Kaleidoscope of Destiny’s Patterns
<First published online in the New York Times on January 30, 2013>
New York City Ballet’s season grows both worse and better. The ghastly art installation in the foyer of the David H. Koch Theater, titled “Les Ballets De Faile,” has now spread over into boards in the side foyers downstairs and diminishes the pleasure in attendance by several more degrees.
Also distressing are the accumulating signs of orchestral problems. No permanent successor to Fayçal Karoui as musical director has been made since his departure last summer. There have been good musical performances, and several good guest conductors. But both weeks of the company’s recent Tchaikovsky celebration had too many wrong notes; and on Tuesday the season’s non-Tchaikovsky third week began with woodwind blips in the Philip Glass score for another repertory standard, Jerome Robbins’s “Glass Pieces.” Such mistakes can unsettle a whole performance.
There have been injuries to principal dancers too. On Sunday the Scherzo was omitted from “Diamonds” when Sara Mearns hurt her foot. Wendy Whelan, Jennifer Ringer, Jonathan Stafford are among those currently being replaced in this week’s repertory. Yet these troubles faded away in the pit and onstage when, as the centerpiece of Tuesday’s performance, Justin Peck’s “Year of the Rabbit” — new last October, to music by Sufjan Stevens — returned to repertory. Although it was sandwiched by marvelous ballets by Robbins and George Balanchine, it held its own superbly.
“Year of the Rabbit” suggests a cyclical view of life. Leading figures come and go; so do games, rituals, encounters, patterns. What’s fascinating is the connection of the personal and the impersonal. From its opening “Year of the Rabbit” abounds in striking images of group architecture, some of which change or dissolve with kaleidoscopic fluency, as if showing us images of destiny as pattern and plan; yet much of its dancing feels free, playful, sent from the heart.
Innumerable beauties of style adorn it just now: the slow lowering of a gesture in an arc, the handsome fullness of a formal port de bras, an acute pounce into a full-stretched arabesque. Watching the perfect fullness with which such tiny details are made momentous, you wonder, with your heart full: Will this ballet ever look this good again in later years with other dancers? I think its architecture will survive this cast, but certainly it should be seen right now.
As you watch Ashley Bouder (that fearless firecracker), Joaquin de Luz (never more touchingly elegant), Teresa Reichlen and Robert Fairchild (surprisingly coupled and marvelously complementary in their freshness), Janie Taylor (a pale but impulsive dream child) and Tyler Angle (who effortlessly turns partnering into poetry), you can’t miss the powerfully affectionate admiration for these performers that Mr. Peck manifests. You see most of them in new lights, and all of them look unaffected, handsomely released. The same is true of the small corps de ballet; many of the most stylish moments occur with its six women and six men.
The stylishness comes from the pit too. Mr. Stevens’s “Enjoy Your Rabbit” (subtitled “Selections From the Chinese Zodiac”) is an electronica album; Michael P. Atkinson’s orchestration, created specifically for the ballet, is a marvelous affair of radically opposed string sonorities, from slow portamenti and rustling scrapes to keen pizzicati and sustained legato. Here City Ballet’s orchestra rises with relish to the stimulus of new work. And here, as with such scores as Leonid Desyatnikov’s “Russian Seasons” (which accompanies Alexei Ratmansky’s 2006 ballet of that name) and Thomas Adès’s Violin Concerto (the score for Wayne McGregor’s “Outlier,” 2010), City Ballet gives important 21st-century music to its audience.
This is the third ballet by Mr. Peck I’ve seen. Although I dare say some disappointments will inevitably lie ahead, it must be said on this evidence that he is the third important choreographer to have emerged in classical ballet this century, following Christopher Wheeldon and Mr. Ratmansky. City Ballet, for all the many choreographic fiascos it has commissioned, deserves congratulations for having helped Mr. Wheeldon and Mr. Ratmansky to their finest work. Now Mr. Peck — entirely a City Ballet product — joins their number. The company gives the premiere of his “Paz de la Jolla” on Thursday night.
Soon after “Rabbit” starts several corps dancers rest their heads sideways together to make a vertical pile of faces, a quotation of the most celebrated image from Bronislava Nijinska’s “Les Noces.” Yet at the same time each of them waves an arm, slowly transforming the grimly ritualistic “Noces” image by giving it wings. The whole ballet has a remarkable ease with tradition; you spot references and resemblances but also a truly individual talent.
Another heartening virtue is the different ways in which Mr. Peck brings man and woman together. In the “Year of the Tiger” and “Year of the Rooster” sections Ms. Reichlen and Mr. Fairchild dance as equals, sometimes sharing the same step, sometimes alternating in different voices, now close and now giving each other space. The quiet duet “Year of Our Lord” is largely supported adagio for Ms. Taylor and Mr. Angle, alone together, but, though much of the focus is on Ms. Taylor, it develops like a dialogue for adults.
Mr. Peck was also the first dancer onstage in the third movement of “Glass Pieces”; he’s still a corps dancer, still learning from the shop floor. It was good to see both that ballet and Balanchine’s “Vienna Waltzes”; each is among these choreographers’ most singular marvels. But “Vienna,” a long ballet, needs more illustrious casting. On Tuesday Mr. Angle in the Vienna Woods opening scene, Anthony Huxley in the second and Ms. Reichlen as the Merry Widow of the fourth section did the most to raise the temperature, making every individual moment count.
@New York Times, 2013