BWW Reviews: CLASSIC NYCB, Sharing Space and Spirit

The Classic NYCB program this past week presented the work of four very distinct choreographic masters: Balanchine, Robbins, Wheeldon, and Peck, as they each expressed an artistic viewpoint on performer individuality in ensemble harmony. The evening's first performance, Balanchine's Chaconne, is not a work to woo potential converts. Somehow both overly sentimental and emotionally repressed, Chaconne is a synthetically peaceful ballet of smiles and cherubim. The sky blue backdrop, simple lighting, and traditional costuming informs the work's status as a historiographic perspective on early balletic tradition. Avoiding excavation of the darker movements of Gluck's beautiful ballet score from Orphee et Euridice, Chaconne remains neutrally joyful. The individual personalities of the performers are diluted into thin watercolors. The work does take tangible shape near its final moments as the corps maneuvers geometric placements and manages to lighten the space with a more interior warmth. A highlight of this start of program is also found in the pas de deux between Russell Janzen and principal performer Sara Mearns, who beautifully gild a somewhat monochromatic piece.

Jerome Robbin's Interplay purges the remote joys of Balanchine's Chaconne outright. Displaying an ensemble of nine performers as distinct individuals, the experiences and expressions of the ensemble aren't hidden as the piece's background, but are utilized as subjects. Clad in separate, bold colors, the performance alternates between individually colored mastery and an ensemble spectrum. The community on stage is undeniable, even as they attempt to outdo one another in balletic stunts. Robbins' choreography displays his iconic marriage of the colloquial and balletic form. He presents the dancer as one who happily inhabits both aesthetics. Whether balletic performative or colloquially spontaneous, a pas de deux in Robbin's aesthetic is equally forceful in its ambition for harmony in movement. The piece's vivacity is grounded in the symphonic jazz score by Morton Gould and Susan Walters' emotive piano solo. Any unresolved executions in stunt elements are forgiven. Falls and flaws are brushed aside as the piece's focus remains on the attempt, rather than the outcome. The audience's focus is centered upon Interplay's play, it's a play of separate personalities in gleeful harmony.

The first two works, Chaconne and Interplay, are extreme representations of ensembles that harmonize multiple individuals in a larger artistic canvas. The third piece, Wheeldon's After the Rain, stands alone in the evening as a meditative modernist duet. The performers, Craig Hall and principal ballerina Wendy Whelan, differ so drastically in form that their physical juxtaposition makes their dance harmony all the more transcendent. The costuming consists of light colored pants for the tall, built Hall and an organic pink leotard for Whelan's thin, translucent form. Choreographically constructed with equal attention to the ground and placement in the air, the performers interact with both simple and grand gestures. The piece is nearly entirely modernist in tradition. Any ballet gestures gleaned from the abstract choreography are earth toned and drained of ballet's traditional regality. Unlike Interplay, patience and simplicity temper the tone of the piece. Much like Satie's musicality, each action allows equal time for reverberation in the performance space. The exchanges between Whelan and Hall are more human than mechanic and coax the audience's gaze within stage action instead of reaching towards the audience for commendation. While so dissimilar in structure, by the end of the piece the two performers are somehow inseparable as a physical entity, impossible to distinguish one physically and spiritually within the other. After the Rain displays the power of discipline when used to exhibit the soul, rather than mask it. The presence of the piece is equally bolstered by its score, Arvo Part's meditative Spiegel im Spiegel as performed on stage with Arturo Delmoni on violin and Alan Moverman on piano. This being one of the final New York City Ballet performances for Whelan, the audience shattered the space with multiple ovations. However, to say the work's impact only manifested to commemorate a professional milestone would be a mistake, as the usual small talk and idle chatter were extinguished in the glow of intermission.

The final piece of the evening's program, Everywhere We Go, is a recent choreographic work by Justin Peck and is accompanied by a grand cinematic score by Sufjan Stevens. Featuring an ensemble of twenty-five performers, the piece recalls early silent film performances with its kaleidoscopic staging and beautiful monolithic tessellation set by Karl Jensen. Despite parts of the choreography alluding to mechanics, the piece doesn't feel cold, yet instead feels as though the performers are winding up to present their own organic exuberance. While none of the individual personalities develop in a textual manner as Interplay, Robbins' spirit pervades the work as the fight for joyful self expression is ever-present. The work's simple geometry uses space to coalesce repetition in form and highlights the distinction between performers rather than smother individual expression. The work is massive in every sense. From the score to the ensemble to the mammoth background, the work has a prewar, technological revolutionary optimism to it. This abstract pieces completes the evening's chronology with a decisive, forward lean. It establishes a sense that the best is yet to come from a company of excited individuals who have the discipline and passion to extend their own capacities and perform harmoniously.

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