‘The Most Incredible Thing’ Brings Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tale to Life

<First published online in the New York Times on February 3, 2016>

In Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Most Incredible Thing” (1870), the usually impressive choreographer Justin Peck has chosen a story whose details he can’t tell clearly and whose overall point he makes hackneyed. Ingenuity shines forth here and there; and Mr. Peck occasionally reveals new aspects of skill. But this 43-minute piece proves a damp squib. Its many dances seem not central but peripheral.

At Tuesday’s premiere with New York City Ballet at the David H. Koch Theater, it was uncomfortable to observe how much time, thought, travail and money had gone into making a ballet so disappointingly drab and tame. (There are dozens of elaborate costumes, none of which I long to see again.) Mr. Peck’s artistic associates — Bryce Dessner (composer), Marcel Dzama (designer), Brandon Stirling Baker(lighting designer) — are part of the problem. So, unfortunately, is the choreography.

The crucial point of Andersen’s tale — in which the one who could do the most incredible thing should have the king’s daughter and half his kingdom — is that, though art may be destroyed, its energy lives on independently as a vital force. This could work in ballet, an art that’s often brilliant at suggesting radiant transcendence, uncrushable life force, miraculous invention. We don’t even have to invoke the past masters Marius Petipa or George Balanchine, we have only to think of Mr. Peck’s effusively pure-dance 2014 hit “Everywhere We Go”: Its extraordinary supply of self-changing formations sums up something close to the heart of this Andersen story.

In “The Most Incredible Thing,” the dashing young Creator (Taylor Stanley) aims to win the hand of the Princess (Sterling Hyltin) by presenting her a clock that performs different marvels (people and actions) on each of the 12 hours. (Remember those e-cards with the 12 days of Christmas? Andersen’s description makes those look like child’s play.) When the Destroyer (Amar Ramasar) smashes the clock and is about to become the Princess’s husband, the clock’s shattered denizens return to life and destroy him.

The creation of the clock had seemed the incredible feat that deserved the Princess; then the destruction more so. It’s the artifact’s survival, however, that truly proves most unbelievable of all and brings artist and princess together. Yet in Mr. Dzama’s visual staging, the two-dimensional clock face is a tedious central spectacle, and Mr. Peck makes it less clear that the Creator made it than you’d like.

As for the three-dimensional people who pour forth from that machine, Mr. Peck makes them neither enchanting pieces of clockwork (the dolls in Leonide Massine’s 1919 ballet “La Boutique Fantasque” have more life than the humans who want to buy them) nor miraculously real (the forlorn title character of Michel Fokine’s 1911 “Petrouchka” is a puppet with an anguished inner life). Mr. Peck’s toy figures merely arrive like a conventional divertissement suite, a series of party pieces — generally duller than the fairy-tale figures who turn up in the “Sleeping Beauty” wedding.

One o’clock in Andersen’s version brings Moses writing down “There is only one God.” Why does Mr. Peck think a cuckoo (Tiler Peck) is a valid equivalent? She’s a very busy bee — I wish Mr. Dzama’s winged outfit let us see her coloratura steps better — but she has nothing to do with how a cuckoo sings or flies, let alone how a cuckoo clock functions.

Those three clunky knights are supposed to be kings? Why are the five senses all alike? Since the program tells us the eight men are monks, why does Mr. Dzama dress them like wizards in Hogwarts hats? This creation isn’t the most anything.

Brief flashes of inspiration occur, often at baffling moments. I don’t know why the King is played by two tall men (Russell Janzen and Ask la Cour) as a single faceless, giant bivalve that magically sunders into two to reveal the Princess — but the effect is so compellingly fantastic that it’s engrossing. I have no notion why the Spring Bird is represented by a woman (Gwyneth Muller) in full-length scarlet doing an act in the manner of the early modern dancer Loie Fuller, with elongated sleeves and fabric suggesting flickering flames — but, for a few seconds, Mr. Peck, Mr. Dzama and Ms. Muller bring Fuller’s fire-dance alive out of history.

When the Destroyer arrives, he’s wonderfully arresting. Like the god Janus of Roman mythology, he has two faces, one on the back of his head. He, in everything he does, is the most real person in the piece.

But when the creations come back to life, Mr. Dessner’s music lapses into a pastiche of Philip Glass and Michael Nyman. Though Mr. Dzama uses several bright colors, his set and Mr. Baker’s lighting make the story somber; theirs is a realm where the sun forgot to shine.

Mr. Peck, 28, became City Ballet’s resident choreographer last year. To date, the largest complaints about him have been old-fashioned ones, namely that he has nothing to say and that he doesn’t make male-female duets with dramatic depth. “The Most Incredible Thing” starts to refute these, but — at a first viewing — not effectively.

Creator and Princess no sooner meet, near the start of the work, than they go into a formulaic this-thing-called-love duet, with no getting-to-know-you courtesy and some foolish upside-down lifts. She, curiously, becomes more freshly lifelike when she’s with the Destroyer: a tense, dark number as if she’s falling reluctantly under his spell. When she’s reunited with the Creator, they reprise their earlier pas de deux, this time without the lifts that, at this later stage of the story, would no longer have seemed improper.

There’ll be more to say of this ballet during the season. There are two casts; it returns to repertory in April and May. In the present program it’s preceded by three ballets that were new in October — Myles Thatcher’s “Polaris,” Robert Binet’s “The Blue of Distance” and Troy Schumacher’s “Common Ground” — and by Christopher Wheeldon’s “Estancia,” which hasn’t been seen since 2010, the year of its creation.

The Thatcher, Binet and Schumacher works are all pleasing and make their dancers highly attractive. “Estancia,” amiably dated when new, now looks harmlessly silly. Now, Mr. Wheeldon certainly has something to say: principally, that, in Argentina, when there aren’t young women to kiss, there are always horses.

@New York Times, 2016