by Leigh Witchel
It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it. The Masters at Work: Balanchine & Robbins III program featured Jerome Robbins’ last ballet for New York City Ballet, “Brandenburg,” returning to the repertory after 15 years. It closed a triple bill of major works, but none of those ballets were foolproof. They all depended on getting the tone right.
When the curtain rose, “Brandenburg” looked like “Goldberg Lite.” The costumes, by Holly Hynes, seemed to be similarly abstracted and simplified from period costume: colored vests, white jabots and tights for the men, colored bodices, white hair bows for the women. Robbins dipped into choice movements from Bach’s series of six concertos. The jukebox picks made the idea feel less like a score and more like a potpourri.
First up was the busy third concerto, with the corps en masse, doing bouncy demi-pliés. Those turned into a motif. Roman Mejia entered, racing with and tossing Emma von Enck. Both were energetic, and Mejia pushed all the way through the ballet. It was an interesting barometer that he chose to sell it so hard.
The corps bowed and exited, leaving the pair to do an adagio. Side note: Bach never wrote down an adagio for the concerto; the score only contains two chords. The musicians were likely expected to improvise an extended cadenza. The adagio Robbins used is the Largo from BWV 1021 Sonata for Violin and Continuo in G Major. This delicate duet covered the stage and culminated with von Enck held overhead, angled downwards, before Mejia carried her off. Robbins echoed Bach’s finale of running triplets with the ensemble jogging, but like most things in “Brandenburg,” for too long. If Arlene Croce had accused Doris Humphrey of reducing Bach to a nest of mixing bowls, this was Robbins reducing the composer to triple time.
Unity Phelan and Adrian Danchig-Waring followed with another duet, to the andante from the second concerto. The pas de deux, based on walking, was nicely done if forgettable. Both dancers did small pas de bourrées courus backwards, Danchig-Waring echoing on relevé what Phelan did on pointe, but again, Robbins had them go on, as if the adagio was longer that he had ideas for. Phelan and Danchig-Waring walked to opposite sides to leave.
The final movement from the first concerto was allotted to four couples from the ensemble. Two couples danced charming duets, and the other two performed a quartet. Again, things got hearty, with the group cartwheeling to the trumpets and the women being spun on the floor before being yanked into their partners’ arms. Because he was using a closing movement, but not as his close, Robbins staged the curtain call for the couples to the ending Bach composed, giving the couples a final reverence.
Von Enck and Mejia, along with Phelan and Danchig-Waring, danced a quartet with happy feet, and again Mejia sold it. In these moments of injecting a little Broadway into classicism, he recalled Damian Woetzel, who likely recalled Jacques d’Amboise. There are lineages. The choreographic motif for Robbins’ finale was a backwards shuffle done butt-first by the whole cast, that Robbins hammered on until it got a laugh.
The Bach that Robbins chose for this outing was some of his danciest, but unlike the crystalline, spiraling rhythms of the double violin concerto that Balanchine used in his singular Bach outing, much of the music Robbins picked had folk rhythms. The churning repetitions of the finale of the third concerto feel almost like a hurdy-gurdy, and Robbins responded with a heartiness that felt forced. With all the bouncing, neat lines and changing formations, “Brandenburg” felt like a kind of dressage. If Robbins wanted to put Bach through his paces, it also ended up equally the other way round.
Peter Walker made his debut in “Fancy Free,” while Malorie Lundgren went in for Nieve Corrigan as the third passer-by. Perhaps the biggest surprise was in a small role, a curtain announcement stated that Andrew Veyette would perform in place of Maxwell Read as the bartender.
The three sailors, Daniel Ulbricht, Walker and Sebastían Villarini-Velez, worked well as a trio, forming three distinct types in the opening. Villarini-Velez took his mime for “woman” and made it really curvy. Ulbricht’s movement was bright and staccato, as if he just wanted to dance! Walker was tall and gawky in a sweet way. All three are good performers, and Villarini-Velez, like Mejia, gets the Broadway elements in Robbins’ work.
