Luminaries and Hopefuls Join to Ensure Choreography’s Future
<First published online in the New York Times on November 7, 2010>
If ballet is to have a future, it needs new choreography. Let nobody doubt that steps are being taken to make that future happen. The New York Choreographic Institute is dedicated to promoting the development of choreographers by providing dancers, rehearsal space and time, symposiums and seminars on choreography and other theater arts, and choreographic fellowships with individual companies.
To celebrate its 10th anniversary, the institute for the first time over the weekend presented public performances, three of them. The program not only showcased new works by known choreographers and dancers but also presented a particularly accomplished work by a choreographer hitherto scarcely known to the public.
On Saturday evening the program, its choreographers and its composers were introduced by Peter Martins, ballet master in chief of New York City Ballet. The institute, which grew out of City Ballet’s several biennial Diamond Projects (starting in 1992), was Mr. Martins’s brainchild. In one of the several film clips presented during the evening, he paid tribute to the generosity of the philanthropist Irene Diamond, who died in 2003, and he stated his goal for the institute: “to create a repertoire for the times in which we live.”
Its artistic committee lists the artistic directors of 15 ballet companies (including the foremost of Britain, France and Denmark). In one film clip the institute’s associate artistic director, Richard Tanner, said that it received 100 to 130 applications from choreographers each year.
Mr. Martins - shown in another film interview as well as addressing the audience in person - spoke, gently, of several aspects that he hopes characterize the institute’s choreography: architecture, deployment of the particular vocabulary of ballet, and a concomitant of music. The institute works particularly closely with the Juilliard School (notably with Prof. Pia Gilbert), so that composers and choreographers can become more intimately acquainted with each other’s arts.
Sixty choreographers are listed as having participated in the first 10 years. They include people now internationally known as choreographers (Benjamin Millepied, Peter Quanz, Alexei Ratmansky, Christopher Wheeldon); those now emerging as choreographers locally in various places (Liam Scarlett of the Royal Ballet, Christopher Stowell of Oregon Ballet Theater); one artist principally known outside the ballet world, in modern dance (Larry Keigwin); and a large number of dancers who are not known - yet, anyway - choreographers at all.
These facts and figures would be forgettable were the choreography itself of no worth. The performances, at the Miller Theater, demonstrated there was no danger of that. In an intriguing exercise, three of New York’s best-known choreographers - Mr. Keigwin, Mr. Ratmansky and Mr. Wheeldon - each contributed a dance made to the same piece of new music composed by the Juilliard alumnus Daniel Ott. The choreographers Darius Barnes, Marco Goecke and Jessica Lang showed pieces to original music by other Juilliard alumni, Kyle Blaha, Jakub Ciupinski and Matthew Fuerst. Since the institute is affiliated with City Ballet, its dancers were involved in these six pieces; they included the principals Ashley Bouder, Megan Fairchild, Sara Mearns, Tiler Peck, Andrew Veyette and Wendy Whelan.
All these works showed skill. The piece I liked least - Ms. Lang’s “Droplet,” a lift-prone pas de deux for Ms. Whelan and Craig Hall - won the biggest applause.
For me, however, the main event was “Tales of a Chinese Zodiac,” the offering by the least-known choreographer, Justin Peck, using dancers not from City Ballet but from the School of American Ballet. Mr. Peck - a tall City Ballet dancer best known onstage as an admirable partner and elegant presence in the Balanchine ballets “Concerto Barocco” and “Liebeslieder Waltzer” - looked more boyish on this occasion introducing his work with a few words. Still, those words showed an intelligent concern with the undertones of his music, three songs by Sufjan Stevens.The songs (“Year of the Ox,” “Year of the Tiger” and “Year of the Boar” from a series of 12, “Run Rabbit Run”) were performed in a recording by Mr. Stevens and the Osso String Quartet.
Who can say yet whether Mr. Peck has any future as a choreographer? But he not only ticks all the boxes mentioned by Mr. Martins - musical responsiveness, use of the ballet vocabulary, a striking sense of spatial architecture - he also shows, in this work, much more. Among the features I noted were his sense of idiomatic gesture; the fluidity with which the groupings of his dance kept changing; the subtle sense of dramatic poetry that created situations, meanings, forms, worlds, claiming the audience’s attention and feelings without spelling out any immediate interpretation; and his connection with the tradition of older choreographic masterworks. If you know your Balanchine (“Serenade”) and your Nijinska (“Les Noces”), what’s fascinating about Mr. Peck’s “Chinese Zodiac” is that he no sooner quotes some memorable formations from either work than he makes striking departures from it.
Of the other dances, I should like most to see again under more favorable conditions the three works made to Mr. Ott’s score “An Inflorescence.” The theater was overheated on Saturday evening. I, suffering from jetlag, found it hard to concentrate on them at the end of a long program with no intermission. In Mr. Wheeldon’s “Sara Solo” the sheer individuality of Ms. Mearns - that vivid oxymoron of lusciousness and tension - made a special impression.
@New York Times, 2010