by Leigh Witchel
When Maria Kowroski retired from New York City Ballet in 2021, she stepped quickly into a new role, Acting Artistic Director of New Jersey Ballet.
The company, based about 45 minutes from New York City, was established in 1958 and up until then was still run by its founder, Carolyn Clark. The reins were passed fully to Kowroski shortly before Clark’s death last year for Kowroski to steward the company back from the pandemic.
The company’s home theater is in Morristown, but it came within a stop or two of Kowroski’s old stamping grounds when it played Newark. The New Jersey Performing Arts Center has a smaller stage, the Victoria Theater, Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch Stage, with excellent sightlines and at 511 seats, the perfect size. To show what’s possible with a little help from her friends, Kowroski brought a triple bill, including two company commissions, from colleagues of hers at NYCB.
The imported work, Justin Peck’s Murder Ballades, opened the show. Done originally for the L.A. Dance Project in 2013, it’s a work for three couples with vibrant décor by Sterling Ruby. With the name, you might assume it was to Kurt Weill, but the score is by Bryce Dessner, based on American folk music of the 1930s and 40s. Dessner and Peck collaborated three years later on the ill-fated (and better than it got credited for) The Most Incredible Thing. Peck is a contemporary choreographer in the most literal sense; he does his best work to American composers from his era.
Murder Ballades had the youthful, precocious energy of early Peck. The ballet began with the cast racing in to sit down and put on sneakers. The L.A. Dance Project is a contemporary group, which gave Peck both a reason and excuse to not use pointe shoes. Still the steps, sautés and soutenus, were ballet. You could tell almost immediately, and these dancers also looked ballet-trained in them. There was a knock in Dessner’s score; Vinicius Freire entered with his hand upraised to echo that knock and Felipe Valentini knocked on the last note before meeting Ilse Kapteyn for a pas de deux.
The two danced one of Peck’s sweetly adolescent duets in socks, which started by taking off their shoes as if at the beach. Valentini’s line flickered in and out; at the speed Peck was asking for, Valentini’s arms weren’t usually extended en haut. Still, he and Kapteyn set the simple tone of unaffected pleasure in the pas de deux and put it over. This is an early work; there are a lot more Dancers-Are-Just-Big-Kids dances to come in the timeline. Valentini and Kapteyn ended by retrieving their shoes, looping arms round each other’s shoulders and walking off together.
The other four dancers went into a double duet, tossing and switching to a vigorous allegro. They came into unison, then Emily Barrows, alone in red, did a solo to get carried off by Valentini at the end. Where there’s youth, play often follows, and the cast ran into a line in center to switch places as in a schoolyard game, tilting to the floor.
That playful atmosphere lived check by jowl with a score inspired by songs about crimes of passion. Peck obliquely referenced this in a more mysterious duet done by Catherine Whiting and David Lopena that threatened collapse before recovering. Still, you would have needed to read the program notes to connect those dots.
The finale followed a well-traveled path; a series of vigorous solos with one person leaving as another entered. It moved into a unison phrase based on the introduction and the dancers fell to the ground for a blackout.
The work was well-chosen to start the program. The cast had the spirit, and the elevation, to make it look good. Murder Ballades is early on in Peck’s career, only a year after Year of the Rabbit, and you could see similarities to Robbins in the boisterous, youthful air of the work. But in the choice of sneakers and the youthful atmosphere, you could also see the road from here to The Times are Racing.
Harrison Ball’s Purcell Suite was first done in 2022, and was his first commission. He kept the designs in the family, getting costumes from fashion designer Zac Posen. Posen did his fiancé proud, turning out black and midnight blue dresses. They were simple, and likely budget-friendly, but elegant and moved beautifully.
Ball took a potpourri of Purcell, largely sections from Dido and Aeneas and Bonduca. Seven women posed and contracted in unison in a fluid contemporary ballet palette. The dancers looked glamorous moving from side to side on the stage, shaking and rolling arms. Ball concentrated more on arms than legs, which was flattering.
The long, smooth skirts and the vocabulary, as well as the fluid transitions, recalled Jiří Kylián. A group section to an aria flowed into a duet. Five new women came on for an adagio and rushed off. The original septet came back for a section in unison. The atmosphere was one of glamorous melancholy; arm poses and modeling from a high-class perfume ad. The women were strongly engaged in their centers, but Ball’s ballet background showed through in how pulled up they were.
Whether true or not, Purcell Suite looks as if it were commissioned to specifications: please make a work to recorded music that uses all the women, isn’t too exposing, so let’s do it in soft slippers instead of pointe shoes, and please make the dancers look good. Props to Ball for acing the assignment by delivering slightly more; the work was also both kinetic and glamorous.
