by Leigh Witchel
Not every dance is best with live music. Two works on the Visionary Voices program at New York City Ballet exchanged musical states: “Emanon – In Two Movements” went from recorded music to live. “Partita” went in the other direction from live music to recorded. Both dances benefited from the change.
But the evening led off with a new work, Pam Tanowitz’ “Law of Mosaics,” with a commissioned score by Ted Hearne, who also conducted.
“Law of Mosaics” began in a pale gray dawn with three men, their backs to us. A sharp sound of strings and the stage brightened. They turned to face us and do little, tight steps, then a shrugging jog. Hearne’s score incorporated silence and pauses, and Tanowitz made those integral by choreographing through them. Miriam Miller entered on the first silence and stated a back tendu. Silence, again, as the dancing continued. The music resumed with an abrupt sawing, and went off and on and off and on.
Miller raised or tapped her back foot against the ground, then shuffled to the side, or spun, and did sissonne after sissonne. All in silence. What it didn’t look as if Tanowitz had given her, or any of them yet, was a reason why.
In her prior commission for the company, “Bartók Ballet,” Tanowitz rebelled against almost every ballet convention, here she assented to one of the biggest: the pas de deux. And not just a pas de deux, a duet for one of the company’s main ballerinas, Sara Mearns, with Russell Janzen. She came onstage chasséing to and fro as the strings buzzed and sawed.
It was a duet of shadowing more than support, with Janzen more often mirroring or echoing Mearns. She held his hand and walked him round, then he came to her to offer support in a simple promenade. She did the same for him as the music whined like dying bees. She left him, drifting away in bourrées pointing enigmatically as she disappeared. Left alone, he did a slow solo, at one point collapsing over on his haunches as if exhausted.
Seemingly out of nowhere, the score quoted one of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, but chopped into pieces. Mearns returned from the other side several minutes later, bourréeing back in. The steps became less phrased and like the music, more blenderized. As they danced together, the other dancers rotated in couples in the wings, barely noticeable.
Mearns walked away to the side and four couples danced slowly in light and shadow as the music went turgid. Then it sawed to an apex as the cast threw themselves into turning assemblés. Tanowitz gave a brief nod to the laundry list of steps that the audience wouldn’t mind seeing for the ticket cost: Preston Chamblee did turns in second position; Adrian Danchig-Waring, a manège. Ruby Lister, known from the Disney documentary “On Pointe” and newly promoted to corps, was given a solo of small jumps with contained but changing arms and hands. To end, she rolled backwards to slot in with Christopher Grant and Isabella LaFreniere for a trio. Janzen escorted them off, saluting towards the other side of the stage with a curved arm as authoritative as a Roman Senator’s.
But that wasn’t the end. Tanowitz doesn’t really believe in beginnings and ends. Everything is the middle.
Mearns removed her pointe shoes and returned barefoot. She moved one leg up the other as if scratching, bouncing slowly and laying out into a slow sustained arabesque. Gesturing, posing, she slowly quoted the mime phrase we know as Myrtha’s command in “Giselle.” Dance. Then a quote from Melancholic’s solo. This was time alone on stage for Mearns, so of course she made it into something juicy. But that was Mearns, not Tanowitz. It could have been the phone book. She lay down, we heard a string pluck, the lights went black and the curtain fell.
Like “Bartók Ballet,” “Law of Mosaics” was anything but easy to dance. In this company so pinned to kinetic phrases and musicality, Tanowitz’ work has been neither kinetic nor musical. She focused on conventions, mechanics and construction, so the dancers wound up forcing out the movement phrases as if they were the last bit of toothpaste in the tube and the results looked labored. She asks questions about ballet others might not. Still, an unfair, yet also very fair question: Would you want to see this again?
Jamar Roberts’ “Emanon – In Two Movements” now has Wayne Shorter’s score played live by the orchestra. It’s an improvement. 180º from Tanowitz, this work was nothing but movement phrases. The dancers leaned into the dancing, what else was there to do? Unity Phelan made her opening solo an essay in light and fluid pointe work. Emily Kikta and Peter Walker pushed the accenting in their duet. On to Indiana Woodward catching the beat in the music to flick her leg skywards.