Ulbricht was an applause hound in his variation. Before he jumped off the bar, he signaled, “Watch this!” There were fireworks from the opening tour into a split to the final balance. Walker isn’t a showy technician; you could tell he was slightly thrown by having to do double tours between the bar stools. At the end of his solo Indiana Woodward gave him a little clap as she might for a puppy who did a trick. Villarini-Velez punched the Danzón hard, but he was vivid, and rhythmic. Lauren Collett and Woodward were much more gentle about facing a choice at the end, with the prospect of leaving one man out. And in his surprise turn, Veyette didn’t try and steal focus, yet he did fill out the character. He played the bartender as hunched and rickety, and he couldn’t be bothered when the sailors fought.
As the first passer-by, Collett’s tone was both a little patrician, and a little threatened. It wasn’t off the deep end, but the part doesn’t hold together as well as when the woman acts as if she hasn’t lost control of the situation.
Woodward was elegant as the second passer-by in the purple dress, but similarly she and Walker shaded the duet as being about consent. This woman has always set boundaries (she removes roving hands, as does the first woman) but when the two women confer later, they’re talking with amusement about which sailor they’d each like. In their pas de deux, Woodward also lets Walker press her overhead and dives into his arms, to be flipped upside down. If the dance becomes too much about Don’t Touch Me There, you question why she’s continuing to dance with him at all.
The off tone could just be this cast finding their way into the ballet. Villarini-Velez and Walker overplayed the fight that bridged the first and second variations. It took too long and it was weird for Walker’s character, who’s the sweetest of them. What happened after the women left seemed more like it, when Villarini-Velez came at Walker, and Walker braced himself for a punch. It may be that, approaching 80 and moving onwards, “Fancy Free” can’t ever be anything but a commentary on how the time of performance views 1944.
“Agon” started out Mannerist. Now that it’s drawing social security past its 65th birthday, its distance can lead to a lot of telegraphing about how mid-century modern it is. There are better ways to get that across.
It was a tall cast; standing next to Russell Janzen, Walker seemed short. Even so, he was taller than usual in the first pas de trois solo, but right temperamentally for the wrong-way breakdown of courtly dance. He has long, angular limbs but phrased his solo smoothly, and got the soft shoe influences as he chacha-ed his feet back and forth. His long torso made the back curves work as well. Corrigan made her debut as one of the two women accompanying him along with Mary Thomas MacKinnon, and was so Bambi-like with her stretchy limbs she almost took a flop after a jeté.
Isabella LaFreniere smiled during the second pas de trois, except when she had to do the hairy balances in the entrée, but she made them. Her solo was avid and she used the space. When she dropped into plié in second position, she popped her arches way out.
Her consorts, Jules Mabie and Davide Riccardo paired well. They are both very loose with a big attack and similar in height, but almost stereotypically dark and fair.
The pas de deux in “Agon” needs tension. From Stravinsky’s atonal score to the casting of Arthur Mitchell and Diana Adams, Balanchine was creating a world onstage that threw the assumptions of the audience. Miriam Miller had the patrician elegance of Adams, and more (well, tons of) pliability, but none of the “nervous intensity” that Mitchell recalled. She was placid, and Russell Janzen is not one to push his partners. Instead of going for broke on the turn in the opening and diving to hook her foot somewhere around his shoulder or head, Miller hooked round Janzen’s waist.
The duet was at its most ambivalent and interesting when she was slightly off her leg in an extension to the side. She rested her leg on his shoulder, and he had to adjust his head uncomfortably to compensate. It had an unplanned energy the rest of their duet did not. Each of the program’s ballets felt off tone that night. Tone can come from the choreography, the dancing or the delivery, but the right one is needed. In “Agon” that needs to be in the movement. It should live on shaky, uncertain ground.
copyright © 2023 by Leigh Witchel
“Fancy Free,” “Agon,” “Brandenburg” – New York City Ballet
Lincoln Center, New York, NY
May 23, 2023
Cover: Roman Mejia and Emma Von Enck in “Brandenburg.” Photo © Erin Baiano.
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