New York City Ballet, Mixed Bill, Sadler’s Wells

New York City Ballet, Mixed Bill, Sadler’s Wells, March 9, 2024

The term ‘mixed bill’ generally refers to a grouping of separate works on the same program that highlights the diverse artistic vision of the company presenting it. The New York City Ballet’s Mixed Bill presented at Sadler’s Wells certainly does that — whatever one might make of the artistic vision — but also mixes a surprisingly disparate level of choreographic craft and technical execution. It is difficult to understand the artistic decisions that led such a prestigious company — a company built by Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine with fabled dancers and an equally fabled repertoire of works by Balanchine and Jerome Robbins — to come to London after a 16-year absence with such a very mixed bill. The one token work by Balanchine, Duo Concertant, danced by Megan Fairchild and Anthony Huxley, serves as a salutary reminder of what had made the company world class. Balanchine gives equal emphasis to Stravinsky’s score for piano and violin (played by Elaine Chelton and Kurt Nikkanen) and to the dance. Fairchild and Huxley listen to the opening movement while standing behind the piano, and when they dance it is as if they are improvising in the moment to what they are hearing. Gestures are clear, shapes are clean, and the dynamic is in perfect accord with the music.

Of the three other works on the program, at least Pam Tanowitz’s Gustave Le Gray No. I has a strong sense of identity. Set to Caroline Shaw’s Gustave Le Gray for solo piano, a quartet of dancers perform an uncompromisingly austere reverie in flowing scarlet costumes by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung that immediately call to mind winged beings. Like Duo Concertant, it begins with the dancers grouped behind the piano and as pianist Stephen Gosling plays the first four repeated chords the dancers move away one by one to begin their mysterious ritual together. The weightless, timeless style of Tanowitz’s choreography is so far from Balanchine’s that the dancers — Naomi Corti, Adrian Danchig-Waring, Ruby Lister and Mira Nadon — seem ill at ease. Moving the piano across the stage at the end while Gosling follows on foot as he continues playing is a gag that does little to resolve the mystery of the work but gets some laughs.

The evening opens — we have waited 16 years for this moment — with Daniel Ulbricht lying supine on stage in Justin Peck’s Rotunda: the returning hero washed up on a foreign shore. It’s a fitting image, but rather than allowing us to indulge in it for even a moment, Peck has Ulbricht scamper up with a romantic gesture of longing towards the audience as soon as the curtain is up. It’s almost as if he’s embarrassed to be discovered napping. His friends arrive and form circles from which solos, trios and ensembles evolve to a commissioned score by Nico Muhly, played by the Britten Sinfonia under Andrews Sill. The costumes, like Balanchine’s but without the formality of black and white, are pastel-coloured tights and leotards, and the overall sense of the work is relaxed bonhomie. The fabric of the choreography seems in danger of falling apart in one especially intricate solo which is just the wrong side of being, in principal dancer Sara Mearns‘ characterisation of the company’s approach to performance, ‘spontaneous and in-the-moment’. Ulbricht’s tightly executed and rigorously musical steps stand out but it’s not enough to save a lacklustre opening work.

If there’s already a sense of programming disorientation by the second intermission, the final work of the evening, Kyle Abraham’s Love Letter (on shuffle) to a recorded selection of songs by James Blake, heightens it further. If William Forsythe hadn’t already used tracks by Blake to create a whole new aesthetic and a scintillating physical technique to display it in The Barre Project: Blake Works II for a group of New York City Ballet dancers and friends during lockdown, Abraham could be forgiven for setting his choreographic colours to the same mast. But where Forsythe had made the score integral to his choreography, Abraham has simply pasted a romantic notion of classical shapes and steps on to tracks by Blake that makes them unsuited to each other. Dressing his dancers in designs by Giles Deacon serves only to widen the disparity of the collaboration.

Perhaps there are unseen technical, logistical and financial circumstances that have limited the company’s repertoire choices at Sadler’s Wells, not to mention injuries and substitutions to the casting, but we in the audience can only react to what we see. If, as the New York Times states, the company’s repertoire is the envy of the world, it is unfortunately not evident on this visit.