The Unstuffy Gala: City Ballet Delivers Youth and Style

<First published online in the New York Times on September 29, 2017>

Five years ago, New York City Ballet’s fall gala became an event for fashion onstage: an annual rendezvous in which new choreography joined new couture. Since 2014, the formula has been four creations, made by four different choreographers, each with a design team from the fashion world.

More recently, the new ballets have been commissioned from remarkably young choreographers. The oldest at this year’s gala, on Thursday evening, was Troy Schumacher, 31; the youngest, Gianna Reisen, 18. These young dance-makers in turn have brought revisions to ballet’s sociology — a young and liberal view of both dance and life.

In just a few years, thanks in good measure to these galas, City Ballet audiences have become accustomed to same-sex pairings amid ballet’s more institutionalized heterosexuality. And though City Ballet has featured ethnic diversity since its inception in 1948, this has become increasingly evident of late. All four of Thursday’s premieres showed how ballet is changing.

The cast for Mr. Schumacher’s “The Wind Still Brings,” designed by Jonathan Saunders, showed men and women in skirts and culottes of widely differing lengths. In Lauren Lovette’s “Not Our Fate,” only two of the five male dancers are white, and the others are featured in same-sex couplings. Ms. Reisen’s “Composer’s Holiday” focuses on male-female duets, framed by separate male and female corps de ballet, but it too includes a little same-sex partnering. And Tsumori Chisato’s wittily inventive costuming for Justin Peck’s “Pulcinella Variations,” with commedia dell’arte imagery filtered hilariously through postmodern and surreal lenses, includes one breathtaking outfit in which Indiana Woodward looks part-ballerina and part-naked; her incomplete tutu gives the impression of totally exposing one side of her body from armpit to ankle.

We can and should argue about which aspects of all this are actually good, but the sheer youthfulness and anti-stuffiness of Thursday’s gala were most welcome. (All four pieces continue in repertory this fall.)

Argument is likely to focus on the first three. Mr. Schumacher’s “The Wind Still Brings,” set to the last three movements of William Walton’s Piano Quartet in D minor, is highly uneven. (It’s also the second Schumacher creation for City Ballet during which I’ve wanted scissors to cut off all the loose strands flying from the costumes.) Mr. Schumacher, using 14 dancers, only occasionally persuades me that this is dance music; and he allows himself to get stuck in various ruts along the way. You see lone women traveling across the stage on point (bourrées) and dancers of both sexes lying down as if to sleep so often that they become clichés while you watch. And the costumes, in various shades of blue and mauve, generally distract.

“The Wind Still Brings,” though, covers a wide range of moods and structures. The sleep imagery (which at times suggests both death and sleep) is contrasted by sequences of high energy and formally geometric organization. And most of the dancers, all experienced members of the corps, have individual material that allows them to register in new ways; the full-bodied adagio solo for Devin Alberda is just one of several examples in which Mr. Schumacher adds to our knowledge of a performer.

There are immaturities in “Composer’s Holiday” (set to Lukas Foss’s “Three American Pieces for Violin and Piano”), but Ms. Reisen repeatedly shows a marvelously arresting theatrical instinct. The piece begins with a woman lifted high by three men, so that we immediately, happily, ask “What’s going on here?” That sense of suspense never departs. Costumes by Virgil Abloh (of Off-White) contrast with dancers in pale colors and dark ones. Even when you realize that this is mainly a vehicle for two couples — the taller, elegant Christina Clark and (replacing Kennard Henson) Gilbert Bolden III, and the engagingly bright Emma Von Enck and Roman Mejia — you’re repeatedly surprised by how they connect with the corps (four men, four women) and one another.

Ms. Lovette’s “Not Our Fate” explains its title in the program — quoting a 12-line rhyming poem by the dancer Mary Elizabeth Sell — and yet it’s a misnomer. Everyone in this ballet carries on, enjoyably, as if fate were flinging them together; one tragically rapturous embrace follows another. Michael Nyman’s poundingly minimalist music is appealingly terrible; as so often with this composer, it builds the kind of rabble-rousing crescendo that makes Rossini’s sound demure. Black-and-white costumes by Fernando Garcia and Laura Kim (of MONSE and Oscar de la Renta) make men and women belong to separate eras — the women in dark bodices and white, flaring skirts with attractively uneven hemlines; the men are in elegant T-shirts and jeans — but this disparity seems irrelevant to the ballet.

Preston Chamblee and Taylor Stanley are one fatally attracted couple, Meaghan Dutton-O’Hara and Ask la Cour another. Since Ms. Lovette has some compositional skill and seems to express an attractively liberal worldview onstage, I wish her work did not also seem trite. It is least so here in the dances for Ms. Dutton-O’Hara, arrestingly bold and mature.

Mr. Peck’s “Pulcinella Variations” is in another league from these three ballets. The music is the suite from Stravinsky’s narrative “Pulcinella,” the work in which this modernist composer, extensively taking material from the baroque composer Pergolesi, reconnected himself back to the classical tradition. In turn it now takes Mr. Peck where he has not been before as a dance classicist. For a cast of nine, it confidently and successfully shows Mr. Peck composing classically virtuoso material that’s elegant, witty and brilliant. Throughout it shows a masterfully fluent command of phraseology. And Ms. Chisato’s costumes are ingenious, fabulous, outrageous.

Sara Mearns and Jared Angle dance an incisively beautiful pas de deux. Winning solos for Tiler Peck and Gonzalo Garcia (as part of a longer pas de deux), Anthony Huxley, Sterling Hyltin, Brittany Pollack, Andrew Scordato and Ms. Woodward, show these dancers happily surpassing themselves in speed and finesse. You can feel the excitement it creates. I’m curious to rewatch the first three premieres, but impatient to see this again and again.

@New York City Ballet, 2017