Celebrating Old Times With New: A Premiere
<First published online in the New York Times on May 9, 2014>
New York City Ballet’s spring gala on Thursday at the David H. Koch Theater was, for many reasons, exciting. Above all, it celebrated the company’s 50 years at Lincoln Center. And the evening reached its climax with a sensational world premiere: Justin Peck’s 42-minute new ballet, “Everywhere We Go,” a work both diffuse and brilliant whose rich supply of configurations, phrases and rhythms often (if not always) suggests that young Mr. Peck can do anything he wants with choreography: a virtuoso of the form.
Earlier, a charming short film documented the theater’s history and importance. Two trumpeters played the short “Fanfare for a New Theater,” which Stravinsky composed for the 1964 opening of this building (then called the New York State Theater). The national anthem followed. Then Peter Martins, ballet master in chief of City Ballet, brought to the stage, one by one, 12 former principal dancers who had been part of the 1964 spring season, including Jacques d’Amboise, Allegra Kent, Patricia McBride, Arthur Mitchell and Edward Villella. How moving to see these legends back onstage. Yet the evening had scarcely begun.
Kristen Bell and Aaron Lazar sang a number that had been performed at that 1964 opening night: “If I Loved You,” from the Rodgers-Hammerstein “Carousel.” Even though Ms. Bell’s singing was sweet-sentimental and Mr. Lazar’s was strained-sentimental, it was good to have this vintage scene — which also commemorated the 1964-69 era when Richard Rodgers directed the Music Theater of Lincoln Center, resident at this same theater.
Sara Mearns, at her most ardent and expansive, and Jared Angle led a bright, breezy account of George Balanchine’s “Allegro Brillante,” the first work danced by City Ballet that opening night. Andrews Sill conducted the Tchaikovsky music (a movement from the unfinished third piano concerto). Though gala audiences tend to be cautious with their applause, this crowd was, by now, truly responsive.
“Everywhere We Go” followed the intermission. It is set to a commissioned score by Sufjan Stevens, the Brooklyn composer whose music Mr. Peck used for his highly impressive “Year of the Rabbit” (2012). Michael P. Atkinson conducted “Everywhere”: It has nine musical movements, seven principal dancers and 18 supporting dancers, costumed in tights by Janie Taylor (the recently retired City Ballet principal) against a set by Karl Jensen whose patterns and illumination kept changing. Everything was characterized by intense, visual chiaroscuro, an impression clinched by Brandon Stirling Baker’s lighting, with the blend of brightness and shadow mainly heightening — occasionally frustrating — the work’s rapidly changing drama.
This is a lot to take in; evidently Mr. Peck intends a cornucopia. “Everywhere We Go” is short on intimacy but rich in incident; its moods shift, briskly, among comic, severe, effusive and poignant. He has a wonderfully unbuttoning effect on his cast: not only do we take delight in his seven principals, but also his junior dancers, the men especially, who throw themselves into the vivid up-down, forward-backward contrasts of his phrases with striking fervor.
In every work Mr. Peck has made for City Ballet, I’ve noticed how Daniel Applebaum, a dark-haired corps member, has danced as if released. Here Mr. Applebaum does so again, but it’s unfair to single him out; at this premiere I was no less struck by six or more others amid the ranks. You watch these dancers explode in jumps, arrive in balances, plunge down and rear up again, all in quick succession, as if this movement were the breath of life.
What images stay in the memory from this kaleidoscope? Robert Fairchild and Amar Ramasar’s duet. (Brief, incidental moments of same-sex mutual support are a welcome addition to Mr. Peck’s lexicon here.) I love the way Mr. Peck pairs the tall Maria Kowroski with Mr. Fairchild; this isn’t the first time he’s put Mr. Fairchild beside a woman taller than he is, and the effect is that both dancers look right at home.
A tableau coalesces out of nowhere, and there’s Sterling Hyltin materializing on top of it, with a laughing insouciance as if she could belong nowhere else. Andrew Veyette vaults and turns in heroically speedy jumps. Teresa Reichlen — her torso’s outline especially complemented by Ms. Taylor’s costume — bursts forth from a supported pirouette into a bravura solo. A duet for Tiler Peck and Mr. Ramasar shows the wonderful plasticity these two can find within equilibrium. A recurring group image has half of the work’s dancers sliding to the floor, supported by partners (some same-sex): death and mourning.
The dance energy and variety match those in the score. Mr. Stevens’s music derives its color and energy from aspects of minimalism, Broadway and jazz. Brass, percussion and piano each make strong contributions. Sometimes we hear the same reiterated note becoming a pulse; sometimes a melodic mini-phrase keeps recycling. Hushes, rushes, brightness, softness, clusters of woodwind notes, quiet choral wordless singing: the score covers a spectrum.
On first listen, parts of the score are Broadway-style manipulative. And onstage there are passages in which Justin Peck’s display of choreographic versatility feels too showy. Another reservation: a few dance passages seem relatively blah — undistinguished, interchangeable. But this is a work to revisit again and again; it seems like 12 different ballets in one.
What’s most exceptional is the complexity of the work’s time structure. As in “Year of the Rabbit” but more so, Mr. Peck seems keen to show us a picture of the world in which change itself is the subject. This is unusual in ballet; though Mr. Peck’s dance language bears no resemblance to Merce Cunningham’s, his sense of sequence does, as if he’s saying, “Look how many moods life contains; it keeps altering before your eyes.”
His mastery of complex geometries is where his virtuosity is most evident. At one point Ms. Reichlen arrives center stage while the ensemble behind her makes a five-column formation like the spokes of a fan; then dancers keep changing place in each column with an effect of such continual motion (but such constant architecture too) that our pulses race at the complexity. In several scenes, all brilliant, Mr. Peck juxtaposes a horizontal-line ensemble and a vertical-line one; something different and momentous occurs each time. We leave the theater intoxicated, our heads full of multiple layers of the choreographic art.
@New York Times, 2014