A World Premiere of Pure Dance to a Familiar Score
<First published online in the New York Times on February 15, 2015>
Three years ago, Justin Peck had choreographed no professional ballet. Today his works (new commissions and existing pieces) are in demand across America, and he has been resident choreographer at New York City Ballet since July. Not everything he has made, however, has succeeded. It seems fair to ask this season if he will prove one of those rare artists who, having begun with several important successes, can grow further.
On Wednesday, the company gave the world premiere of his “Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes” The centerpiece of a triple bill of choreography made since 2000, it was sandwiched between impressive works also made for this company by Alexei Ratmansky and Christopher Wheeldon, two of the world’s most sought-after ballet choreographers. (Both were both in the audience.) Mr. Wheeldon was City Ballet’s resident choreographer from 2001 to 2008; today he is artistic associate at the Royal Ballet. Mr. Ratmansky is artist in residence at American Ballet Theater, though his finest pieces have all been for City Ballet. Tough competition, but Mr. Peck came through with flying colors. With three choreographers of such skill, 21st-century ballet is in better hands than we dared hope in 2000.
His premiere was somewhat diminished by injury. The principal dancer Andrew Veyette, one of four leading men who deliver high-energy virtuosity in the first and fourth movements, had hurt himself in the previous evening’s performance of Balanchine’s “Donizetti Variations.” His place was taken by Mr. Peck himself (first movement) and Sean Suozzi (fourth). Though each did well, neither has the sweeping athletic flair of Mr. Veyette at his finest. When we see the role performed by a single dancer, we’ll better appreciate this work’s structure.
Yet this hardly mattered; the work’s energy, charm, inventiveness, musicality and polish proved irresistible. The complete score for “Rodeo” was composed by Aaron Copland in collaboration with the choreographer Agnes de Mille; her ballet (which Ballet Theater is to revive this May) was a famous hit. Mr. Peck, using Copland’s dance suite, takes things from the music that evoke the complete “Rodeo” ballet: informality; jocularity; a single woman holding her own amid a community of outdoorsy men. But Mr. Peck’s work is pure dance, and some of its finest passages are very far from de Mille’s creation.
What’s evident in all Mr. Peck’s work, even in his less persuasive dances, is that he keeps setting himself new challenges. The outer movements of “Rodeo” have such ebullience (15 men and one woman) that they ensure its success — but it’s the second and third sections that most impressed me. In the second, Mr. Peck gives himself the task of a single-sex adagio ensemble — five men — with partnering but without sexual implications; in the third, he gives himself the test of a male-female pas de deux of extensive give-and-take, with the woman and man (Sara Mearns and Amar Ramasar) taking turns partnering each other and complementing each other’s dance virtues. Mr. Peck meets these new assignments with compositional flair and winning musical grace.
The five men of the second movement, “Corral Nocturne,” are junior City Ballet dancers, soloists or corps members: Daniel Applebaum, Craig Hall, Allen Peiffer, Andrew Scordato, Taylor Stanley. After the premiere, they took no bows in front of the curtain, unlike Ms. Mearns, Mr. Ramasar and the other men who led the outer movement’s bravura.
But it’s this male quintet that brings Mr. Peck’s most haunting poetry. The way in which its five men lyrically — in overlapping melodic lines — share one mood, partner one another, give complex dance voice to one unbroken, slow, expansive feeling strikes me as something unprecedented in choreography. Its nearest parallels lie in the work of Frederick Ashton and Mark Morris; for City Ballet, it’s a breakthrough in style. The rich texture of Mr. Stanley’s dancing, free-flowing and ardent, is outstanding.
It’s very happily followed by the reciprocity of the male-female duet, beautifully poised between friendship and romance, and affecting in its response to the music’s melody. You see Ms. Mearns supporting Mr. Ramasar as he takes jumps or holds arabesques, just as he supports her; the mutual appreciation that shines through is affecting. Ms. Mearns here is seen with little of her usual glamour; her makeup is minimal, her legs bare, and her outgoing warmth at its most quietly cheery. Mr. Ramasar, who in the last two years has become an endearing and central artist at City Ballet, seems to carry whole sections on the tide of his immense good humor and large-scaled prowess.
There will be much more to say of this piece; Mr. Peck is one of those rare dance-makers whose detailed planning rewards multiple viewings. Gonzalo Garcia and Daniel Ulbricht, alongside Mr. Peck or Mr. Suozzi in the Veyette role, lead the other men in outer movements; Mr. Ulbricht, with his allegro skill, inelegant physique and marvelous timing, is given a hilariously decelerating grand pirouette, perfectly fitted to the music. Discussion is already rife about the costumes (by Reid Bartelme, Harriet Jung, and Mr. Peck): the male quintet, wearing shorts, socks and striped tops, look like soccer players, and the exposed bareness of Ms. Mearns’s thighs draws our attention to sinews rather than line.
The strange originality of Mr. Ratmansky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” new last October, grows only more fascinating; I love its amalgam of wildness and design. The formal planning and dance brightness of Mr. Wheeldon’s “Mercurial Manoeuvres” (2000), set to Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 1, are always admirable. But on Wednesday, it was preceded by one of City Ballet’s occasional “See the Music” lecture-demonstrations, with the conductor Andrews Sill giving us some perfectly judged insights into the score. Unfortunately, what Mr. Sill said about Shostakovich’s humor and despair led us no deeper into Mr. Wheeldon’s choreography — whereas it did cast fresh light on “Concerto No. 1,” the much more peculiar but dramatically charged ballet Mr. Ratmansky made to this score in 2013 for Ballet Theater.
@New York Times, 2015