by Leigh Witchel
There was almost complete turnover in New York City Ballet’s Robbins/Tanowitz/Peck quadruple bill. Each work had a new leading cast, and the performance added up to a playful evening, starting with Interplay.
That ballet’s new cast made its debut the night prior, and included dancers the company wanted us to watch for, filled out with a few we haven’t seen much of yet. The schoolyard games acted out – follow the leader and leapfrog – provided a natural choreographic device, but also felt like an early instance of one of Robbins’ big tropes: Dancers-Are-Just-Big-Kids. But that’s not just Robbins, that’s theater of the time. Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, Let’s-Put-On-A-Show, how Hollywood and Broadway liked to package performers and performances.
Even more than Fancy Free, which has slowly become unmoored from the 1940s, Interplay gave up looking like its period long ago. There are period moves in the ballet, jitterbugging and snapping fingers while swinging low, but those felt like distant references. When the dancers lined up at the front in shadow, it was less about mood and more about dancing, still you could feel the urge in Andres Zuniga’s jitterbug pose with the whole body cocked. But Interplay as done at NYCB takes place onstage in the present.
In the second movement, David Gabriel shooed everyone away, shrugging his shoulders before doing perfect multiple pirouettes. Sometimes he clapped to acknowledge his skill, sometimes, like Ashton’s Blue Boy in Les Patineurs, he shrugged as if it were nothing. But the pirouettes were always perfect. Gabriel flew through a manège as well; he has technique for days, and his promotion at the end of the season was no surprise.
After being noticed early on, then being sidelined from a back injury, Alston Macgill is getting roles again. She did the main, bluesy duet with Victor Abreu, and was a clean, light contrast to his sober innocence. In that pas de deux, you can almost imagine Robbins in the studio, hearing the pianist play trills, imagining the next step and almost reflexively going on relevé to do bourrées . Were it Ashton, he would have had the woman lifted while she did battements serrés.
The final movement is all competition; we’re American, we love contests. Still, it’s in teams and not for blood. Robbins healed some playground traumas by making sure the final two women were picked at the same time so no one was picked last. The women spun forward in chaînés forward to see who went farthest. This is a community, not Lord of the Flies, but Dances at a Gathering Junior.
The men’s contest for tours that followed was dodgy. Abreu had trouble with two doubles in succession. They should have let him go first (the first man does one, the second two, etc.) and let Zuniga do the back to back tours instead. Gabriel nailed three perfectly but KJ Takahashi, who is a whiz at turns, had bad luck. He was off his axis by the second, still managed three on a single preparation but had to stop and recover to do the fourth tour.
Both Joseph Gordon and Indiana Woodward made debuts in Other Dances. They were a good match physically, and he didn’t overpower her. She displaces enough much mental space on the stage to hold her own.
This worked better for Gordon’s demeanor than Rubies. Gordon immersed himself, as he usually does, in the feel of the ballet. From the seats, he seemed flummoxed by the casual play and light touch of Rubies, but instinctively got the elegance and more deliberate principal dancer vibe of Other Dances.
He and Woodward danced the opening like a single breath. Technically both have the chops. He had beautiful elevation in jumps, barreling to an open attitude and soaring round the stage. Her fillip was maintaining aplomb while ending turns in the most difficult, open positions.
Gordon’s not a light or casual dancer; most of the jokes in his first solo didn’t hit a bullseye. Ironically, the one that landed is the one a lot of others muff; spinning out to getting dizzy. It looked carefully planned rather than spontaneous, but the angles and timing worked. Woodward’s reading was sunny but nuanced. When she stopped to listen to pianist Elaine Chelton during her solo, she created a change of mood.
Both Gordon and Woodward entered for their second solo more or less the same way, but the man’s variation has more big turns, and grand allegro, which Gordon soared into. The woman’s solo was made of balances and extensions, but also folk-flavored moments, where Woodward walked on pointe with a bent leg, then slapped the floor.
It’s always interesting how Robbins had Natalia Makarova and Mikhail Baryshnikov dance to the same music repeated. It was a choreographic exercise in musicality and gendered steps, though nowadays, I think we’d conclude that Baryshnikov or Makarova’s pronoun was Star.
Though her execution was lovely, Woodward didn’t have much folk in her, rather it was classically sculpted. Countless couples have done this since the original, but it would be interesting to see a reading that pointed up the character and Slavic elements in the duet, or the myriad things one could glean about Chopin: the lineage from salon dances of the early 20th century (when Chopin was used because any pianist available likely knew a Chopin waltz or two) to Robbins’ fascination with the composer. There’s more possible in the duet than a vehicle.
Pam Tanowitz’ Gustave le Gray No. 1 seems like an inscrutable pairing with Other Dances on paper. But it made more sense than the simple logistics of two piano ballets. The piece was originally a 2019 commission for The Kennedy Center’s Ballet Across America, a quartet using a man and a woman each from Miami City Ballet and Dance Theatre of Harlem. Caroline Shaw’s score was named after the pioneering 19th century French photographer.
