BWW Reviews: NYCB Art Series Takes Off with Les Ballets FAILE

Co-authored by Ellen Dobbyn-Blackmore

Patrick Miller (l.) and Patrick McNeil (r.) sitting on the Tower of Faile, photo by DDB

Faile is the name artists Patrick Miller and Patrick McNeil chose for their collaboration. It is an anagram for A Life, the name of a former partnership of theirs. The sensibility of Faile is that of guerrilla street art operating outside the mainstream, and while they have become a great deal more part of the conventional art world in recent years, they never thought they would be showing their work at Lincoln Center as part of New York City Ballet's Art Series. Miller, with a wry smile, acknowledged, "It was ironic having (sanctioned) posters up in the subway after working on the streets for so long." This kind of exchange between established classical arts and contemporary artists hasn't happened for a while. It's something that needs to happen for both sides to grow and evolve. Faile, through its process of using the fragmentation of images to focus viewers upon different ways of seeing, brings to the ballet a sense of openness of perception, inviting fans of each to regard each other honestly and with new eyes.

The selection of Faile is something of a masterstroke on NYCB's part. For ballet companies to survive they must foster new audiences and continually establish their relevance as leading art institutions. For its part, the artists known as Faile are reaching beyond their current comfort zone to embrace something totally new to them. On a recent visit to their Brooklyn studio, Patrick Miller escorted us through their works in progress for the upcoming Art Series at NYCB's Spring season and explained their thought processes.

As to why they might have been chosen, Miller said, "I think having somewhat of a youth following was enticing for them. It introduces ballet to a new audience. I think that was interesting for us too, introducing our work to a new audience. Not only does New York City Ballet have an incredibly rich history but they've worked with artists who were young and contemporary. They have an amazing history of this art series. It kind of went away for a time. I think they had the idea to bring this back and they had a short list of artists. We have a friend who knows us and knew about the situation and what they were thinking of doing and he asked us - hey guys, what do you think? It was originally supposed to be two artists but Peter loved our ideas and what we were presenting and he said, - let's go for it. I think it was a great opportunity for us to riff off a new language. Ballet is such a classic art theme. First, just going through the archive and looking through all the old Playbills... we pulled bits and pieces from that and were inspired by it."

Miller and his partner mined the archives of City Ballet to come up with new images that resulted in the Tower of Faile and the accompanying works. Miller says the duo learned a new appreciation for NYCB Founder George Balanchine: "It was cool to see how much Balanchine was experimental and coming at it from a non-traditional way. We feel like our trajectory was also kind of outside of the box and we're slowly becoming more established. That was something we could appreciate about Balanchine." In case some have forgotten, NYCB used to be a pretty avant garde company. Peter Martins has wisely recognized that the company needs to continue to break new ground to remain viable and relevant and Faile helps that mission along.

The goal of this venture is to generate meaningful exchanges which benefit both the artists and the ballet company. The New York City Ballet, in this endeavor, opens itself up to a younger audience who know the work of Faile and thus helps to energize its fan base while Faile learns about the realm of classical ballet which has really challenged them and given them an opportunity to show their work to a group of people that might not otherwise be aware of their work. Miller acknowledged not knowing much about the ballet company. He had only ever seen Nutcracker as a child.

What they learned about ballet: "Honestly, the most enjoyable moments have been watching them practice, when they're totally casual and then going to see them in performance. They're so much more real when they're dressed down and practicing. They're not hitting it every time, and you just realize how many hours go into it and I feel like some of those moves... are not the highest percentage moves. They're not gonna hit it every time. They're gonna fall, or whatever. When you see a performance where everyone's on, synced up, landing everything, it is a really amazing moment. I think that was something I didn't understand from the outside. A lot of those dramatic sequences are like that. I don't think people appreciate how hard it is."

Referring to the images that they created for the art series, Miller spoke about how his experience observing the dancers helped to shape the images for their installation. One of the images, Victoire, is of a dancer with lightning bolts for legs. Miller said, "We went and saw the ballet one night and we were thinking it was amazing, the energy, and you don't really think, these guys are athletes. It's so physical. We were thinking of the idea of lightning bolt legs."

Surgere Supra Bestias, based on an archive image of Tanaquil Le Clerq, photo by Faile

The most popular image was Les Ballets de FAILE, he said, which featured a girl holding a ballerina's legs. Tanaquil Le Clerq, one of NYCB's great former ballerinas, served as the template for another image called Surgere Supra Bestias. Other images were layered with parts borrowed from different elements in the archives. An old poster contributed a wreath of flame, an old perfume ad from Playbill delivered a dragon and other symbols accreted along with them until the whole effect is a riff on the mingling of classical arts and a contemporary street sensibility.

In an effort to explain how they build up their images, Miller opened a medium sized wooden box for us, telling us about how a long time ago, he and his partner, McNeil, were inspired by Chinese puzzle boxes. He revealed to us the box full of cubes, painted on all sides, which portray separate images. Fragmenting those images by turning some to different sides, ideas explode as the differing images begin to relate to each other in random, unexpected ways. Their use of the technique dates back to their Lost in the Glimmering Shadows show. Said Miller, "We were researching a lot of different, old things and we came across these puzzle boxes. Games from the thirties and forties, like Buffalo Bill stuff. We really liked the interaction of play and we made these small puzzle boxes and through that process we were seeing how they could start to abstract. When things got turned and flipped it started to become a beautiful way of the image changing, and the narrative and the color." It is evident from Miller's engagement with the box that the element of play and serendipity is important to their way of making art. "From working on the street, you put up a piece and it gets ripped and something gets exposed, someone puts a sticker on it and someone else writes on it, there was that beauty of having all of those happy evolutions through the work." On the event night of their first show with NYCB the artists gave one cube to each seat holder representing a grand, overall image. The element of play inherent in this was evidenced by the fact that on the spot people started swapping their cubes, and now they are even trading them on eBay.

