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.
Tiler Peck, Turn It Out with Tiler Peck & Friends, Sadler’s Wells, March 9, 2023
Tiler Peck and Michelle Dorrance in Time Spell (photo: Christopher Duggan)
In William Forsythe’s The Barre Project, Blake Works II, which concludes Turn It Out with Tiler Peck & Friends, Peck works out the choreographic problems with such elegance and clarity that inherent in her response is the quality of the challenge that provoked it. Forsythe is a brilliant innovator of the use of classical technique in the way George Balanchine was; it is perhaps not surprising that Forsythe found in Peck, who trained at Balanchine’s School of American Ballet and rose to principal in the New York City Ballet, a dancer who knows instinctively how to absorb such innovation into her own technical repertoire and deliver a scintillating interpretation. Peck is joined in The Barre Project by fellow NYCB dancers, Lex Ishimoto and Roman Mejia, while Brooklyn Mack completes the quartet. Created during lockdown, entirely over Zoom — like some kind of haptic online surgery — The Barre Project, to the music of James Blake, took three months to conceive and a matter of days of studio work at CLI Studios to bring the four dancers together for its initial digital performance on March 25, 2021. Forsythe wrote at the time that, ‘Irrespective of genre, a dancer’s irrepressible capacity to summon fierce joy through their work gives testament to the resilience of the human spirit.’ He could have been talking not only about The Barre Project but of the entire evening Peck has devised and delivered to Sadler’s Wells audiences.
Turn It Out with Tiler Peck & Friends highlights Peck’s love of producing, of finding works from other choreographers that challenge her own way of dancing and at the same time that accord with her vision of a show. And this is very much a ‘show’ in the Broadway sense: a unity of vision formed of diverse numbers. Peck, who according to Michelle Dorrance, ‘lives at the intersection of so many dance forms’, is clearly the source for this unity. The different numbers include, in running order, her own choreography in contemporary classical style; a philosophical duet by Alonzo King; an exuberant collaboration in tap and ballet for the full ensemble by Dorrance, Peck and Jillian Meyers, and Forsythe’s blindingly lyrical paean to classical ballet. What flows through the entire program is a palpable sense of consummate musicality.
The only reason Peck does not dance in the first piece, Thousandth Orange, is that she expressly choreographed it on six colleagues while recovering from a herniated disc. Used to choreographing on her own body, the work reflects a certain reticence in dynamics while focusing on the fluid continuation of form and, one can’t help feeling, a desire for healing. The dynamic that permeates the movement, derived from Caroline Shaw’s exquisite quartet of the same name, played live on stage, is one of precise, sensual form reacting to the rippling of the wind.
Peck was drawn to the philosophical approach of choreographer Alonzo King by his belief that ‘dance is thought made visible, just as music is thought made audible.’ Inspired by his reading of the Upanishads, King created Swift Arrow for Peck and Mejia to the piano solo of the same name by Jason Moran (played on stage by Shu-Wei Tseng). The swift arrow of the title is ‘the disciplined mind’ fixed on its objective of oneness, and Peck translates this lucidly in her opening solo of sinuous lines and forms while the bare-chested Mejia looks on. Peck’s dynamic strength, however, is in marked contrast to the unseemly force Mejia employs when he comes to string his own bow: the disciplined mind of classical technique has been deflected in the gym, leaving King’s goal of uniting the two spheres tantalisingly unfulfilled.
Time Spell, with choreography by Dorrance, Meyers and Peck ‘in collaboration with and improvisation by the dancers’ (not to mention assistant choreographer Byron Tittle) has a subtitle that captures its spirit and the post-pandemic environment in which it was created: ‘subdivisions of time and space, and intersections of isolation and community, longing and joy.’ Layered around the superb a cappella voices of Aaron Marcellus Sanders and Penelope Wendtlandt, Time Spell builds up an intense sense of community and brings the house down. On the way home on the bus I asked a lady clutching her program if she liked the show. ‘Oh yes’, she replied, ‘but I thought the third piece should have closed the evening.’ She has a point, from a purely theatrical perspective, but The Barre Project also sends out a consummate signal that the benchmark of ballet has been irrevocably raised.
