by Leigh Witchel
New York City Ballet planned the spring of its 75th anniversary season as looking towards the future. A quadruple bill of works by Pam Tanowitz, Christopher Wheeldon, William Forsythe and Kyle Abraham gave us an in-depth chance to look at the new sector of the company’s repertory. A sector that, with the exception of Wheeldon, came from outside the cloister. Most of the pieces featured debuts earlier in the run.
Sebastián Villarini-Vélez was not around much during the season, and KJ Takahashi went into his part in Abraham’s Love Letter (on shuffle). Even with the same steps, Takahashi might as well have been doing a different role. Like Ruby Lister, who also got a complex solo, and Quinn Starner, Takahashi had a varied dance background, excelling in hip-hop before starting ballet. Here, he was all technical fireworks, with amazing phrasing and isolation, but with less emotional spark. Villarini’s approach simmered with hints of barely concealed rage. Takahashi did double air turn after double air turn until he met up with Starner.
Starner, who’s already done the part Tiler Peck originated, once again ripped through the solo to a pounding groove as if it were something from In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated. Later on, Olivia Bell did a short solo with sharp footwork, joined by Starner and Kennedy Targosz before Lister and Naomi Corti added in for a quintet. That ended with Starner again ripping sharply into turns, before jogging and bouncing through more killer turns before whamming into 185° extensions to the side. Peck gave off diva vibes in the part. Starner, being younger, felt more like a humorous riff on the stereotype of the white girl who can funk.
Giles Deacon’s costumes, screen printed but with ruffles, made Taylor Stanley look like Pierrot. Thair first anguished solo was countered by elegant flourishes of the arms, then arabesques and turns. As always, Stanley’s upper body was beautifully coordinated, whether isolating, voguing or doing classical port de bras.
Against Stanley’s opening, the rest of the group did an adagio combination: tendus and renversés, but with head isolations, and grouping with poses happening line by line. Despite that fusion, most of their work was in the legs, while Stanley was shaking. It was both choreography and a familiar metaphor: the corps as a group versus the individual. But it was also a nod to NYCB’s brand as having the best legs in the business.
After the group dispersed, Corti lifted Lister before they went off arm in arm. It’s not a long moment, but in a sense almost more radical than the large, notable male duet that comes near the end. How often do we see a lesbian pas de deux in a ballet choreography? And even with Stanley as the center of the work, Abraham gave a nod to the convention of the work having a ballerina in Starner. Plus briefly, he stuck three women in the back corner holding hands like the cygnets. Peter Walker and Emily Kikta danced a more traditional love duet as he partnered her in turns, but she pushed him away, finally leaving him by drifting back on pointe.
The big pas de deux was almost at the end, for Stanley with Jules Mabie. Being even longer than the one for Lister and Corti, it felt meant to give a voice to gay desire and affection. Their duet had a slow, underwater quality, with walks and adagio swings of the legs to a final embrace. Sometimes they just doubled one another, but also they did adagio work alternating who supported whom. That’s a dimension same-sex duets can add to the pas de deux, because they don’t have nearly as many physical constraints on who can best bear weight.
The emotional arc of Love Letter ends with the duet, but there’s still a large group adagio to close the work, almost a contemporary echo of Bournonville’s Konservatoriet. That big finale felt unneeded, another reason the work felt disjointed. It’s built around around three pairs: Stanley and Mabie, Takahashi and Starner, and Walker and Kikta, with an important but brief section for Lister and Corti. But structure is Abraham’s weak point. Even though the adagio repeated things already better said, such as Stanley and Mabie’s embrace, it did help to tie Love Letter together.
Like Liturgy, This Bitter Earth is one of those reliably atmospheric pas de deux by Wheeldon for Wendy Whelan that can be easily put into the middle of programs that need a short, glamorous star vehicle. It had a new pair, Unity Phelan and Andrew Veyette in his New York debut. Phelan made impeccable shapes, and Veyette partnered impeccably. Still, he felt less like a partner and more like a porteur, planted there, waiting for her to fall into his arms. Yet what was happening when they looked at each other?
Taking a part Whelan first did at NYCB, Tiler Peck changed the shape and intent of Forsythe’s Herman Schmerman pas de deux. Whelan was all about line and extremity. Peck has line, but not line for days. Her specialty is balance and virtuosity.
Paired with Roman Mejia, it was once again The Tiler and Roman Show, which is not something to sniff at. Their timing is seamless, so is their coordination and the ability, essential in Forsythe, to distort and go back to their axes. You could see them each choose what they’d like to do. What really made it The Tiler and Roman Show was, whether reality or just our projection, how transparent their relationship felt when they danced together. They looked like a couple. There were flickers of comradeship, competition and mischief as Peck gave Mejia a little “Good job, good luck on the rest” pat before she walked offstage. Left alone, he barreled round the stage, but with arms waving softly like seaweed.
You don’t think of masculine swagger when you think of Forsythe, but taking on the part for the first time a few days prior, Mejia had swagger. It hit differently, but worked when he came back onstage bare-chested, but in the same lemon yellow skirt as Peck. He cut loose with more turns and more attack, and Peck matched him in playful competition. The combat was both humor and foreplay.
