by Leigh Witchel
Opening night at New York City Ballet was over a week late, but it happened. Delayed by the pandemic, a week’s programming was dropped and the first New Combinations program in two years became the season opener. It functioned well as one: a varied program with many debuts and a major premiere.
Justin Peck’s work is most interesting when he pushes himself, and in “Partita,” he did. It was set, like the last New Combinations premiere, Alexei Ratmansky’s “Voices,” to a vocal score. Caroline Shaw’s “Partita for 8 Voices” was performed a capella by singers from the eclectic vocal ensemble “Roomful of Teeth.” She’s one of the members and won a Pulitzer Prize for this composition in 2013. Shaw sometimes set words, “To the side, to the side, and around, allemande left.” Sometimes there were grunts and whines, sometimes hymn-like harmonies. Put together it had a very American quality of speaking in tongues. Peck picked up on that when he had the cast look to their hands; it looked almost like prayer.
The décor by sculptor Eva LeWitt, the daughter of Sol LeWitt, brought her gallery work to the stage: immense, bright-colored ribbons looped and draped to form medallions that in Brandon Stirling Baker’s luminous gold sidelighting had the effect of stained-glass. With all these effective collaborations the athletic-wear costumes designed by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung were a letdown; so basic they might as well have been bought at lululemon.
“Partita” is dense and there was enough new in it grabbing focus that when you finally tuned in to the movement it looked familiar and American. It followed the aesthetic of 2017’s “The Times are Racing,” dressed in sneakers and athletic wear, with an improvised rather than academic vocabulary, but it seemed to stand more apart from its pandemic zeitgeist than the earlier work, which premiered at the dawn of the Trump era. Sometimes, “Partita” felt like a mash-up of an aerobics class and a square dance.
The cast onstage was also an octet, and was more eight dancers than four men and four women. Some of the best work in the ballet deal with a neutrality and equality of gender. The first duet for Claire Kretzschmar and India Bradley was low-key subversive: a woman’s duet that was intimate without being romantic. Peck used simple torsion for the women thoughtfully. They lined one another’s faces with their arms like a picture frame, then charged off to jog. Female partnering is awkward in pointe shoes; sneakers allow for weight bearing because of traction. But when Bradley lifted her leg to the side the blockiness of the sneaker made you wish she was in a slipper.
To gasps from the singers, Harrison Coll and Taylor Stanley danced a second duet with scissoring and pumping arms, along with jumps switching direction. There was a deliberate equivalence in each duet; the same partnering of equals and shared weight bearing. It was bracingly experimental and without judgment, but also slightly antiseptic.
They rotated off and Tiler Peck came on for a solo. Ms. Peck was the Great Exception who brought Goddess-of-Ballet diva realness to cardio class. From slow turns floating through attitude to controlled extensions, the way she unfurled her leg or suspended her upper body made the sneakers look like ballet slippers. Kretzschmar, Bradley and Ashley Hod returned and joined up with her to form a quartet; the two men occupied a corner to repeat what they had done.
The full cast returned in complex, speedy movement and vanished off to the side, leaving Ms. Peck and Chun Wai Chan in a double solo rather than the standard boy-supports-girl pas de deux. The other dancers moved into a line slowly revolving on the stage like a clock as she moved on the outside. Then they all coalesced into a clump, moving faster and vibrating like bees as the music did much the same. The men came forward to whirl their arms like propellers about to be airborne, some earlier sections were reprised, and finally the cast backed away as the curtain fell slowly.
“Partita” was an interesting journey, but a circular one. Did we arrive at a new destination or back where we started? It was dense and the movement was the swirly-whooshy phrasing Peck does when he isn’t using academic ballet vocabulary. He was most likely improvising, but his movement material suggested that he’s naturally a jerky mover. His found vocabulary was exuberant and athletic, but not yet eloquent. He used unison a lot, in ways both powerful and predictable. The phrases went on and on but felt less like a signature and more like a run-on sentence.
A lot of these reservations are exactly the kind you might have for a new work, and they are often self-correcting. Ballet companies work from the outside in, putting up a skeleton of steps and choreography and then fleshing them out with repetition. What’s missing here isn’t bone, but flesh, and it could show up as the dancers need to think less about the steps.
Sebastian Villarini-Velez with Meaghan Dutton-O’Hara and Adrian Danchig-Waring in “Summerspace.” Photo credit © Erin Baiano.
In some ways “Summerspace” should be an ideal modern dance for the company. Its cool, pastoral quality should prompt the audience to draw parallels from Merce Cunningham’s formalism to Balanchine’s. But it’s not ballet and the company dances it as if it were.
There’s an argument to be made that it looks just fine done balletically. Adrian Danchig-Waring, in Cunningham’s part, connected the steps as beautifully as if they were an enchaînement. Sebastián Villarini-Velez (in an early debut stepping in for Andrew Veyette) sailed around the stage with Danchig-Waring. Legs flying sideways, their soaring jetés didn’t look like a lack of weight, but a defiance of gravity.
But more often, every step looked as if it had a French name. Legs flew skywards without any resistance, and a rotating arabesque with the arms crossed in front looked as if it came from a variation in “Cortège Hongrois.” Villarini-Velez did beautiful high jumps retracting his leg repeatedly, but that wasn’t the point. In Cunningham, it’s not the shape or the height of the step, it’s the movement and the effort that matters.
Christopher Wheeldon’s “DGV: Danse à Grande Vitesse” was danced by an almost entirely new cast. First done in 2006 by The Royal Ballet, from early on, Wheeldon collaborated with good designers. Jean-Marc Puissant’s set, intimidating as it is, is also memorable, turning Michael Nyman’s score about high-speed travel into a murky industrial fantasy set inside what looked like the remains of an airplane fuselage.
Behind a scrim a tight crowd vibrated from one side to another as the music hammered insistently. Wheeldon loaded task after task, mechanical and inhuman, on the dancers: pick up the woman, jump back to the same position, get lifted again. More couples were hauled in like cargo on a runway. Was it desperation or just a hive, or factory of pointless activity? After a while, it was exhausting to watch.
The ballet uses four lead couples in succession. As the first, Jovani Furlan and Isabella LaFreniere moved slowly in the darkness at the front. Their intricate partnering also felt mechanical; insert Tab A in Slot B, but LaFreniere tried to vary the texture with sudden staccato motions at the end of each position.
Sara Mearns took over the part Maria Kowroski left in her farewell, and of course turned it into the prima ballerina role, curving her arms towards us in benediction as Tyler Angle set her down. In an unexpected moment, Wheeldon pushed pause on the score to have Mearns and Angle continue in silence. Jennifer Tipton’s lights glowed incandescent on the floor and blue above from a single lamp.
After the four duets, the music’s pounding drums built to a juggernaut and Wheeldon set the men marching crouched as the lamp rose and turned hot white. Nyman ended the score on a massive crescendo and Wheeldon tried to contrast with a slow diminuendo of the women suspended in lifts above the men in silence, but the sheer mass of the score score sloughed that off.
If the season didn’t open, as originally planned, with an all-Balanchine evening showcasing the company’s brand, in many ways this was as good a way to start back up. It represented the company looking forward. If nothing was perfect, that’s not the point, particularly in new work. Everything was vital.
copyright © 2022 by Leigh Witchel
“Partita” “Summerspace,” “DGV: Danse à Grande Vitesse” – New York City Ballet
Lincoln Center, New York, NY
January 27, 2022
Cover: India Bradley and Claire Kretzschmar in “Partita.” Photo credit © Erin Baiano.
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