The ballet was performed here by four tall women, Naomi Corti, Emily Kikta, Ruby Lister and Mira Nadon, with all but Corti making their New York debuts. They were in soft slippers, dressed in simple but ingenious blood red costumes by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung, built of a leotard and tights with an outer layer that was open at the sides, so that it fluttered interestingly and managed to both move and stay close to the body at the same time.
Stephen Gosling played gentle chords on the piano as the women began by doing neat, repeated battements, and port de bras that almost became obsessive. Throughout the work they used wide arms with flat hands that recalled Merce Cunningham’s work. Seemingly out of nowhere, Gosling started playing quotes from the Chopin we just heard, and suddenly the coupling with Other Dances made elegant sense. Shaw’s score moved into a variation of that theme.
Again seemingly out of nowhere, the four women rolled the piano across the stage; he walked, still playing.
Corti broke off and did a solo at the back, then exited. When she returned, it was with another stool for him to sit on. It would have been fabulous, though, if they had figured out how to get the stool from the other side back to him. To close, the women returned to the repeated battements of the opening and gathered at the piano on the final chords.
This is the sort of work Tanowitz does well, a bracing examination of conventions. But where her first NYCB commission, Bartók Ballet, was sunk by the thorny music, Shaw’s contemplative score let you focus on what Tanowitz was examining without double the work. Gustave was just spicy enough: pithy, witty and a much better fit into NYCB’s repertoire. It felt different without feeling alien.
From 2012, Year of the Rabbit was Justin Peck’s second work for NYCB, a quick follow up to In Creases. The air of precocity in the piece wasn’t just artistic energy but a necessary career move. At NYCB you need to bust out of the gate as a bright young thing.
You could see the invention immediately with the formation of a viaduct created by the women standing in attitude front with their feet resting on the men’s shoulders. There were distant echoes both of MacMillan’s Danses Concertantes and André Beaurepaire’s scenery for Ashton’s Scènes de Ballet. Shapes! Patterns! Activity!
There was a new cast of leads, with Emma Von Enck leading the first movement, playing off the ensemble formation, then a solo for Chun Wai Chan. Like Interplay, Rabbit looked as if it happened on a playground. People tapped shoulders as if playing tag, but like Robbins early on, Peck used playground games both as a device and an emotional state. The orchestra scratched and the dancers made a loud “ssh!” as they left to end the movement.
Takahashi opened the next movement with a solo; while six couples made formations in counterpoint. Peck’s palette early on was more academic than it became, with energetic, neoclassical shapes and brisk allegro work. Peter Martins was running the company, you could see Peck picking up those influences that he moved away from after time.
Miriam Miller had to go in for Isabella LaFreniere, she and Chan stood at either side of the stage reaching with a yearning rather than nervous quality. What Peck didn’t pick up from Martins was sour, violent emotions in partnering. Peck’s always been more of a naif; like Robbins, his couples are young and innocent. Even so, from early on his partnering work had a contrary, pushmi-pullyu quality: the woman might jeté facing one way, and the man would stop her impulse and carry her the other.
Takahashi ran off and disappeared into the corps before we picked him out again. Peck was still in the corps as well, and he thought like a corps member: he cast people he knew well, and though he choreographed solos, hierarchy was fuzzy. When the full cast assembled at the finale, the principals weren’t in the front. They appeared later from the back, almost as if they had been concealing themselves.
Sufjan Stevens’ music had several photo-flash endings, but Peck was able to navigate them. He had Chan and Miller walk off after another short duet, then did something surprising enough to be a classic Bright Young Thing maneuver: En masse, but divided into trios, two men slid a woman across the stage, and repeated to build up to a slow progression to one side and back.
Harrison Coll met Von Enck with more pushmi-pullyu partnering. The ballet suited her strength and accuracy. Coll popped and caught her, then went to Alexa Maxwell. There was a ton going on; Maxwell and Coll gave way to Miller and Chan at center, with others racing in and out of the wings. A lot of Peck’s invention here was in patterning and the use of space. The cast lay down in the wings while Chan and Miller danced for each other. There was a strange, almost threatening confrontation at the end of this section, but it evaporated as quickly as it arrived.
The finale of the work ended in silhouette, with Von Enck racing through a presto. The music whined, and she was carried off. The closing moment of the ballet was her once again pressed into the air by the men before a blackout.
Still, the gem of the ballet, as with Christopher Wheeldon’s breakout work, Polyphonia, was when, in the midst of all the ingenuity and energy, Peck went simple. Before the finale, he set the adagio for Alexa Maxwell and Harrison Coll to droning music. She leaned on Coll’s back and he carried her to arabesque and promenade. Maxwell had a natural sense of the atmosphere. They embraced on the final notes for a duet that was youthful, but haunting.
copyright © 2024 by Leigh Witchel
Interplay, Other Dances, Gustave le Gray No. 1, Year of the Rabbit – New York City Ballet
Lincoln Center, New York, NY
May 9, 2024
Cover: Emma Von Enck and New York City Ballet in Year of the Rabbit. Photo © Erin Baiano.
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