‘Scherzo Fantastique’ Brims With Liberated Energy

<First published online in the New York Times on July 24, 2016>

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. — Was it really just four years ago that the choreographer Justin Peck presented his first professional ballet? And is he still in his 20s? The answer to both questions is yes, but we keep asking because he’s so internationally in demand, so impressive, so prolific.

This month the Paris Opera Ballet presented “Entre Chien et Loup,” a new Peck work to Poulenc music. On Tuesday, the Los Angeles Dance Project presents the New York premiere of his “Helix” (score by Esa-Pekka Salonen). And on Saturday, the New York City Ballet gave the first performance of his “Scherzo Fantastique,” his third new work for the company’s 2015-16 season.

Mr. Peck still dances with City Ballet as a soloist; for the last two years he’s also been its resident choreographer. “Scherzo Fantastique,” his first piece to Stravinsky, is suspenseful and ebullient, with costumes and décor whose vivid colors and imagination make an immediately potent impression.

To those who find Stravinsky’s music arid, his “Scherzo Fantastique” comes as a surprise. This is one of his earliest compositions, from 1908. Just over 12 minutes, it was inspired by Maeterlinck’s book “The Life of the Bee” (1901). The music — sensuous, busy, often soft — has the subdued buzzing of bees, but in one central passage opens out into a strain of romantic melody that this composer would soon eschew. (A 1917 ballet to it by the French choreographer Léo Staats, admired by City Ballet’s founding ballet master George Balanchine, was called “Les Abeilles.”)

Mr. Peck’s décor, by the French (Brooklyn-based) painter Jules de Balincourt, is in bright Fauve colors: a view of trees, landscape and sky, seen through a fencelike foreground of fauna. The scale and proportions are intriguingly confused: Are these trees or are we low down and looking at flowers? The 10 dancers are individually dressed by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung in horizontal stripes, maybe like those of bees, but in multiple bright colors to match the set. Most have one layer of strands (at chest or pelvis level) that fly out entertainingly.

This is comedy, even romantic comedy, but you keep asking, “What’s going on here?” Although the dancers sometimes return to a cluster (the swarm or hive?), they often erupt in subgroups (sometimes same-sex pairs, as when Daniel Applebaum lifts Anthony Huxley high in the air at speed). At the beginning, Brittany Pollack (a strong, bold soloist, here at her most seriously forceful) and Taylor Stanley (a young principal whose wild freedom often makes him the company’s most individual dancer) stand apart, as if wondering how they fit into the group and what to make of each other.

Matters are complicated when the prodigious Mr. Huxley (another young principal, in whom stylish classicism often seems exhilaratingly inflamed) takes an interest; but there’s also a central, investigative getting-to-know-you Pollack-Stanley pas de deux. In the outer sections, formations keep changing so fluently that, when it’s over, you hardly know a quarter of what you’ve seen; but the ending is a nice touch of neatness, with the 10 dancers finally becoming five male-female couples, something you never quite imagined happening until it does.

Mr. Peck has learned from Balanchine the fun of math as drama: the sheer arithmetic and geometry of the evolving stage events here are central to the entertainment. More important, though, he keeps learning the Balanchine lesson of liberating energy. (“What are you saving it for?” Balanchine would often ask.) It’s not unusual to find that a Peck ballet shows City Ballet dancers looking both motivated and unleashed — as they are here. These 10 look happily on fire, but it’s Ms. Pollack whose audacity acquires a new definition and maturity. Amid the huge ovation, the biggest cheers were for Mr. Peck.

The occasion of the “Scherzo Fantastique” premiere was the company’s annual gala at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. City Ballet’s two-week season here is its golden anniversary one. When the company first appeared at Saratoga in 1966, Lincoln Kirstein, who had brought Balanchine to the United States in 1933 and with him created and steered the company, said: “We are in summer residence in what I firmly believe to be the greatest theater in the world for the spectacle of dancing.”

The company, fresh from a three-week season at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, is riding a wave just now. “Scherzo Fantastique” was the ninth premiere of its 2015-16 season.

Four of the others — Myles Thatcher’s “Polaris,” Robert Binet’s “The Blue of Distance,” Troy Schumacher’s “Common Ground” and Christopher Wheeldon’s “American Rhapsody” — were danced at the gala; the first three have deepened. The six gala items were by living choreographers; the sole pre-2015 item was “Ash” (1991), a strong candidate for that dubious prize: the best ballet by Peter Martins, the company ballet master in chief.

“Scherzo Fantastique” reaches City Ballet’s home theater at Lincoln Center in the 2016-17 season, where it’s listed as the second of three Peck premieres. Jam-packed with dancing, it will reward further viewings.

@New York Times, 2016