Jonathan Fahoury’s solo was both fluid and obsessively step-for-note. It was followed by a complex duo for Woodward and von Enck, then Kikta and Phelan, then Jovani Furlan playing with the timing. However, through bad luck, Anthony Huxley’s absence forced his central part to be reduced to the bare minimum (one short passage kept, a solo and presence in the finale cut) so it could be pinch-hit by Victor Abreu.
On second viewing, “Emanon” was still long and impressively danced, but as Bessie Schönberg said thousands of year ago in choreography workshops, “Choreography begins at the trio.” By that measure, “Emanon” was short on choreography as well as concepts. It was about the mystique of the dancers and it relied on them to sell the dance.
in “Gustave Le Gray No. 1.” Photo credit © Erin Baiano.
A second piece by Tanowitz, “Gustave le Gray No. 1,” was briefer and more fluid than “Law of Mosaics,” both factors an improvement. It was performed with two guest dancers from Dance Theatre of Harlem, Alexandra Hutchinson and Anthony Santos. Naomi Corti was the night’s hero, not only having to replace Mira Nadon in “Law of Mosaics,” but also Huxley here.
The dancers started lined up by the piano, still figures wearing red robes. Their costumes by Reid Bartleme and Harriet Jung seemed like simple unitards, but with free panels secured at the shoulder and leg. Tanowitz had them repeatedly lift their legs to the side; you could see the costume flow.
This dance itself had a sense of flow even as the cast ran from one place to the next. Tanowitz used another score with familiar quotes, this time the Chopin Mazurka (Op. 17 No. 4) from “Other Dances.” That was when it hit you on the head that this was Tanowitz’ deconstruction of a piano ballet.
If “Gustave le Gray No.1” was fragmented, it couldn’t help but be more romantic than “Law of Mosaics.” The dancers looked much less labored and more purposeful, and the ballet was more bracing than numbing.
Unexpectedly in a move both gimmicky and appropriate, the dancers all slowly moved the piano across the stage as Stephen Gosling kept playing. Corti walked past the others to do turns, left the stage, and once the others got the piano to the other side, brought out another piano bench for him.
After that, Tanowitz kept things hermetic. The cast repeated the steps, including the extensions, from the beginning, and ended by spinning and coming back to the piano, in lurid red like bloody sentinels, to end.
The music for “Gustave le Gray No.1” was composed by Caroline Shaw, the same composer who did the vocal score for Justin Peck’s “Partita.” The ensemble she’s part of, Roomful of Teeth, sang the first few performances live. Now, the ballet is performed to a recording. Counterintuitively, it was an improvement, allowing for an extreme range of dynamics, particularly loudness, that a live performance couldn’t muster. Eva LeWitt’s draped sculptures turned the stage into a strange, luminous cavern of rainbows.
Casting was largely the same as at the premiere with the swap of Woodward for Tiler Peck. The cast has become even more of an ensemble, breathing with one another.
There’s very little academic vocabulary in “Partita.” Mr. Peck’s heart seems to lie outside of the danse d’école towards free, wild motion. Still, there’s an exquisite moment when India Bradley placed her hands on Claire Kretzschmar for support as she extended her leg with the ease and articulation of an arm. And did it again. The dancers’ attack also felt more purposeful. As the voices got louder and louder, Bradley and Kretzschmar tore into a run to the back.
Peck and the music moved from exaltation to exhalation. Harrison Coll and Taylor Stanley tossed one another round to male voices sounding like short expulsions of breath, “Ooh ah ah unh.” Coll and Stanley danced very well together, Coll a little – but only a little – rougher. The men ceded the stage to Woodward, again the music became hymn-like.
She danced a duet with Chun Wai Chan that dissolved into a slow revolving line for the cast as Woodward circled behind it. Then the music became chatter and the dancers moved rapidly to echo it.
The recorded music was able to get much louder than the live performances. It crescendoed so loud that Peck’s choreography to it – arms rotating like a propeller of a plane taking off – suddenly made sense.
Chan and Woodward broke past as if clearing a runway, and to end they backed out slowly, looking up. The Exalted Upwards Gaze is a Peck Cliché, but in this cathedral of sound, this vast, loud tabernacle, he finally earned it.
copyright © 2022 by Leigh Witchel
“Law of Mosaics,” “Emanon – In Two Movements,” “Gustave Le Gray No. 1,” “Partita” – New York City Ballet
Lincoln Center, New York, NY
April 23, 2022
Cover: Sara Mearns in “Law of Mosaics.” Photo credit © Erin Baiano.
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