For all the elegance more than the honesty of the emotions, Ball manipulated the group with skill. The smaller group imperceptibly morphed to the full cast, using individual women posing within the clump to create both drama and action. The cast moved fluently and dramatically. If there were a moment that Ball owed to Peck, it might have been when the women seemed to race slowly across the stage, pausing mid-stride, but that’s close to The Ratmansky Jog as well.
The final group number was a slow procession Dido’s famous aria When I am Laid in Earth. In perhaps the only moment that tipped the scales into contrivance, each woman went one by one into a spotlight at the center to Strike a Pose in a slow dramatic moment. They raced off to the sides to end.
Purcell Suite was a straightforward dance, but if a single ballet can add up to a voice or aesthetic, Ball’s may be avidly queer. The Hi-Fashion quality, the pictorial nature, the love of drama, and the eye for female glamour, it’s a kind of Queer Eye for the Ballet Girl, but done well. If my guess was correct and the piece was actually tailored to a situation much like Balanchine’s Serenade, Ball rose to the occasion.
Lauren Lovette’s Jewel Box was a world premiere, and an ambitious one. It was a large work done to a recording of the handsome Concerto for Orchestra by Kevin Puts, who composed The Hours. We’ve been watching Lovette learn on the job, and it’s impressive how bilingual Lovette has become. She’s been able to take on new works for Paul Taylor’s dancers and New Jersey Ballet’s and speak effectively in both languages.
A large work, Jewel Box started with the full cast in an inverted V, the women facing front, but everyone with bowed heads. All were dressed by Lovette and Peggy Casey, the women in crushed velvet semi-sheer leotards of beige or black, the men in sheer leotards and pants.
If Lovette’s response to the soaring music at the opening was more predictable, everyone racing about looking exalted, with some tentative same-sex partnering, her work is still gaining sophistication. A male quartet that had breakout moments for each man showed command of grand allegro.
In the next section, unsurprisingly titled Ballerina, Lovette and Casey put Se Hyun Jin in a black leotard with lilac ruffles at the armhole, echoing the tulle of a tutu without slavishly duplicating it. Three men partnered Jin as the score tinkled for a riff that was allusive to a music box, again, without being a direct imitation.
Two of the men carried her off, while Lopena sat, and four women appeared at the corners. To energetic horns, they now became his corps. There was an echo of other man-among-women dances, including Melancholic in The Four Temperaments. You may not have been sure who these people were, or the reason for their brio, but Lovette knew.
They rushed away and Lopena posed to us to give way to the Big Pas de Deux for Denise Parungao and Joshuan Vazquez. To a tinkling piano adagio, Lovette set a large scale, well-made duet. Parungao had a long torso and sharp, needle-like pointes. Vazquez’ partnering was strong and tender. He grabbed her and spun her round; but she wasn’t always cargo. She went off on her own journey, reaching as she stalked on pointe slowly to the corner while he danced.
Lovette wasn’t shying away from complexity, asking for tricky promenades, and you could also sense things that a woman might pick up on more than a man. Vazquez picked Parungao up as she shook her head in rapture but also uncertainty. The women entered and separated them. Vazquez took Parungao off in a one-armed press.
Two dark curtains at the back with a tall mirror at the center defined the finale space, looking like an open jewel box. To a march featuring snare drums, one woman encountered a man, which moved to three couples, then two. Everyone was racing around including Vazquez and Parungao, but without a clear sense of who anyone was, it was structurally rough.
Lovette did try to tie some strings together, taking us back to the opening V formation, only with the cast facing forward. Vazquez pressed Parungao overhead, everyone was doing something, recalling more than anything Gerald Arpino’s everything-and-the-kitchen-sink exuberance. And finally, the cast came into unison and posed around the lead couple doing a torch lift at the center – an Arpino moment if ever there were one. Lovette is learning how to sell.
New Jersey Ballet is a solid group, but it’s a farm team, not quite major league. The dancers are technically reasonably secure, but not steel-plated. And there was the usual difference between the majors and the minors, more less-than-perfect bodies. Jewel Box, but actually the whole triple bill, was a challenge in a good way and the company rose to it.
Kowroski has a Rolodex – and she knows it. Look at the company’s releases at the time she was hired: using her connections was one of her main promises. She delivered, getting two commissions from colleagues who might otherwise not have noticed a company this size.
And neither of them sucked. Considering the batting average of most commissions, that is far higher praise than it sounds. Kowroski isn’t tooting her horn loudly, so let’s do it for her. The program was intelligently chosen, with good, fresh works and shows someone with discernment at the helm.
copyright © 2024 by Leigh Witchel
Murder Ballades , Purcell Suite, Jewel Box – New Jersey Ballet
New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Newark, NJ
May 4, 2024
Cover: New Jersey Ballet in Purcell Suite. Photo © VAM Productions.
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