For the third summer running, the one-week New York City Ballet residency at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center opened Tuesday night not with a spectacular full-evening ballet, or gems from the permanent repertory, or a mix of classics and exciting new works, but with an anthology of excerpts from most of the week’s offerings. While most dance goers would rather experience the thrilling emotional architecture that a great company like NYCB can provide in complete ballets, the lecture-demo proved entertaining and illuminating, with the guidance of principal dancers Adrian Danchig-Waring and Tiler Peck.
The program began with selections from the week’s only two ballets by company co-founder George Balanchine. Balanchine was famous for stripping ballet of narrative and letting the movement and music express purity of feeling, but here were two story ballets, both involving enchanted poultry. In the tragic ending of Tschaikovsky’s Swan Lake, Tyler Angle received Sara Mearns’s plunging embraces, her working leg shooting toward heaven, while her black-costumed swan maidens swirled around them, finally separating the heartbroken lovers. In Stravinsky’s Firebird, princely Peter Walker pursued magical Isabella LaFreniere, trapping her as she fluttered her hands, then supporting her to earn her trust. The two ballerinas then demonstrated how similar sequences of steps could express either romantic tragedy or transcendent ornithology.
The opening of Fancy Free, Jerome Robbins’s début ballet, to Leonard Bernstein’s score, showed how Robbins’s love of jazz and social dance transformed ballet with a new infusion of American energy. As performed by Christopher Grant, Lars Nelson, and KJ Takahashi, this 1944 work about three sailors on shore leave in Manhattan quickly establishes the characters and camaraderie of the three pals as they strut across the stage, freeze in comical poses, grow combative, and patch things up.
After these three narratives, the evening shifted into abstract works, the usual NYCB diet, although Balanchine refrained from using the term. How can a ballet be “abstract,” he reasoned, when it involves physical bodies performing physical movements? In fact, a relationship between Sara Adams and Jovani Furlan does unfold in a duet from Christopher Wheeldon’s 2003 Liturgy, to music by Arvo Pärt—or perhaps “fold” is more accurate. Associate Artistic Director Wendy Whelan, who originated Adams’s role, likened its series of tender manipulations to the creation of an origami crane—another ballet bird for the company’s repertory.
The remaining clips all came from new ballets from the past year. A sextet from Gianna Reisen’s Play Time alternated dynamic gestures with sinuous ones, to music by Solange Knowles. Its ingratiating movement struggled, though, against historically absurd, gender-bending costumes by Alejandro Gómez Palomo.
A solo from Kyle Abraham’s Love Letter (on shuffle), to recorded songs by James Blake, showcased Taylor Stanley’s astonishing skills, especially the fluidity of his upper body, his forearms whirling while his feet kept things largely classical. A duet from Love Letter built to Emily Kikta advancing on her pointes toward Peter Walker and gently offering her hand, but then, disappointingly, backing away and exiting.
The evening’s sampler ended with three excerpts from Justin Peck’s new Copland Dance Episodes, two of them familiar from his 2015 Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes. “Tumbleweed” featured five men, with Chun Wai Chan leading the others, hands joined, in a chain slowly unfurling toward the audience. In the contrasting section “Armor,” Miriam Miller, like an American queen, presided over an energetic court of four other women. Miller, flashing her brilliant extension in the concluding section, “At the Rodeo,” could not be topped even by three darting daredevils, David Gabriel, Roman Mejia, and Sebastian Villarini-Velez, proving there may still be some truth in Balanchine’s old mantra, “Ballet is woman.”
The New York City Ballet residency at SPAC runs through Saturday, July 22. For ticket information, visit spac.org.
Jay Rogoff is a poet and dance writer who lives in Saratoga Springs. His latest poetry collection is Loving in Truth: New and Selected Poems, and his book of critical essays, Becoming Poetry, will be published by LSU Press this fall.
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