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.

Seeta Patel’s re-imagining of The Rite of Spring

Seeta Patel’s re-imagining of The Rite of Spring, The Place, May 17

In 1913, when Vaslav Nijinsky was starting to choreograph a new work by the young composer Igor Stravinsky, Serge Diaghilev hired a eurythmics student, Marie Rambert, to assist his protégé with counting the score. The new ballet was The Rite of Spring which famously premiered in Paris in May of that year. After a mere eight performances, Nijinsky’s choreography was lost for almost 70 years until Millicent Hodson painstakingly reconstructed it for the Joffrey Ballet in 1987, but since the latter half of the twentieth century Stravinsky’s celebrated score has become a rite of passage for choreographers eager to challenge the rich complexity of its musical structure. Seeta Patel is the latest to tackle the score but she is perhaps one of the first to formulate her response through the Indian classical dance form of Bharatanatyam. It’s a revelation. 

Patel is known for her exquisite solo work but she has also devoted her considerable artistic intelligence to dealing with issues of identity that affect her as an artist and Bharatanatyam as a traditional dance form, from her film with Kamala Devam, The Art of Defining Me, to her dark cultural fable created with Lina Limosani, Not Today’s Yesterday. While her work remains firmly anchored in the Bharatanatyam technique, she has also begun to explore collaborations with complementary art forms, notably in Sigma with Gandini Juggling where her mastery of both rhythm and gesture complement the mathematical precision of the jugglers. In the process she is subtly moving Bharatanatyam away from its original context to reinvent it in a contemporary idiom. This process has reached a new level of maturity in her re-imagining of The Rite of Spring; everything she has struggled to achieve has come to fruition.  

Patel approached what she calls ‘this beast of a score’ by studying Stravinsky’s rhythms with pianist Julien Kottukapilly which she then translated into a carnatic vocabulary with which her dancers could identify. This attention to a score until it becomes embodied — similar to the way Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker approaches her work — is to enter into the music by the same door as the composer; only then is it possible to deliver a response that is true to its structure. To see Patel’s choreography is to hear The Rite of Spring in a new cross-cultural perspective.

The original score is subtitled ‘Pictures of Pagan Russia in Two Parts’, a scenario devised by Nicholas Roerich who also designed the original costumes and scenery. Patel initially follows Roerich’s outline; in the first part, she writes, ‘the excitement is palpable, the dancers still youthful and full of hope, being pushed and pulled by the energy around them.’ The energy is in the music and Patel opens up a dynamic spatial world within it by defining geometric pathways for her dancers. From the opening languorous poses that pay homage to Nijinsky’s faun she builds up the suggestion of a community waking up and setting out into the fields in a spirit of worship. Using Bharatanatyam’s vocabulary of complex rhythmical coordination punctuated by eloquent hand gestures, facial expressions and precise percussive footwork her six dancers — Ash Mukherjee, Indu Panday, Kamala Devam, Moritz Zavan, Sarah Gasser and Sooraj Subramaniam — make the intricacy of the musical textures and rhythms visible while maintaining their ritual allusions. 

Separating the two parts of the score with a brief vocalised interlude, Patel then inverts Roerich’s idea of the Chosen One as sacrificial victim; it is the community who chooses a leader to whom they cede their autonomous power. The tall, imposing Subramaniam is deified, wrapped in blood-red trappings and at the score’s final chord of sacrificial exhaustion he is the one remaining upright spiralling slowly into his trailing adornments as the community crouches behind him in his shadow. 

The setting for this re-imagining is a bare white stage with a white backdrop; the element of scenery is subsumed in Warren Letton ’s subtle washes of colour and in the luminous silk costumes and elaborate makeup of Jason Cheriyan and Anshu Arora. So closely do all the elements of this creation align with the music that it appears effortless; whatever orchestral forces Stravinsky throws at her, Patel transforms them into a field of light. 

The evening begins with Patel’s Dance Dialogues, a short choreographic conversation between six young performers trained in either Bharatanatyam or contemporary dance. The music is by Talvin Singh with live accompaniment by cellist Celine Lepicard who bridges the two choreographic works with a recital of Bach’s first cello suite. 