As we move forward, one of the most interesting subtexts in ballet partnering is the question of agency. How much say does each partner have in what happens, and who initiates it? Peck was all about her agency here. At the end, she walked away from Mejia, then decided to take his hand and do the unending finger turns that close the work. Contrast this with This Bitter Earth.
Several dancers made debuts in Tanowitz’ Law of Mosaics, which got an encore from 2022. The ballet began with three men standing in perfect turnout, then moving almost like wind-up dolls set into motion, with one arm circling the head as if spinning a lasso, or doing a bouncy jog with the feet in front. The randomness of the composition was classic Tanowitz, deliberately without an arc. No move had to follow another and any move can follow anything else.
The music by Ted Hearne paused several times with the movement continuing in the silence. Devin Alberda and Gilbert Bolden III, both part of the new contingent, did coupé jeté en tournant. In the next silence, Bolden did bell kicks, another vaguely folk-Western allusion.
A lone woman, Miriam Miller, entered to dance among the men, and refreshingly, there were no emotional implications. Another reference was thrown in; both arms held high with the elbows at a right angle as if doing Scottish dance.
The men walked off, leaving Miller alone, who in another silence started a solo of chaînés and sissonnes by tapping her toe twice against the floor. She continued, again knocking her toes against the floor as if testing the capacities of both. As quotidian as the movement sometimes is in Tanowitz’ work, Miller stood there, but suddenly – wham – turned out to a perfect 180° before leaving with the same two taps. Ordinary movement, but these were not ordinary folk.
Sara Mearns entered with Bolden to what sounded like a hoedown put on scramble for a duet that was more of a double solo. They danced together, but looked obliquely out at us as they did tight turns in attitude or pas de bourrée en tournant. At times the score had the same feeling of endless preparation, but that diminished as it went on.
The music softened and the lights dimmed as Bolden partnered Mearns in promenade, then she did the same, supporting him. Those moments are what Tanowitz does best, assembling a heap of stereotypes and fracturing them. Still, some stereotypes remained. Like one of Balanchine’s classic Unknowable Goddesses, Mearns drifted away from Bolden on toe, zigzagging on the stage until she left Bolden in the half light, pointing in the direction she moved.
They met again, and both did a promenade with those Scottish arms while the music went into a fracturing of one of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. Tanowitz recombined some earlier solos, and if Bolden’s solo had the dance impulse removed, he got to do a 180° penchée.
Mearns wandered on again, pointing, and leaned her head on his shoulder. She crossed at the end, but looked back, then they both lay down at the wings as the other four couples entered at the front to plangent chords lifted from Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Maybe it was the musical reference, but you couldn’t help but feel somehow as if the adagio were tender.
Again, conventions were referenced and questioned. While a group was at the front, Mearns and Bolden, who would under ordinary circumstances be considered the lead couple, danced in the back and left quietly from there. And some conventions not questioned: In a new section where the music itched and the dancers bounced, Preston Chamblee whipped out pirouettes with his leg to the side in the center of a quartet of women, and pulled in for a gorgeous finish.
Later, Chamblee repeated his turns and finished, walking off slowly as Lister began a turning solo. She sat down, collapsed into a backward roll and drifted into a formation with two others. It felt as if Tanowitz had made her point, but with an interchangeable structure it could just go on.
The sampling of the Adagio for Strings returned and Miller strode through the others and slowly dropped into a split at the wings. Chamblee pulled her off. Like a current-day Cunningham, we were watching a series of events. That is, until Bolden gestured at his last note to an empty stage, and walked off.
Mearns filled the void with a long closing solo with slow developpés to dramatic chords. It turned into gestures from the ballet canon: pointing, refusing, then Odette arms and finally Myrtha’s commands. The solo summarized Mearns and it was certainly a moment, but it needed what came before it. After a repeat of the drifting bourrées the work ended with her lying supine on the stage: blackout.
Ironically, when the piece was first done, I asked, “would you want to see this again?” That first time, I would have said no. Now, my answer is emphatically yes. A complicated truth, that almost everything looks better after you’ve seen it more than once, and some of that is simply that you can parse it better. But instead of Law of Mosaics looking as if Tanowitz were just compiling a laundry list of ballet conventions, it felt now as if she were heading towards a point of view. Or the dancers were.
One of the things this post-Balanchine program showed was the range of what the company dancers are capable of. They’re now coming into the company more cross-trained. If the dancers have changed from what Balanchine dancers once were, so has the audience. It’s not just looking for masterpieces. It’s looking for a reflection of itself.
copyright © 2024 by Leigh Witchel
Law of Mosaics, This Bitter Earth, Herman Schmerman pas de deux, Love Letter (on shuffle) – New York City Ballet
Lincoln Center, New York, NY
May 19, 2024
Cover: Roman Mejia and Tiler Peck in Herman Schmerman pas de deux. Photo © Erin Baiano.
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