The FAILE Wheels that will fill the Promenade during this Spring season will create a different kind of energy than the tower did. As a central figure, the tower lent itself to a lot of picture taking and had everyone circling it, looking up. Miller explained the reasoning behind the Faile wheels: "Tibetan prayer wheels were really inspiring for us. It's something that's been in our work for a while and we thought that for the second round, there was something great about the interactivity and the motion of them. Especially when you get twenty-one of them together and they're all spinning at once. It will create a lot of movement and there's something beautiful about that." The FAILE Wheels, which are carved in relief and painted, will be set up in three rows of seven and people will be encouraged to walk among them, touch them, spin them... play with them.

About their experience with NYCB, Miller said, "They're happy and we're happy. It brought in a really young audience which I think was good. One of the coolest things, I think, from going to several of the ballets and seeing that it's usually an older crowd, was that it (Les Ballets de Faile) brought a much younger crowd. Standing up on the Promenade after, everyone was talking about the ballet. They either loved it or they hated it. One of those pieces, I forget the name (Balanchine's Variations Pour une Porte et un Soupir) but it had this crazy dress and this creaking noise score to it. It was really polarizing. It was great from the standpoint of having dialogue, and having passionate dialogue about the ballet. I feel like that used to happen a lot more there."

Miller and McNeil have enjoyed the experience and would love to do more. They want to get their art onstage: "We've made it very clear to them. We wanted to be on stage from the beginning. We really wanted to do sets," he said with regret, but that was not possible. "For that to happen I think we really need to be working on a new ballet. So many of the things are already done there in a lot of ways. Unless you're starting with the choreographer and the music from the beginning, I think it's really hard to interject into that. It would be so amazing. I feel like, if anything, other artists that continue the Art Series down the road might have a better chance to do that just because we really tried to impress how important we thought it would be to bring it on stage. For us it worked well because we were able to be inspired by their archive and in our process that works really well." That's because Faile's work uses found, existing images; other artists' work would, of necessity, have to begin from scratch.

If there was any risk in bringing Faile in for this project, New York City Ballet seems not to be concerned about it. However, this wouldn't be new art if at least someone didn't like it. Miller related that they were warned from the beginning that a certain someone was not going to be pleased. Miller related, "Everyone, from two weeks into this, said, just know that there's this New York Times critic and he will hate this. It was kind of amazing their foresight. We didn't take it too personally." When we mentioned Alastair Macaulay's name, Miller smiled, "Yeah, that guy, I think he was the one person who didn't get it. But that was fine." Fortunately the success of this Art Series initiative doesn't require the approval of old guard, revanchist critics because it is intended to go straight to the people and get them engaged. We are reminded of the journalist, Louis Vauxcelles, who coined the term "les fauves" to describe the work of Matisse and his circle. Wild beasts, he declared them to be, but it's telling that in our time no one other than art historians know the name Vauxcelles.

Patrick Miller on future plans for Faile: "We're doing a large mural in Vienna in June. There's a bigger exhibition through the city and a gallery there. It's a 75 x 100 foot mural. We're doing these arcades as well, a 80s style arcade, in Miami, this year. We're hoping for a large mural series in Chicago next year. We've got a few people in the city and we're working with institutions to make it happen. We'll show the Tower of Faile in Hong Kong next year. We're always working toward a few gallery shows. We're trying to do something in Berlin next year and maybe something in Dallas. There's always a lot of things spinning around out there. Like the ballet thing started with an email with someone asking - hey, what do you think of this? Not all of those things are as prestigious as the New York City Ballet. The amazing thing is going full circle from traveling in the streets and putting things up illegally and now cities are getting in touch with us."

Faille's sensibility is playful and far-reaching and particularly suited for the marriage of "established" art to "outsider" art. Their use of a broad range of images, some ubiquitous and some original, pop images, pulp art images, juxtaposed serendipitously, place the viewer in a unique cognitive environment. The variety of images could be overwhelming if the attitude weren't so playful but, as it is, the viewer is able to absorb an enormous amount of information and make sense of it by connecting known images in unknown ways, forging new understandings of what we thought we knew in different, enlightening ways. Combining this process, already pregnant, with classical forms like ballet opens new thought-ways to the public that can only benefit everyone. We are hoping that the Metropolitan Opera will invite Faile to work with them to make more magic for us all.

FAILE Wheels under construction in Faile's Brooklyn studio, photo by Faile

The special Art Series performance on May 29th is sold out but Les Ballets de Faile exhibit is on display during all NYCB performances at the David Koch Theater with special viewing hours free and open to the public, from June 6-9:

Thursday and Friday: 12-5pm

Saturday: 10am - 12pm

Sunday: 10am - 1pm

Small portions of this article also appear on the Huffington Post.

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