Didy Veldman’s Umanoove: The Knot at The Place

 Didy Veldman’s Umanoove: The Knot at The Place, November 20

Mai Lisa Guindo, the arm of Angela Venturini, Dane Hurst, Mathieu Geffré, Oliver Chapman, Sara Harton and Sam Costello in The Knot (photo: Tristram Kenton)

Choreographer Didy Veldman describes The Knot as an enquiry into contemporary marriage. She writes, ‘Together with my collaborators and dancers, we have explored different aspects of marriage, our fears, expectations, the meaning of “forever” and the wedding party.’ This is not the first time Veldman has translated the results of an enquiry into choreographic form. In The Happiness Project — her first work for her company, Umanoove, in 2017 — she interrogated the idea of happiness and built a response in the theatricality of the performance. She also built the musical framework around a single composer and musician, Alexander Balanescu.

In The Knot Veldman calls on much larger musical forces: Igor Stravinsky’s iconic score, Les Noces, an intricately rhythmic work inspired by a traditional Russian peasant wedding. For a contemporary exploration of marriage this is challenging for while it might anchor Veldman’s purview ‘over the last 100 years’, its ritual aspect contrasts with a contemporary view of marriage that, as Veldman writes in the program note, ‘could even be seen as part of our throw-away culture.’

To have more freedom and space for her choreographic ideas Veldman invited composer Ben Foskett to provide additional sections that would ‘weave in and out of Stravinsky’s dense sound world’. The dreamy opening of The Knot is one of these as the seven dancers (Oliver Chapman, Sam Costello, Sara Harton, Dane Hurst, Mathieu Geffré, Mai Lisa Guindo and Angela Venturini) enter in a procession wearing only their undergarments with their wedding attire draped neatly over their arms. The men form a line on one side of the stage and the women on the other and all attend to their respective sartorial and cosmetic preparations. In a concession to choreographic style the performers do not include shoes over the socks — they mime them into place — which diminishes the sense of nuptial formality but the introduction is nevertheless elegant in its simplicity and its choreographic ritual is close to Stravinsky’s conception. Paradoxically, when Scene 1 of Les Noces follows Foskett’s opening, Veldman’s choreography abandons ritual for long-limbed, exuberant sliding steps that suggest the party has started before the nuptials.

Conventionally, the start of the enquiry into contemporary marriage is the traditional couple at the altar — Harton is the bride and Hurst her groom — even if Costello has to coax a dazed Hurst into kneeling and Geffré has to place a bouquet in his rigid hand. It’s not an auspicious beginning but Veldman seems to relish the humour as she piles up other ideas like snapshots in a wedding album: Geffré makes a predatory move on Chapman, who is not interested; a disconsolate Harton then sits down beside Geffré who offers her an imaginary ring in a box that she refuses. Costello takes her place and again Geffré finds his advances rebuffed so he takes out a torch and looks for someone in the audience while the other three couples are dancing up a storm to Foskett’s jazz rhythms. There’s a same sex ceremony for Geffré and Chapman, a brief discussion about what is desirable in a partner, a scene with the women taking off their dresses to catch the eyes of the men, Costello tossing the bouquet and an invitation to some of the audience to be part of the wedding party on stage.

The problem is that Veldman’s tightly conceived snapshot observations lose intensity in their staged context. Unlike in The Happiness Project, the role of the dancing is here one of independent display that suits the abilities and predilections of the dancers rather than connecting the theatrical ideas into any kind of choreographic enquiry, while Ben Ormerod’s lighting and Joana Dias’ set of numerous chairs and hanging lights, while serving as a metaphor for ritual, only emphasizes the bland volume of the stage.

When Bronislava Nijinska first choreographed Les Noces in 1923, she embodied in her conception her convictions and ideas about the role of women in marriage and sculpted those convictions and ideas in a choreographic form that matched the rhythms of the score precisely. Veldman understandably steers clear of Nijinska’s enormous influence on the score, yet without finding her own form for her choreographic enquiry that is anchored in her chosen scores, she risks allowing the images she has created to float free of both her intellectual framework and her personal convictions. What does she really think of marriage? The Knot is just too loose to be an effective answer.