Another season, another chance for a living choreographer or two to contribute something lasting to the legacy of the preternaturally prolific George Balanchine. Four decades after his death, the current six-week winter chapter of The New York City Ballet's 75th anniversary celebrations has showcased two challengers. On February 1, Tiler Peck, in her glory as one of the company's most distinctive principals, gave her house debut as a dance maker with Concerto for Two Pianos (seen February 4 and 20). Two weeks later, the company's newly appointed artist in residence Alexei Ratmansky took his turn with Solitude (seen at its premiere, February 15). In defiance of Balanchine's possibly apocryphal shibboleth, "Ballet is woman," each new entry centered on a lone male figure whose name appeared, alone, on the top line of the cast list.
A principal's other hat
In the plotless Concerto for Two Pianos, set to Poulenc's sometimes hard-edged, sometimes songful score, that honor went to Roman Mejia. He took charge from the start in a soaring solo studded with electric batteries (beaten steps) and huge single air turns that simply stopped the clock. And all that was just by way of hello. Here was bravura in excelsis.
In the first cast, Mira Nadon and Chun Wai Chan appeared in magisterial form as a second-listed principal couple of striking independence; in a subsequent performance, Miriam Miller and Gilbert Bolden III achieved the same high polish along with a gentler gleam. A sparkling female duo—Emma von Enck and India Bradley in both casts—rounded out the solo roster. Ever on the move, Mejia cruised in and out among them all, linking up with this one and that one, some in ever shifting constellations of two and three. Seven elegant, highly energized couples made up the corps de ballet.
Roman Mejia, Mira Nadon, and Chun Wai Chan in Tiler Peck's Concerto for Two Pianos |
New Yorkers could be forgiven for thinking Peck (no relation to City Ballet's resident choreographer and artistic adviser Justin Peck) a choreographic novice. But since 2018, she has been honing her extra skills set in a half dozen commissions for companies way off the local radar.
Her Poulenc unfurled with joyous assurance, not only in its inventive poetry in motion for individual dancers but also in its grand designs. The masterly integration of the parts and the whole marks Peck as a true Balanchine disciple. In other respects—Mejia's mercurial coalitions with the other principals come to mind—she boldly goes her own way. Critically, she knows how to deploy large platoons of dancers without creating a logjam—but also how to fill the proscenium with just a single dancing body, or a few. Touches of heel-clicking folk and swooning ballroom styles bespoke her sophisticated ear for musical nuance.
The decision to have the fashionista Zac Posen dress Two Pianos was felicitous. For the two male principals, unadorned dove-gray T's and tights were the order of the day, appropriately suggesting the old song's daring young men on the flying trapeze. The other men, an ensemble of cadets, appeared in what amounted to trim, discreetly dandified dark uniforms. The women showed to splendid advantage in soft, above-the-knee tutus in blues that ran from airiest of the airy to midnight—or, in the case of the top ballerina, in rich ruby that struck the most glamorous note of all. On first viewing, Two Pianos cried out for a second look. On second viewing, it looked like a ballet we'll want to live with for a long time.
For the record, the New York City Ballet Orchestra rose to Poulenc's estimable challenges with alacrity, on February 4 under the baton of the company's Music Director Andrew Litton, on February 20 under that of the Associate Music Director Andrews Sill. The capable keyboardists on both occasions were Hanna Kim and Stephen Gosling.
Ratmansky premiere
On to Solitude, which Ratmansky dedicates to "the children of Ukraine, victims of the war." The score, heard at the premiere under Sill's baton, stitches together the klezmer-tinged third movement of Mahler's Symphony No. 1, which evokes a funeral march, and the shimmerin Adagietto of the composer's Fifth, which evokes the beyond. The central presence this time was Joseph Gordon, discovered at curtain rise kneeling downstage, holding the hand of the seemingly lifeless Theo Rochios, a student at the company-affiliated School of American Ballet. For some ten minutes, they would not move a muscle. And as the Adagietto wound to a close, they reverted to starting positions once more, as if for eternity.
Alexei Ratmansky's Solitude premiered in New York City Ballet's 75th-anniversary season |
As Ratmansky disclosed in The New York Times, he based the tableau on a news photograph that went viral in 2022. The man in the viewfinder was a father who stayed praying for hours by the body of his 13-year-old son, struck by a Russian missile while waiting for the bus in as Kharkiv. As silence is to music, stillness may be the wellspring of all dance, but if that is so, its power can dissipate quickly. Here, as a kind of visual pedal point over the nine-minute span of the funeral march, the father-and-son pietà numbed rather than sharpened the emotions.
While Gordon and Rochios bided their time, however, Ratmansky peopled his underlit canvas with a total of 13 principals, soloists, and members of the corps de ballet. For the most part, their angular, individualized movements generated few flashes to take away. Still, there were some. Early on, when the men lofted the women overhead like so many kites, toes together, knees apart, it seemed a conscious nod to Balanchine's Symphony in Three Movements, set to Stravinsky's tremendous score of that name, composed during last years of the Second World War.
Later, in a Daliesque sequence, the women stretched out side by side on the floor like stranded mermaids while the men, on their feet, lined up beside them, leaning in their direction. Uncannily, the composite tableau suggested the one good eye of a giant Cyclops. But then—can this really have happened?—the dancers regrouped in pairs, the women perhaps as prisoners, the men as stone-cold killers, pointing imaginary guns and pulling the triggers. Yet nothing momentous seemed to follow, and the dirge simply plodded on. Aglow with a gentle radiance amid the enveloping dark, only Sara Mearns occasionally stood apart from the crowd.
With the Adagietto, Gordon sprang to life. In supercharged arabesques, leaps, and whirlwind pirouettes, he gave expression to paroxysms of grief wildly out of step with the music. Yet for all the élan, he seemed trapped in spiritual exhaustion. When he took up the boy's impassive body and ferried him through thin air to no knowable destination, the gloom only deepened. How one yearned for a spark of epiphany! But it never came. Did Ratmansky, who has roots in Ukraine and family living there, think a moment of transcendence would have felt too cheap? Like so many dispatches from the front lines in our time, Solitude left a dull ache.
Photos by Erin Baiano