New York City Ballet paid tribute to Jerome Robbins on the opening of its winter season with Fancy Free, about three sailors on shore leave looking for some action, and In the Night, about three couples who have mixed feelings about the action they are getting. Also on tap was The Four Seasons, in which a throng of dancers indulge in outdoor flirtations in all kinds of weather. Part classical ballet spoof and part exercise in bravura, Seasons takes its hummable score from the third act ballet of the 19th century Italian opera I Vespri Siciliani plus other bits of Verdi. (As a humorous reminder, the composer’s name is painted in a huge font on the backdrop above an enormous lyre and putti.) The opening night cast brought it home.
Emma Von Enck was a snow flurry incarnate, her pointes crisp, in the hilarious Winter section, seemingly a send-up of the Nutcracker’s ‘Snow’ scene, in which every character was shivering while echappé-ing, with broad smiles on their faces.
Spring was stunning: sheer fun and unforced virtuosity dispatched by the ebullient Indiana Woodward and Anthony Huxley. Simple steps – walking, gliding, skimming jumps – were garlanded together in marvellous patterns, becoming more virtuosic with sudden changes of direction, then exploding in the air. Their intrepid entourage of corps men flew out of the wings in big billowy jumps and nailed their whimsical series of mathematically engineered Italian changements.
Summer was dreamy and sensuous, all studiously draped arms, slow drags and shallow bobs with one knee bent. The glamorous Emilie Gerrity and Adrian Danchig-Waring managed to convey both otherworldliness and lust, a hint of Eastern European folk dance in their footwork.
Twin powerhouses Tiler Peck and Roman Mejia set the place on fire in Fall, in the run up to a madcap finale, egged on by the puckish KJ Takahashi as Pan. A luscious, expansive pas de deux that featured daredevil plunges, off-kilter promenades and stopping on a dime out of supported twirls turned brazenly competitive. Peck, ultra-cool, looked like she was making it all up on the spot, deciding which balance to hold, which phrase to speed through. Mejia went for broke, did his grands pirouettes the way Baryshnikov did them, pushing off terra firma every so often. (They might have been tidier had Mejia left one or two out.)
Seasons was a shot in the arm after some diffident performances in the other two pieces. Olivia MacKinnon and Alec Knight were faultless in their execution of the first duet of In the Night but moved like ghosts, rather than the flesh-and-blood lovers suggested by Chopin’s Nocturne Opus 27 No. 1 and Robbins’ fraught, masterly choreography. Unity Phelan and Andrew Veyette in the final duet were rather languid and not that convincing as a couple at each other’s throats. A few partnered moments looked shaky, and that strange moment in which she touched various parts of his body before prostrating herself barely registered. In contrast, the middle variation was rendered with daring and finesse by Sara Mearns with Tyler Angle. When the three couples finally united, Mearns seemed to be pushing cobwebs aside, searching for something, whereas the other two couples remained remote, polite. The lifts executed in canon were heart-stoppingly beautiful; the entire piece should have felt that way. The dancers were not helped by the pianist’s somewhat lacklustre interpretation of the Chopin nocturnes that did not play enough with light and shadows.
Fancy Free also lacked oomph: starting with Daniel Ulbricht, Joseph Gordon and Jovani Furlan's cartwheeling entrances, their technically flawless execution of Robbins’ brilliant and demanding blend of gesture, social dance and ballet was surprisingly cautious. And the camaraderie between these sailors – the essence of Robbins' concept for the ballet – was weak. The women (“passers-by” in the libretto) delivered sharper performances, with finely calibrated dramatic instincts; we sensed Mary Thomas MacKinnon's fear and frustration at being the victim of a mugging, Alexa Maxwell's ambivalence toward Joseph Gordon's dreamy sailor, Malorie Lundgren's expert sizing up of the trio, and all three women's instinct for self-preservation. But no matter how polished the women’s performances, Robbins’ libretto remains unchanged, spinning women’s disgust with being manhandled into comedy. There is no resolution to their dread, which is amplified in Leonard Bernstein’s score. Even the bartender doesn’t take the women seriously.
In this enlightened era, when ballet companies are taking great pains to address long-standing issues of exploitation and harassment, a ballet like Fancy Free provides an ideal creative entry point into this critical discussion. It’s disappointing that City Ballet – with its vast resources, its prolific and sophisticated use of video, like the ‘Anatomy of a Dance’ series, and social media – has failed to spearhead an important dialogue anchored in one of the most popular works in its rep.
