Justin Peck’s ‘Decalogue’ Pushes Into New Ballet Forms
<First published online in the New York Times on May14, 2017>
Justin Peck — still not yet 30, yet resident choreographer at New York City Ballet since 2014 — makes ballets both with apparently complete assurance and as if conducting experiments. His latest work, “The Decalogue,” which had its world premiere with City Ballet on Friday night, is his most exploratory piece so far.
It has both beauty and charm — it was warmly received — but it will take further acquaintance before we know how its changing structures add up as meaning, drama or form. City Ballet presented it at the evening’s end, but surely this, unlike most Peck compositions, is not a closing piece: too quiet, too inconclusive. Costumes, designed by Mr. Peck himself, are practical dancewear (leotards, tights) combining various shades of brown and white.
The score, a company commission, is by Mr. Peck’s colleague Sufjan Stevens, and it is attractive but quite unlike the Stevens scores Mr. Peck has given us before, with their propulsive rhythms and theatrical orchestrations. This is for solo piano (played by Susan Walters): 10 pieces like Romantically modernist études.
There are 10 sections and 10 dancers; but if the “Decalogue” title refers to Ten Commandments, they surely aren’t those in the Bible. Having any god seems not to cross the minds of these 10 people; nor does killing. And they either commit adultery freely, depending on how you read their occasional couplings, or (more likely) never copulate at all.
Instead, this “Decalogue” seems, without any radical effects, to be coolly composing a new grammar, and with some largeness of spirit. More than any Peck piece so far, its partnering assignments include female-male and same-sex as well as male-female. And couples are fluid. Jared Angle, the company’s most redoubtable partner, is variously paired with both Sara Mearnsand Rebecca Krohn; at one point, he holds a first arabesque — extending his line on one leg — while a woman walks around to revolve him. The exact reverse of the partnering for which Mr. Angle is best known, it’s an emblem of the changing priorities in this ballet.
Coupling is not the central point here anyway. The five women and five men are individuals and a community before they are couples. There are hierarchical groupings in which Ms. Mearns is central, dominant, with the others arrayed as if in attendance; but all such orderings here are impermanent. In one duet, she turns and moves in Mr. Angle’s arms with fabulously fluent length of phrase; but walking — prosaic walking without airs or graces — is also a prominent part of the vocabulary.
Dancers are often crouched on the ground as well as upright. Thursday’s performances included two moments when individual women briefly fell to the floor; they looked to me like accidents, but other members of the audience decided they were choreographed. The mixture of formality and informality is part of the piece’s character.
The group geometries (always one of Mr. Peck’s specialties) are seldom symmetrical; there are off-center parabolas, and chain effects that ripple through the group in diagonally slanted zigzags. All 10 dancers — the others are Rachel Hutsell, Claire Kretzschmar, Kristen Segin, Daniel Applebaum, Harrison Coll, Gonzalo Garcia and Aaron Sanz — have individual opportunities, but there are quintets in which the differences between men and women are not paramount, as they usually are in ballet.
This is the second of two world premieres in City Ballet’s current four-week Here/Now season, and it closed the eighth of the 10 programs. The 43 Here/Now ballets have all been made in the 34 years since the death of the company’s founding ballet master, George Balanchine. The dancers have been working exceptionally hard — the more so since there have been a number of injuries — so it has not been unusual to see one dancer making two debuts in a single evening. Almost everyone has risen admirably to the challenges; several have revealed unsuspected facets.
Megan Fairchild, bubbly and daffy in Peter Martins’s “Jeu de Cartes” (1992), has never been more adult or womanly than in two ballets by Alexei Ratmansky, “Russian Seasons” (2006) and “Odessa” (new last week — she was second-cast in the role made for Sterling Hyltin). Mr. Applebaum, replacing Amar Ramasar as Tiler Peck’s partner in Justin Peck’s “The Times Are Racing” (new this January), refreshed the ballet’s male-female duets with innocence: Every turn of his and Ms. Peck’s heads to each other (their faces seemed to shine) had rhythmic point, and the rhythmic emphasis of their simple shifts of weight spruced up a duet that had seemed bland.
Other virtues have shone offstage. All of program 7 — “Ash,” “Funérailles,” “Common Ground,” “Oltremare” and “Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes” — was musically distinguished; it’s worth noting that two of the scores (Bruno Moretti’s for “Oltremare” and Ellis Ludwig-Leone’s for “Common Ground”) have been, like the one for “The Decalogue” and several others this season, commissioned in the last 10 years. Dance and music have been leading each other further into the 21st century.
@New York Times, 2017