Review: NYCB boldly pirouettes into the future
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. » While no other company matches the rich repertory of the New York City Ballet, no company commissions as many new ballets. At SPAC on Thursday night, NYCB glimpsed the future, dancing four works made in the past year, all plotless, all by choreographers 30 or under.
NYCB soloist Justin Peck, 30, has become a major choreographer, with commissions worldwide and a Tony Award for the current Broadway revival of “Carousel.” His “Pulcinella Variations,” to Stravinsky, shows him at his most purely and playfully classical.
Inspired by George Balanchine, “Pulcinella” displays lyrical wit and transcends mere imitation. It has two strong pas de deux, one for Sara Mearns and Jared Angle, another for Tiler Peck (no relation to the choreographer) and Joseph Gordon.
Mearns and Angle develop erotic tension through lifts during which she performs quick changes and entrechats. Gordon spins and leaps, his arms expressively signaling overhead, and Peck pirouettes luxuriously, then dances slow piqué turns.
Andrew Scordato excels in an elegant variation, while Anthony Huxley, clad in waggly vertical stripes, bursts hyperkinetically into high leaps and lightning entrechats, suggesting the mischievous trickster Pulcinella, whom English speakers know as Punch.
Tsumori Chisato’s outrageous, colorful costumes italicize the dances. They minimally allude to the commedia dell’arte setting of the Ballet Russe’s 1920 “Pulcinella” (Emilie Gerrity wears a kind of OpArt checkered pattern resembling Harlequin’s black-andwhite diamonds), but mostly to the great artists who designed costumes for that company. Leger-style daisies and eyes decorate the dancers’ bodies, a Miró-like digestive tract snakes down Sterling Hyltin’s front, and Indiana Woodward looks half-floral, half-naked, with half a tutu snugging her waist. Despite their busyness, the costumes don’t distract from Peck’s choreography, which divulges its continual pleasures cleanly before a plain gray backdrop.
Peck’s other new work, “Easy,” honors choreographer Jerome Robbins, who liked to calm his dancers by calling, “Easy, baby!” A kind of manic swing dance and jitterbug anthology for six, to Bernstein’s “Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs,” this light entertainment has a great role for Christopher Grant, who begins it with a body that can’t stand still, and
ends it with a flying horizontal leap into the wings.
Gianna Reisen was only 18 when she made “Composer’s Holiday,” for six couples, to an engaging Lukas Foss score for piano and violin (Susan Walters and Arturo Delmoni). Reisen intriguingly composes and moves groups of people, and she handsomely makes and breaks symmetries. She springs continual surprises, one couple in any given group, for example, defying the tendency of the others. Her images—surprising lifts and carries, a woman slumping forward over a man’s shoulder, for example—have clarity and stay in the memory.
Twenty-six-year old NYCB principal Lauren Lovette’s “Not Our Fate” develops a recurring pas de deux for two men, Preston Chamblee and Taylor Stanley, ending with Chamblee lifting Stanley proudly to his shoulder. In addition to homoerotic love, their dance explores the strikingly different physics of men partnering men, teaching us something new about dancing bodies.
Unfortunately, “Not Our Fate,” for ten dancers, uses a tiresomely recursive Michael Nyman score and includes an equally tiresome on-again, off-again liaison between Meaghan Dutton-O’Hara and Ask la Cour. Their series of brief hookups pales beside the better developed, clichéfree Chamblee-Stanley romance.