by Leigh Witchel
Both casts of New York City Ballet’s Ratmansky/Dove/Reisen/Robbins quadruple bills had several debuts. Half of the cast of Ulysses Dove’s Red Angels was new, but first Davide Riccardo began in silence, rippling his chest. Emilie Gerrity waited behind him until the music started, when he spun her to each sides of an imaginary square. Riccardo was having trouble staying in form; his supporting leg was jittery in turns.
When the music repeated, the new dancers, Taylor Stanley and India Bradley, entered in a duet. Bradley is very leggy, and the tightness of her leg work was what she showed off. Stanley’s coordination lives more in his upper body, so there were fewer parallels in the pairing of the Stanley with Bradley, then of Stanley cast with Riccardo, as they both have a similar elegance in their demeanor.
In the section where the back scrims formed a corridor, Riccardo took the hint and did a runway walk to enter. Stanley certainly can do one, but didn’t. Stanley tilted even farther in the developpé, with a higher leg. But thay kept it determined, not super fierce.
Everyone danced in spotlights, which summed up the work as a fierce showpiece. In her final solo, Gerrity pushed her attack and attitude. But we knew it was her because of her smile when she came into line. Red Angels felt solid and didn’t wear out its welcome, but even seeing it twice, it didn’t feel more consequential: all glittery, sexy surface rather than substantial core.
Playtime is literally glittery. Alejandro Gómez Palomo’s crystal-encrusted costumes feel like its main calling card. Where the fashion seemed to have little to do with Gianna Reisen’s steps, her choreography felt firmly built on Solange Knowles’ score. When the music lowed, David Gabriel moved his head like a cow.
Unfortunately, the dance frayed with repeated viewing rather than gelled. The more listenings Knowles’ score gets, the more it feels turgid and undistinguished. Palomo’s costumes don’t integrate into the work. The panniered hips of some of the dancers looked like the tops of pocketbooks. The lavish use of crystal made a few striking poses, but a lot of detail got lost in the sparkle. I finally noticed this time that both KJ Takahashi’s and Mary Thomas MacKinnon’s costumes had neckties.
This was the same cast as the previous performance except with Olivia Bell instead of Bradley, which leads to an awkward question. Does the company slot off certain roles as Black? It’s certainly flirted with that in the past; it felt as if Albert Evans inherited Agon from Mel Tomlinson for mainly that reason. If the company is doing that, intentionally or otherwise, does that create and preserve opportunities, or make a casting ghetto?
Glass Pieces had a mostly new cast. The sextet that merged and emerged is usually as faceless as the pulsing crowd in the opening Rubric, but Dominika Afanasenkov is special. She just glows onstage. Even in the anonymity, seeing this more than once let you focus on the dancers, watching them walk “normally” in an unguarded moment that hinted at the person behind the stage persona: one person intent, another back on her heels.
Ava Sautter made her debut with Aarón Sanz in the sinuous Facades pas de deux. Tall and leggy, Sautter looked like the women Robbins cast in the part. She was also dramatic, making sharp poses in the half-light.
In the Akhnaten finale, Robbins didn’t bother trying to get under the skin of the repetition and the piece’s slow build. Instead, he used it as an impulse rather than a structure and made Act 3: Everybody Dances. It boiled up to a stereotypical finale, but some of the stereotypes have not aged well. Glass’ faux-tribal percussion and Robbins setting the men posturing and stalking, and the women drifting, felt more like Ann Miller crooning in Small Town Girl that she loves the sound of a tom-tom, “Primitive though it may be.”
Pictures at an Exhibition had no debuts, just replacements. Mira Nadon once again went in for Sara Mearns and Tyler Angle encored his part instead of the scheduled Adrian Danchig-Waring. The work opened very sharply, with Tiler Peck and Roman Mejia making flash pictures in the opening. Nadon matched the tempestuousness of her solo to The Gnome, using her wrists to make angles, or slapping the floor.
The mood of the solo is yet another example of how driven by the music Ratmansky is. The wind-tossed ending is right in the trills in the piano. Later on, there was a dramatic duet for Sanz and Ashley Laracey where she pushed him to the floor, then they felt their way blindly to the back. That wasn’t a permanent state, it was temporary, keyed to the music and a music change. All impulses were musical; everything was what Ratmansky heard.
Angle and Unity Phelan danced a very intricate duet. Coming at him, he pressed her into an overhead “bird” lift; most of the partnering required complicated grips. That was problem for Angle, who was generally in form all season. Peck trilled her foot through a speedy variation, which led to a quartet for the other women. You might think he would have given the lower register music of Bydlo to the men, but instead asked the women to use their weight and galumph about in emboîtés, or lift their legs high, yet drive their weight into the floor at the same time.
Then Ratmansky gave the Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks to the men, speeding on the high notes. He saw the quintet as comic and antic, racing and shuffling, the guys jumping one or two at a time like popcorn. Before that, Mejia got another show piece, a solo that mixed sudden huge jumps with slow finishes.
After a bright allegro featuring two rising dancers, Andres Zuniga and Rommie Tomasini, Peck and Mejia floored the pedal in a lightning fast duet they took at a breakneck pace. Three couples, working through trios and other switchoffs, found one another with Angle and Zuniga threading through while Tomasini and Phelan waited at the side. Even with slower sections, Pictures is a very robust allegro ballet; it barely feels adagio.
Andrew Veyette danced a pounding solo, seeming to run in the air, finally doing barrel turns with an interesting delay in the timing of the working leg. The others drifted in one by one before a dramatic duet for Nadon and Angle. She deliberately threw herself around before he spun her off and followed her, which worked up to The Great Gates of Kiev.
Unity Phelan touched the earth, Ratmansky’s homage to both La Sonnambula and Dances at a Gathering. But instead of the cast standing still in tableau, the dancers switched places, searching in the twilight.
Even with the exalted music that refers to Kyiv and the tangential references in the material to Ukraine, the retrofitted ending projecting the Ukrainian flag felt forced. Wassily Kandinsky, whose art formed the projections, was Russian but was raised and educated in Odessa. But Mussorgsky’s main cause as a composer was native Russian art.
Ukraine is Ratmansky’s cause, and his passion is understandable, but when you set aside politics and add up the artistry, the change didn’t actually do anything for the ballet. Like Mussorgsky’s vignettes, Ratmansky was working in miniature, painting a series of small musical portraits, not creating a message work. It’s like two decades ago when for a time, everything was about 9/11, even when it wasn’t.
copyright © 2024 by Leigh Witchel
Pictures at an Exhibition, Red Angels, Play Time, Glass Pieces – New York City Ballet
Lincoln Center, New York, NY
May 22, 2024
Cover: Ava Sautter and Aarón Sanz in Glass Pieces. Photo © Erin Baiano.
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