For flashes of Zen insight, George Balanchine's collected sayings rival or surpass Yogi Berra's. Did the founding choreographer of the New York City Ballet truly once propose that all ballets should be called Swan Lake because then they would all sell out? (If so, it must have been before he came out with The Nutcracker and Jewels). Generating sexy titles for the mixed bills that make up the lion's share of the New York City Ballet's programming can't be easy, but the marketing folks do what they can.
 Indiana Woodward and Taylor Stanley in Kyle Abraham's 'When We Fell' (Photo: Erin Baiano). |
This season's "Eclectic NYCB," which rolled around for the first of four performances on May 16, brought revivals of Balanchine's Divertimento from 'Le Baiser de la Fée' (1972), Lynn Taylor-Corbett's Chiaroscuro (1994), and Alexei Ratmansky's Odesa (2017). And for novelty, add the first live performance of Kyle Abraham's When We Fell, created for distribution during the pandemic with an octet of dancers working under bubble conditions. Filmed in part from an aerial perspective high above the grand promenade of the David H. Koch Theater, the company's Lincoln Center home, When We Fell premiered online in April 2021. Abraham has expressed his "curiosity to see how both versions live in conversation with one another." Maybe next year. For the moment, the video, shot in purportedly "dramatic" black and white, has been withdrawn.
Seen in living color, in three dimensions, from a fixed seat in the auditorium, Abraham's 15- minute piece makes a powerful showing. The score—consisting of Morton Feldman's introspective Piece for Four Pianos, Nico Muhly's graceful Falling Berceuse, and Jason Moran's hard-driving All Hammers and Chains—offers a broad spectrum of kinetic and emotional cues, which the choreography explores in a coherent, while at the same time eclectic and improvisatory, style.
Abraham cites as one influence the clean, taut neoclassicism of Balanchine's Agon. Here, that element harmonizes with Baroque bursts of whirlwind energy. Hands clasped high above the head, elbows bent at spiky angles, the dancers fly through space with thrilling abandon, their image enhanced by Karen Young's matte, trim costumes of cloth of antique gold and silver. Between flights come lulls in which the dynamism seems suspended in the sculptural stillness of a far-from-textbook arabesque.
The program lists the ensemble of dancers in alphabetical order: India Bradley, David Gabriel, Jules Mabie (replacing Christopher Grant), Unity Phelan, Taylor Stanley, KJ Takajashi, Sebastian Villanini-Vélez, and Indiana Woodward. Like all-star soloists in a Handelian concerto grosso, they have their individual opportunities to shine alongside striking interactions in shifting configurations, sometimes in lockstep, sometimes in counterpoint. Stanley's prowling big-cat gift for flow and Mabie's reach and crispness mark those two, perhaps, as primi inter pares, but that's a judgment call. As for the import of the ballet's title, the secret is safe with its creator.
Too brief to stand alone as the central segment of a typical three-part repertory program, When We Fell is paired with Taylor-Corbett's similarly proportioned Chiaroscuro, set to majestic variations by Arcangelo Corelli on the hypnotic La Follia. It's a good match—similar in scale, different in strategy. Within the cast of six, Andrew Veyette has the central role, surrounded by ballerinas Ashley Laracey, Olivia MacKinnon, and Brittany Pollack, with Preston Chamblee, Daniel Ulbricht as their cavaliers. For the most part, Chiaroscuro is propulsive and enjoyable, spiked with mannerisms that add a sense of chic, but the portentous ending for the protagonist comes out of nowhere. Left alone onstage he faces the audience, kneels and flings his hands to the heavens. Why?
 Andrew Veyette iin 'Chiaroscuro' (Photo: Erin Baiano). |
There are more resonant hints of narrative in both Balanchine's prismatic Divertimento from 'Le Baiser de la Fée' and Ratmansky's rambunctious Odesa. With its principal couple, two ballerina soloists, and an all-female corps of ten, Balanchine's ballet—danced to Stravinsky's fragrant homage to Tchaikovsky—distills the kind of Romantic love across supernatural barriers we know from Giselle, La Sylphide, and Swan Lake. Odesa, which is set to incidental music from a Russian film based on Isaac Babel tales of Jewish gangsters in Ukraine, points to grittier realities, and early on, someone receives a slap in the face. We're not all that far from the world of Fiddler on the Roof.
Megan Fairchild, Sara Mearns, Indiana Woodward, Tyler Angle, Joseph Gideon, and Daniel Ulbricht led the Ratmansky with flair, backed by a bang-up, Broadway-style ensemble. But Tiler Peck and Roman Mejia's account of the Balanchine was on another plane, soft-pedaling transcendent technique for the sake of poetic suggestion. Though the beginning of the ballet sparkles, the mood in the end plunges into heartbreak—cue "None but the Lonely Heart" for the climactic pas de deux. As the curtain falls, the lovers are separated by the full depth of the stage, drawn apart by some inexorable power, reaching backward to happiness that is lost forever.
 Megan Fairchild, Daniel Ulbricht in 'Odesa' (Photo: Erin Baiano). |