natural physicality to make the meandering choreography lush. She and Huxley had in common an introspective approach, to dance the solo as if it were a soliloquy, and as if we weren’t there.
What may have attracted Peck to the Barber was the seemingly endless musical phrases, and that’s what Peck choreographed. Solo looks more classical despite not being on pointe. All the steps are academic, even the ports de bras largely are. There’s an occasional free element; an elbow knocking on the knee, or a roll to the floor, but even the roll finishes with a clean developpé.
Coming to the shimmering climactic chord in the music, Corti looked at her hand for a moment and walked into small reverences. Huxley did a frenzy of steps and sissones speeding up until a pirouette. Corti sped up also, but into chaînés before stopping herself by putting her hands on the downstage leg. In a short feature on the piece, Huxley mentioned a developpé added for Mearns, so those changes may be a slow evolution rather than a big revision, and there may be more than one version. In all cases, the version Corti did was more successful musically than Huxley’s. Still, one truth about Peck is that he often solves a problem not by working against the issue – such as slowing down the steps for clarity – but by instead leaning into it. Corti ended quietly on the floor at center.
Ballet number 22, Partita, took its bow in early 2022, and might be the last piece in an imaginary trilogy, along with Everywhere We Go and The Times are Racing, of Justin Peck’s America. Like Times, Partita is a sneaker ballet with an almost completely free vocabulary. A clip of Times, with Peck dancing his original part alongside Robbie Fairchild, preserves how Peck moves naturally, movement you can see brought into Partita.
Partita began in hyperactivity, with quick arms on the downbeat, and a push of movement, but then it quieted down. Of the “American trilogy,” all of which are effectively designed, Partita happens in the most striking environment: a world of draped sculptures by Eva LeWitt in luminous colors, and weird sounds and words by Caroline Shaw, that begin with instructions: “to the back, to the side . . . run and near and all around.”
Peck responded with free arm movements that again looked like they were developed by improvisation in the studio: port de bras, dropping, lifting, circling, gathering, like gibberish communication. Though there were solos, originally done by Tiler Peck, and here Indiana Woodward, and two large same-sex duets, more often you would pick out the dancers out in teams or groups. All of the “American Trilogy” are journeys taken together.
Sneaker ballets also can remove gender casting. In the duets for India Bradley and Brittany Pollack (originally Bradley and Claire Kretzschmar) to one for Victor Abreu and KJ Takahashi (originally Taylor Stanley and Harrison Coll), though Peck wasn’t working with gender roles, he was working with the physicality of the bodies in front of him. The men did more lifting, the women more extensions, balances and support, but both duets created intricate sculptures of entwined arms.
When Woodward did a short solo, the other three women joined in. Their drifting arms approximated ballet, but that went right into the duet for Takahashi and Abreu that felt like the one in Times. The main difference is how much of the duet in Times evolved from Peck’s early tap dance training. Both duets used ballet’s coordination and carriage but the vocabulary was completely free, without academic definitions. In Partita the steps felt generated by the tight, breathy vocals. After, dancing with Woodward, Gilbert Bolden III did a walkover almost like a breakdance move.
Peck moved seamlessly in Partita from one striking spatial concept to the next. Moving towards the conclusion, the full cast walked round, then gathered at the front again moving arms speedily like chatter, as they slowly moved back gesturing, but Woodward reaching back to us. Then they rushed forward as the music got louder and louder, wildly spinning one arm like a propeller. There was a recapitulation of earlier material starting with Woodward’s and Bolden’s, then everyone rejoined before finally backing out on the diagonal, arms and chest spread wide as if ready and vulnerable to whatever comes after.
The story and journey of Justin Peck over the last decade has been of someone who was anointed inside the temple, but still felt like an outsider. He’s made more classical ballets, (Belles-Lettres, Pulcinella Variations) but, using both his words and his works as the best evidence, that’s not where his heart seems to lie. The same film mentioned at the beginning of this essay showed the myriad charts and diagrams Peck used to plot his works. What stays consistent from work to work isn’t vocabulary – as we can see, that moves. His method of making a dance, the structure, planning and outlook, is the constant.
copyright © 2024 by Leigh Witchel
In Creases, Solo, Partita, Everywhere We Go – New York City Ballet
Lincoln Center, New York, NY
October 12, 2024
Cover: Dominika Afanasenkov and Preston Chamblee in In Creases. Photo © Erin Baiano.
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