Beethoven isn’t danceable. He conjures entire universes in sound and most sensible choreographers have kept their distance. Maurice Béjart nonetheless presumed to choreograph the Ninth; inspired by a post-revolutionary trip to Cuba, he fashioned a fierce paean to universal brotherhood later revived in Tokyo for a multinational battalion of 250 performers. The music swallowed the dance whole.
Last week, Justin Peck, New York City Ballet’s resident choreographer since 2014, fielded a more economical detachment of six to the first movement of Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the Eroica. Titled The Wind-Up, the dance was subversive and witty, finding room to move inside a score that shattered the architecture of Western art music two centuries ago.
Peck largely let the drama unfold in the music, volatile as weather. Dancers rushed on and offstage, much of the choreography cast as solo dispatches, urgent messages relayed from one dancer to the next, like musical lines that ricocheted across orchestra sections. The chief physical thrill lay in rapid destabilizing shifts between big airy movement and terse, knotty phrases delivered with dazzling precision and clarity. Simple, evocative gestures triggered eruptions aloft.
Turns out Beethoven is danceable after all. Especially by Daniel Ulbricht and Roman Mejia, whose crisp, slicing attack echoed Beethoven’s splintering of musical ideas. By Tiler Peck, who slowed down time with an unhurried enveloppé on pointe before teasing out the score’s rapid-fire syncopations. By Mia Williams – the lone corps dancer, wholly at home among the principals – who slid on from the wings in a wide skating stance then collapsed dramatically in a Graham-like spiral only to spring upright in a flash. And Mira Nadon and Chun Wai Chan, in an astonishing melting duet of lush arms, liquid torsos and scissoring legs.
Partnering suggested novel transportation arrangements more than intimacy, often to comic effect. Mejia joined forces with Peck, conveying her across the stage in ground-skimming lifts while she appeared to fire arrows from an invisible bow. Perhaps finding his pace sluggish, she shot into the wings ahead of him. When Nadon leapt toward Chan, he extended a hand like a ground marshaller guiding an aircraft in for a landing.
Near the end, men and women faced off in two columns – an echo of long-eighteenth-century European social dance – flung a leg combatively toward their counterparts, then bolted: contredanse abandoned before it had begun. Sporting references surfaced fleetingly: Mejia found a moment in his busy day for a push-up; the women flashed Muay Thai-style crocodile tail strikes and skewered fitness tropes with snippets of Pilates floor work.
The piece ended as it began, Ulbricht alone in a spotlight, this time spinning seemingly endless grands pirouettes. Here the physical idea of the wind-up lay elegantly exposed: the taut preparation, the ritual coiling of energy before release. Musically, Eroica’s first movement, beset by dissonance and the accumulation of tension, winds up toward the relief at a crisis averted. Ulbricht faced that moment alone. The hero’s journey, after all, is a solitary one.
This austere, engrossing response to a towering score was nearly undone by half-hearted design. Colorful squiggles on shiny shorty unitards carved the torso into unattractive planes; a token layer of tulle hinted at budget concerns. Practice clothes, Balanchine-style, would have suited the choreography perfectly. So would a changing color wash on the cyc. Instead, the dancers performed against a mud-colored wall – an uncharacteristic lapse considering the striking designs for Peck’s previous ballets by heavy-hitters like Shepard Fairey, Eva LeWitt and Eamon Ore-Giron.
The Wind-Up would have made an exuberant closer, but was followed by an uneven performance of Jerome Robbins’ gloomy Opus 19/The Dreamer. Alexa Maxwell was splendidly chilling – more spy handler than muse – while Anthony Huxley in the role originated by Baryshnikov remained diffident and remote.
The Flower Festival in Genzano pas de deux also succumbed to the miscasting of Ryan Tomash who brought the demeanor of a toreador to the role of a joyfully betrothed youth in an idyllic hamlet. His jumps were labored in contrast to the crispness and buoyancy of Isabella LaFreniere’s petit allegro.
Balanchine’s windswept Walpurgisnacht Ballet opened the evening with Miriam Miller jumping in at the last minute for Sara Mearns. Tentative at first, the statuesque Miller soon tackled the stretchy work and tricky traveling turns with abandon, luxuriating in backbends and plunging extensions with Tyler Angle’s stalwart support. A fevered, hair-flinging finale by the female ensemble heralded a heart-stopping whirl of whipping turns by Miller down the diagonal – straight as an arrow despite hair lashing her face – and a glorious vault onto Angle’s shoulder.
