by Leigh Witchel
If George Balanchine avoided time, Jerome Robbins embraced it. Unlike Balanchine’s abstractions that only referenced the world offstage in the most general ways, Robbins’ ballets were about the world outside: how people behaved and what they were thinking. An All-Robbins triple bill showed the continuum Robbins worked on and how that topicality looked decades later.
1970’s “In the Night” was the least temporal of the three. Made as a demi-sequel to “Dances at a Gathering,” Robbins continued his exploration of Chopin. The ballet is simple yet lush: three couples of varying moods each do a pas de deux to one of Chopin’s nocturnes. Even more than in “Dances,” Robbins avoided hints of contemporary manners: Like Balanchine’s works, the world of “In the Night” is centered on the stage.
Sterling Hyltin and Tyler Angle raced and skittered through the first duet. Angle’s strong partnering and Byronic air worked for the part, but in the darkness of Jennifer Tipton’s light plot (or at least what it looks like now) Hyltin seemed to disappear. You couldn’t see her face, and one thing that could have made up for that was movement that seemed to radiate from deep in the back. Yet her limbs seemed to move externally.
Sara Mearns is a natural for the hyperemotional third duet (she danced it a few days later) and a strange fit for the more reserved second. She shot laser beams out of her eyes as she glared. As the music became stormy, Mearns took the cue literally and cranked up for unsupported pirouettes as if “In The Night” were “Allegro Brillante.”
Ask la Cour made his debut; his partnership with Mearns hadn’t worked out its kinks. He was hands-y working with her, and she compensated by trying to do the work herself, hiking on to la Cour’s shoulder at the end of a phrase.
With Mearns in the second duet, Tiler Peck made her New York debut with Jared Angle in the tempestuous third duet. She pushed the drama, taking every opportunity to make the movements as sharp and mercurial as she could.
“Interplay,” from 1945, was Robbin’s second ballet after “Fancy Free.” There’s no set and nothing in the costumes to link it to the forties, but even without period costumes it’s still utterly of its time, from Morton Gould’s blues and jazz-influenced score to the hepcat finger-snapping and social dances within it.
Robbins demanded classical technique, including a contest where each of the four men does one more double tour than the last, but the hardest thing in “Interplay” – as in much of Robbins’ ballets – was being ballet-trained with a Broadway attitude: acting like a fresh-faced hyperenthusiastic juvenile even if you’re not.
Devin Alberda led the first movement with manic energy. Alberda’s tensions with Peter Martins were publicly known and regime change has made a substantial difference for him. He has been getting new roles; if this was part of a run for soloist, it is deserved.
Spartak Hoxha played the goofball who’s a technical whiz in the second movement and turned like a top. The blues-tinged pas in the third movement featured Erica Pereira, another dancer who has been in eclipse. Peter Walker pinch-hit for Joseph Gordon, which gave Pereira the luxury of dancing with someone tall enough for her to let go without worry. She seemed vibrant rather than juvenile.
Of the three ballets, “NY Export: Opus Jazz” is the most unorthodox, the most risky, and the one most mired in its era. First made in 1958 for Robbins’ own Ballets: U.S.A., the year after “West Side Story,” the ballet looked like a rehash. Angry youths seemed as if they were about to break into “When you’re a Jet . . .”
The episodes of the piece deal with sexual tension, but Robbins’ take on sexuality often has a weird aftertaste. Here, it was “West Side Story” meets “The Cage.” After a quintet to percussion for men, Sarah Villwock joined them. Harrison Coll carried and turned her upside down. It felt like a heavy-handed metaphor for just having fucked. And it felt just as uncomfortable as reading the previous sentence. At the end, the guys pitched her into the wings as if throwing her off a roof. Ugh.
The next movement wasn’t any less icky. Robbins’ choreographic motif for this ballet’s version of “Dance at the Gym” was a pelvic thrust used for me-so-horny comedy. That was funnier in the Time Warp. The intimate, bluesy pas de deux with Laine Habony and Walker was unintentionally undercut by his double-casting in “Interplay” as well. It made the two duets on the same program look alike.
The finale used one of Robbins’ favorite devices: a choreographic fugue of everyday movement – snaps and shrugs that went into a salsa the cast danced all in the shoulders rather than the hips.
“NY Export: Opus Jazz” wasn’t done at NYCB until 2005. It could be saved by a cast that could sell it, but the awkwardness of this cast was the same that the NYCB dancers have with “West Side Story.” They’re untrained to do a work that was aimed to a Broadway audience; they looked forced and phony. The faster the tempo, the less artificial they looked, and a few dancers, such as Coll, managed to convince. Christopher Grant threw himself into the steps with a quality recalling Ben Vereen.
A film of the ballet made in 2010 re-costumed it in street clothing instead of matching sweatshirts that looked like a cost-saving maneuver, opened it out and meant that the dancers didn’t have to project to the fourth ring. The only thing it lost was the Ben Shahn backdrops. The smaller scale gave it a new, more naturalistic life.
One reason classical ballets have a longer shelf life is that they stand outside of time; every era gets to see their own time within them. But every generation also needs ballets that speak to how they danced – and lived. They don’t have to grow stale. Instead of becoming dated, “Fancy Free” became a snapshot of the ‘40s. The risk a topical ballet shoulders is aging from art to artifact.
copyright © 2019 by Leigh Witchel
“Interplay,” “In The Night,” “NY Export: Opus Jazz” – New York City Ballet
Lincoln Center, New York, NY
February 5, 2019
Cover: Erica Pereira and Peter Walker in “Interplay.” Photo © Paul Kolnik.
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