Last year during lockdown, over Zoom, William Forsythe choreographed The Barre Project (Blake Works II) on a quartet of dancers in New York: Tyler Peck, Lex Ishimoto, Brooklyn Mack and Roman Mejia. “Ballet is a great platform for compositional thinking,” he remarked at the time. “It’s a way of hearing, and so what you’re basically demonstrating is how you listen.” The Barre Project revealed a choreographer whose legendary familiarity with classical ballet technique allows him to take it in directions that ring true to its source while extrapolating its technical and spatial possibilities, just as Balanchine had done at New York City Ballet. In his way of working and in the choreography itself, Forsythe demonstrated the excitement of a precocious, hyper-active child at play: creating not to indulge an inherent aesthetic sensibility so much as to respond instinctually to James Blake’s music within given physical parameters. If anyone stood out it was Peck, but all four were clearly inspired by what Forsythe had brought out of them; in order to make sense of the choreography, they performed with the same excitement and impulsion that Forsythe brought to the work.
For English National Ballet (ENB)’s recent The Forsythe Evening at Sadler’s Wells, both works on the program — Blake Works I and Playlist (EP) — are conceived with a broader brush than The Barre Project (Blake Works II) — more orchestral than chamber — and neither was fully conceived and choreographed on the company. Blake Works I, to seven tracks from James Blake’s album The Colour in Anything, was first created on the Paris Opera Ballet in 2016 and has been staged for ENB by Stefanie Arndt and Ayman Harper, while Playlist (EP), to the beats of neo-soul and house music, and staged for ENB by Amy Raymond and Noah Gelber, is an enhanced version of Playlist (Track 1,2) that Forsythe had set on the male dancers of ENB in 2018 and subsequently extended for Boston Ballet a year later. There is always going to be an inherent challenge in passing on a choreographer’s initial motivation to dancers on whom the choreography was not conceived, especially to dancers who are not familiar with his way of working. In an interview in the program with Sarah Crompton, Forsythe describes these two abstract works as dancing for the pure pleasure of dancing, a ‘celebration’.
But there’s a subtle disconnect between the celebratory feeling of the choreography and the performance of the choreography by the dancers: their celebration — with one or two exceptions — seems to get lost in the satisfaction of accomplishing the steps. If choreography is a way of hearing, ENB’s dancers are hearing something different not only from each other but from what the choreography is manifestly singing. At the final bows, Forsythe improvised a brief impromptu boogie by way of instigating the encore; there was so much celebration in his movement that it came across as pure spirit in a musical body, and it stood out from the rest of the evening because it revealed the very ingredient that had been lacking.
This is one of the last programs, if not the last, ENB will be dancing before artistic director, Tamara Rojo, leaves for San Francisco Ballet along with some of her current dancers. Rojo has done so much for the company’s reputation in terms of getting works by choreographers like Pina Bausch, Jiri Kylian, Mats Ek and Forsythe, getting Akram Khan to choreograph a Giselle, pulling together a program by female choreographers and most recently reviving Raymonda. Not to mention attracting the sponsorship for and overseeing the move to their new home at the Mulryan Centre for Dance. This is the kind of artistic acuity that has reframed ENB’s image, and if there is a rivalry between ENB and Rojo’s former company, the Royal Ballet, it is not hard to see that the former has constantly outclassed the latter in its string of achievements. In all areas, perhaps, but one: the multiple publicity triumphs Rojo has accomplished seem to have overshadowed the company’s dancers. While technique is still at a high level — there is nothing wrong with the technical ability of the company under its swathe of ballet masters — there are traces of cloud hanging over the company. The news of Rojo’s departure may be recent, but the cloud — despite a counterpart of sunny spells — has been part of the climate for some time.
Even after the performance of The Forsythe Evening has finished and the memory allowed to settle, there is not much left of the evening apart from the knowledge of having seen Forsythe’s work in the absence of its full realization.
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