NYCB celebrates Jerome Robbins
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. » In Saturday’s season-ending Ballet Gala at SPAC, the New York City Ballet honored choreographer Jerome Robbins in his centennial year. The evening sampled works from Robbins’s ballet and Broadway careers.
Even with its sometimes silly high spirits, Robbins’s “The Four Seasons” — to Verdi, not Vivaldi — is a great ballet, with wonderful season-inspired roles. Carefree Lauren King braves the cold in Winter, motoring on one pointe down a diagonal of snowflakes. When winter winds howl (Devin Alberda and Ralph Ippolito), she refuses to freeze, defying them with catlike pas de chat leaps.
Spring occasions a delicate, breezy pas de deux for Sara Mearns and Tyler Angle. In her solo, Mearns uncoils an unusual sequence of turns, spiraling left, right, left like a spring tensing and relaxing (Robbins was not above such puns).
Summer brings languorous oboes and a sexy, hip-waggling dance for Teresa Reichlen and Ask le Cour; then Fall supplies the rousing finish. As a faun, that high-leaping tornado Daniel Ulbricht leads a romp for long-haired bacchantes, thirsty for the wine harvest. His crosslegged jumps defy not only gravity but anatomy.
In the Fall pas de deux, Tiler Peck, partnered by Andrew Veyette, displays true greatness. When she tears off a set of triple fouettés, her working leg propelling her body around, her sup-
porting leg doesn’t wander one inch. Her port de bras—the expressiveness of her arms—adds steaminess as her hands articulately sculpt the air with seductive flicks of her wrists. She is a brilliant ballerina at the height of her powers.
After a welcome repeat of Justin Peck’s jazzy new Robbins tribute, “Easy,” technical wizards Ashley Bouder and Joaquin De Luz performed Robbins’s “Other Dances,” an extended Slavic-flavored pas de deux to five Chopin piano pieces, played by Elaine Chelton. In his first solo, De Luz leapt so precisely and spun so dizzyingly that it’s hard to imagine him retiring this October.
“Other Dances” also brims with delicacy and tenderness, especially in the solos each partner performs to the identical mazurka. Bouder’s slow turns on her divided pointes almost break the heart, and in the finale, when De Luz lifts her to his shoulder and she smiles not at us, but down at him, we imagine we know all their secrets.
In a way, Something to Dance About, the Gala’s closing anthology of Robbins Broadway dances, assembled by Warren Carlyle, contradicts everything Robbins stood for as a choreographer. He wanted dancers to understand their characters in both ballets and musicals, and the dances to grow out of the characters, their feelings and their stories.
Something to Dance About collages together ten dance numbers, plus opening and closing songs performed by Leah Horowitz, but without dramatic context. Snippets of numbers hurtle by, and although we admire the choreography, the dances lose the depth Robbins worked so hard to give them.
Still, the dancers look as though they’re having great fun, especially Veyette wooing Bouder in “All I Need Is the Girl,” from “Gypsy,” Peck and Ulbricht unleashing a mean Charleston from “Billion Dollar Baby,” and eight men (without bottles on their heads, alas), led by Andrew Scordato, in the “Fiddler on the Roof” Wedding Dance. But Robbins, and NYCB, are about so much more.