If a ballet doesn’t have an enchanted swan, or a sleeping princess, or a mechanical woman, what is it about? Friday afternoon at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, the New York City Ballet proposed some tantalizing answers with three non-story works, by Jerome Robbins, George Balanchine, and Justin Peck.
Balanchine, NYCB’s co-founder, once said, “Ballet is about nothing so much as dancing.” He also liked to say, “Put a man and a woman on a stage, and there is already a story.”
Ballet, then, is about choreography with real people expressing something about music and human feelings. Friday’s program opened with Jerome Robbins’s 1975 work, In G Major, to Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G. The choreography evokes bright days at the beach, underscored by Erté’s wave-spangled Art Deco costumes and backdrop. Unity Phelan solos with slow kicks and sultry slithers that suggest lazy summers and reflect a recurring Gershwin-like figure in Ravel’s score.
Phelan and Tyler Angle’s pas de deux dramatizes a developing love. They step toward each other but retreat, testing their personal ocean. After Angle catches her in backward leans, they take a more intimate plunge. He supports her in long, floating lifts, before they exit into privacy, with Phelan hoisted high, one leg kicking the summer sky.
Choreography, emotion, and music dazzle in Balanchine’s 1972 masterpiece, Stravinsky Violin Concerto, with unscheduled debuts for soloists Davide Riccardo and Jules Mabie. Their fine performances display NYCB’s remarkable bench strength, but also how a ballet resembles a fountain: different dancers flow through it over the years, yet the choreography retains its recognizable shape.
And what a shape! The opening Toccata embodies mathematical logic, but with a smile, Emilie Gerrity jumping joyfully, Mira Nadon whooshing offstage in turning leaps, Mabie comically melting down—it’s Balanchine’s neoclassicism, with a heart.
That heart gets tested in two emotionally fraught pas de deux. In the first, Nadon and Riccardo enact a contorted relationship. He supports her from behind, as she shoots one leg into the air and lowers her head to touch the other. Joining hands, they bend agonizingly away from each other, impersonating a zero. They palm the walls of a glass box, trapped inside. Every move expresses breathtaking tension.
In the richly ambiguous second pas de deux, Gerrity and Mabie embrace while walking, but with their arms intertwining in struggle. Twice Mabie kneels devotedly to her but also seizes her knees, imprisoning her. At the end, he kneels behind her yet covers her eyes, worshiping but controlling. After these deep conflicts, Balanchine’s joyous, folk dance-flavored finale lets us breathe once again.
Justin Peck’s new ballet, Mystic Familiar, with a commissioned score by Dan Deacon, builds on a thematic foundation: the classical elements—Air, Earth, Fire, and Water—plus Ether, the mystical fifth element once believed to fill the universe’s empty space. In Air, dancers with pillowy wings float right-to-left across the stage. Taylor Stanley, representing Earth, dances a knotty, grounded solo, arms whirling in frustration or powerless protest. Fire includes Peter Walker’s dynamic solo and Preston Chamblee lofting Brittany Pollack in angular poses. For Water, Naomi Corti and Ruby Lister, stretched on the ground, float around each other, their limbs rising buoyantly. The finale, Ether, with all 14 dancers in white jumpsuits, alternates energetic order with chaotic entropy. Each soloist bursts forth for one last, shining dance turn.
With no stories but many possible meanings, these three dances convey the rich imaginative variety ballet offers.
The Robbins, Balanchine, Peck program returns to close NYCB’s SPAC residency Saturday at 7:30. For further information, visit spac.org.
Poet and critic JAY ROGOFF has published seven books of poetry, including Enamel Eyes, a historical fantasy about the ballet Coppélia and the Franco-Prussian War. His most recent book is Becoming Poetry: Poets and Their Methods. He lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.
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