Ballet After Balanchine: 3 Choreographers Lead the Way
<First published online in the New York Times on May 22, 2017.>
How do you get over George Balanchine? Supreme classicist, supreme modernist and still underrated as a superlative Romantic and dramatist, he remains ballet’s dominant figure.
This spring, during the four weeks of its Here/Now Festival that ended on Sunday, New York City Ballet presented 10 programs of 42 works created over the past 30 years by 21 choreographers. These figures are remarkable — and only with this company are they conceivable. Balanchine (1904-1983) and Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996), City Ballet’s founding fathers, committed it to novelty and to a repertory composed almost entirely of its own commissions. Here, eight world premieres each year is not an unusual statistic.
Under Balanchine’s successor, Peter Martins, the company has presented a number of festivals and festival-like seasons. Most of these — from the American Music Festival (1988) to Here/Now — have showcased new creations. Ballet, as Balanchine often said, would keep changing anyway; let’s find new ballets to believe in.
Those of us who remember the first big seasons of post-Balanchine choreography can see that City Ballet has come far. Starting in 1988, bad or unimportant new ballets proliferated. Mr. Martins was widely blamed for spoiling the perfect realm left by Balanchine. The company’s dancing of Balanchine grew dimmer, duller. And its novelties were enough to put people off the new.
Gradually, over the last 17 or so years, the situation has reversed. Many (not all) of the company’s admirers take pleasure again in the way it dances Balanchine. And many (not all) take pleasure in a number of the ballets created for the company since 2000.
That’s thanks mainly to three choreographers (unsurprisingly all male, all white): Christopher Wheeldon, whose work showed intermittent promise from 1996; Alexei Ratmansky, older than Mr. Wheeldon, but largely unknown as a choreographer in the West until 2005; and Justin Peck, whose professional debut in choreography was in 2012. Their work for City Ballet — though they also create elsewhere — has now made it the world’s main source of important ballet choreography.
From Moscow to Seattle, Miami to London, companies are dancing pieces created this century for City Ballet, a phenomenal achievement. Sure, it would be good if more of the company’s choreographers were women, and if they were not all white. Still, three importantly talented living choreographers is three more than most of us could see in 2000.
Of the 42 ballets at the Here/Now festival, 19, fairly enough, were by the three men: six from Mr. Wheeldon, five by Mr. Ratmansky and eight from Mr. Peck. Almost all of these repay rewatching. Many — including the festival’s premieres, Mr. Ratmansky’s “Odessa” and Mr. Peck’s “The Decalogue” — have enlarged our ideas of what ballet can be. The rhythmic intricacy of the octets in Mr. Wheeldon’s “Polyphonia” (2001), the unidealized portrayal of love and community in the slow movement of Mr. Ratmansky’s “Concerto DSCH” (2008) and the idyllic all-male quintet of Mr. Peck’s “Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes” (2014) are high-water marks of 21st-century choreography.
There are problems, though. Most obvious is Mr. Wheeldon’s fondness for overpartnering and Mr. Peck’s attraction to uninteresting music. Nonetheless, there’s reason to hope that some of these 19 works will be considered masterpieces in decades to come. “Concerto DSCH” and “Rodeo” look the most built to last, though other, perhaps more fragile works by those two men now seem even more marvelous in aspects of style, expression and stage sociology. Mr. Peck’s choreography often makes dancers look fervent, ignited; Mr. Ratmansky’s arouses their imaginations.
Seventeen other choreographers were each represented by one dance. There was only one African-American choreographer represented: Ulysses Dove, who died in 1996. Works by Robert Binet (“The Blue of Distance”), Kim Brandstrup (“Jeux”), Troy Schumacher (“Common Ground”), Myles Thatcher (“Polaris”), all new in October 2015, still cast spells as poetry. It was good to see again Mauro Bigonzetti’s “Oltremare” (the only work I’ve ever enjoyed by this choreographer), and to hear its evocative Bruno Moretti score: an atmospheric depiction of Italian immigrants traveling by ship to the New World.
Wouldn’t a revival of Miriam Mahdaviani’s “Images” (1992) have strengthened the case for women’s choreography in ballet? I remember that piece for creating a world that lingered in the mind. It interests me that “Chiaroscuro” (1994) by Lynne Taylor-Corbett, one of three women in Here/Now, appears to have anticipated many of the trends in recent ballet choreography: same-sex partnering and women supporting men.
The festival served as a reminder, too, that several general tendencies in City Ballet choreography have endured since the company’s inception. The marriage of music and dance is fundamental; the language of the ballet classroom is not just a stylistic underpinning but often central to choreographic vocabulary; storytelling is rare. Costumes are secondary; lighting is crucial; props and scenery tend not to exist. (The suitcases of “Oltremare” and the wigs and cigarettes of Mr. Ratmansky’s “Namouna, a Grand Divertissement,” from 2010, would occasion little comment elsewhere; here they look a tad heretical.)
Only one other choreographer contributed several ballets: Mr. Martins, with six. Made between 1988 and 2002, these ranged from the generally commendable (“Ash,” with its marvelous Michael Torke score) to the ghastly (“The Infernal Machine”).
The inclusion of his “Hallelujah Junction” (2001, John Adams music) would have strengthened the case for Mr. Martins’s originality, but so what? It seems Mr. Martins, choreographically, is now a spent force. In the 1980s, nobody was more prolific. (He made nine premieres for the American Music Festival.) These days, revivals are all that remain of his work. And the sheer skill of construction that distinguishes his best dances has long since been surpassed by most works made by Mr. Wheeldon, Mr. Ratmansky and Mr. Peck.
Wouldn’t a revival of Miriam Mahdaviani’s “Images” (1992) have strengthened the case for women’s choreography in ballet? I remember that piece for creating a world that lingered in the mind. It interests me that “Chiaroscuro” (1994) by Lynne Taylor-Corbett, one of three women in Here/Now, appears to have anticipated many of the trends in recent ballet choreography: same-sex partnering and women supporting men.
The festival served as a reminder, too, that several general tendencies in City Ballet choreography have endured since the company’s inception. The marriage of music and dance is fundamental; the language of the ballet classroom is not just a stylistic underpinning but often central to choreographic vocabulary; storytelling is rare. Costumes are secondary; lighting is crucial; props and scenery tend not to exist. (The suitcases of “Oltremare” and the wigs and cigarettes of Mr. Ratmansky’s “Namouna, a Grand Divertissement,” from 2010, would occasion little comment elsewhere; here they look a tad heretical.)
Only one other choreographer contributed several ballets: Mr. Martins, with six. Made between 1988 and 2002, these ranged from the generally commendable (“Ash,” with its marvelous Michael Torke score) to the ghastly (“The Infernal Machine”).
The inclusion of his “Hallelujah Junction” (2001, John Adams music) would have strengthened the case for Mr. Martins’s originality, but so what? It seems Mr. Martins, choreographically, is now a spent force. In the 1980s, nobody was more prolific. (He made nine premieres for the American Music Festival.) These days, revivals are all that remain of his work. And the sheer skill of construction that distinguishes his best dances has long since been surpassed by most works made by Mr. Wheeldon, Mr. Ratmansky and Mr. Peck.
@New York Times, 2017