by Leigh Witchel
With gems, you’re better off with a perfect trio, duo or solitaire then to drip with bling. Balanchine’s “Jewels” got a hushed performance in two out of three settings, but one that was taut with fantasy.
“Emeralds” featured several debuts for women. Emilie Gerrity’s in the Mimi Paul role in “Emeralds” was fascinating in its reserve. Drifting at the back of the stage during her solo, she gazed downwards as if she and the audience couldn’t see one another. Yet she also hit poses with a quick shock as if she had fallen into bed while dreaming. Her walking duet with Andrew Scordato had echoes of “La Sonnambula.” She looked past him as if she were sleepwalking; her slow walks and ticking arm movements seemed to measure the past.
A veteran in Violette Verdy’s part, Lauren King took her place in a line of successors that are cool, elegant and underrated. Her musicality was precise, hitting a plucked note on each piqué turn in her solo. The opening wrist and hand poses in her solo as the music whirred didn’t recall high fashion modeling, but a game she was playing with herself. Yet the variation ended in a final reveal to us as she tucked aside her skirt to bourrée as if letting us in on an amusing secret.
Daniel Applebaum has partnered King in this role before and his excitable demeanor balanced her calm. He was a neo-romantic, making the most of his mini-variation in the coda and pushing every lunge and pose. King stayed more up and down, pausing to hit a balance as she raced through the corps or posed wrist-to-wrist with him. Their pairing produces a restrained ecstasy.
If the lead women’s solos are, as has been posited, Balanchine’s fantasy of women in private, the trio that forms an interlude in “Emeralds” is public, with two women presented to the audience and braced by a man as if it were dressage.
The pas de trois had a new duet of women: Rachel Hutsell was the more extroverted, reaching far from herself as she posed in arabesque. Olivia MacKinnon raced in to the violins with the mystery of someone searching for something she didn’t realize was no longer there. Dancing alongside them, Spartak Hoxha turned with clean brio.
The final moments of Emeralds felt more like a cortège than ever. The most beautiful part was how the stage diminished as each woman floated into the air, then continued offstage running as if they had never landed.
There were some bobbles (Applebaum and King got stuck in a promenade, Hoxha missed an air turn), but if this cast was figuratively as well as literally green, they inhabited the aqueous, nostalgic world that Balanchine and Fauré laid out for them.
Switching over to “Rubies,” more was less. The corps danced predatorily, the dancers’ pelvises wildly exaggerated as if “Rubies” were “The Cage,” and the ballet were made up of its mannerisms. That got better in the third movement. Because of its speed, it was less overdone.
Sterling Hyltin and Andrew Veyette stepped into the leads for Ashley Bouder and the injured Anthony Huxley. Hyltin’s solo had the lighter touch the rest of the ballet could have used; she also nailed the turns in the coda that have caused more than one ballerina to wipe out.
As he often does, in the lead male role Veyette chose force over line, stomping flat-footed to emphasize a step, whizzing around in no position or doing leg extensions with his shoulders. At the end of their duet instead of a sculpture made of limbs, he bent and manipulated Hyltin’s arms as if they were vacuum hoses.
Emily Kikta didn’t dance to kill as the solo ballerina; she smiled to introduce herself first. When she extended and dipped with four men as they partnered her into contortions, she kept her eye on them, but in a way that suggested we shouldn’t take this as a metaphor, but literally as an acrobatic stunt. After, she came out of it to tower over the men, and hit all her exiting penchées including a final one to six o’ clock. The finale demanded a wilder touch, calling for her to throw her legs sky-high. She did that at full tilt.
“Restraint” and “Sara Mearns” are generally not seen in the same sentence. Yet there we were, watching her give a quietly absorbing performance in “Diamonds.” Did her pairing with the expressive but reticent Russell Janzen calm her down?
All the steps were there, and done fully, but a Mearns “Diamonds” tends to be about pegging the gauge. Yet she didn’t enter the duet loaded for bear. Janzen’s relation to her as he followed her attentively in the pas de deux seemed to be less of a suitor and more of confidante. That made the rapture of their duet beautiful in a different way, as if it were an intense truth told in a whisper.
Mearns is always worth watching in “Diamonds,” because it can contain all her crazy, but it’s just as rewarding to see she doesn’t always need to turn the dial to 11. Even for her, less can be more. But still, she’s Sara Mearns. As the music mounted in excitement during the Scherzo, she couldn’t help herself, hit the accelerator and went to 10.5.
copyright © 2019 by Leigh Witchel
“Jewels” – New York City Ballet
Lincoln Center, New York, NY
September 21, 2019
Cover: Lauren King and Daniel Applebaum in “Emeralds.” Photo © Rosalie O’Connor.
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