NYCB On and Offstage

New York City Ballet concluded its 75th anniversary year with its traditional summer residency upstate at the amphitheater of Saratoga Springs’s Performing Arts Center (SPAC). The 75th year’s programming has been divided between founding classics and examples of the company’s evolution and growth. The residency followed this pattern, devoting two programs to the classics and one to the new. Each program was performed twice with the same casts.

Performance

New York City Ballet: “On and Offstage”

Place

SaratogaPerforming Arts Center, Saratoga Springs, July 9-13, 2024

Words

Eva S. Chou

Mira Nadon and Peter Walker in George Balanchine’s “Stars and Stripes.” Photograph by Erin Baiano

Under the founding classics rubric, Balanchine’s three-act “Jewels” opened the residency, as it had done for the yearlong 75th year celebration in the City. SPAC’s role, though, was not overlooked: “Coppélia,” which had received its world premiere here fifty years ago (and will be performed for two weeks in the fall), was represented by an excerpt from Act Three. SPAC also mounted an exhibition of historical photographs and costumes from that debut. As always, the season also provided the chance for role debuts, especially among promising new dancers, and to introduce new principals (Mira Nadon and Emma von Enck) to the upstate crowd. It was an unusually hot and humid week. At several of the 7:30 p.m. performances, the weather report read “87 feels like 91.” The dancers, however, remained focused throughout.

The week began with “NYCB On and Offstage,” a program initiated post-covid to bring audiences back. This year’s hosts, Unity Phelan and Adrian Danchig-Waring, provided useful pointers on the coming week’s dances, while dancers gave their all in the excerpts. Judging from the large audience, the program is likely worth the slot it takes up, though one wonders whether repeat business is limited to the next year’s “On and Offstage.”

New York City Ballet soloist Alexa Maxwell in George Balanchine’s “Emeralds” from “Jewels.” Photograph by Erin Baiano

In the evening of Day One, “Jewels” made a festive start. In each act, the curtain rises to show a glittering tableau of the entire cast that encapsulates that act’s ballet world. The first ballet, “Emeralds,” looked the epitome of Romantic ballet: against a backdrop of a sylvan glade framed by the suggestion of drapes is a tableau of lead couple and ten dancers in soft green Romantic-length tutus, their arms softly held. The softness remained throughout this work of great intricacy and subtle shifts in dancers’, and hence our, attention. The lead couple, Indiana Woodward and Jared Angle, maintained an effortless bond to each other, reinforced by hands that remained connected through many intricate interlacings and changes in body directions. The second lead couple, Emilie Gerrity and Peter Walker, danced what is called the “walking pas de deux.” It was exactly that: Gerrity, on pointe, intent and absorbed, takes one step after another—step, step, step, step for nearly the entire dance. Walker walked by her side, their oneness conveyed by their common attentiveness to her task. This time in “Jewels” I was most entranced by “Emeralds,” though there was something lesser in the matinée. It may be that “Emeralds” needs the night to work its full magic.

The opening tableau of “Rubies” gives notice of an utterly different world. The curtain rises on a curved line of dancers in saturated red, the women already on pointe and everyone angled at the hips and primed to move jut forward or back. The lead pair, Emma von Enck and Anthony Huxley, had a feisty relationship in their quick-moving reciprocity. Mira Nadon as the Tall Woman was a dominatrix with legs like swords. Four men rushed to support her in a promenade, two appropriately at her feet. But it is all in fun: at one point, coming out of a deep, unsupported arabesque, Nadon vamped at the audience before exiting.

“Diamonds” evokes imperial Russia, with the curtain rising on an appropriately formal arrangement of twelve ballerinas along the three sides of the stage. An unusually long dance showed the beauty and skills of the corps in clean patterns of lines and diamonds before the principal couple, Unity Phelan and Joseph Gordon, entered for a seamless display of virtuosity. With her glittering diamond headdress and big smile, Phelan was both regal and at ease. Gordon’s variation was outstanding. In a counterpoint to the dazzle, in the final moment, with the corps arrayed behind them, he suddenly knelt and kissed her hand, a gesture from the court world suddenly made personal.

Chun Wai Chan, Mary Thomas MacKinnon, and Gilbert Bolden III in Amy Hall Garner’s “Underneath, There Is Light.” Photograph by Erin Baiano

The season’s second program consisted of four contemporary works. First was Amy Hall Garner’s “Underneath, There is Light,” a Spring Gala commission from an established choreographer who has recently drawn much notice. This abstract ballet has five sections to music of varying types by five composers. Distractingly there were two quite different sets of costumes (by Holly Hines). Initially the costumes are black for all. The men wear smart-looking unrelieved black from head to toe: turtlenecks and long trousers. The women are in black leotards and dance skirts with jagged edges. Then about two-thirds of the way through, the women appear in long, semi-sheer yellow dresses, very flattering, but for the men it was grey leotards and bare legs.

The ballet begins with exhilarating speed: four men burst on stage at full speed, after which dancers streak through from both sides. Most stay only long enough to execute rapid work in feet and hands while getting to the other side. A nice touch is the men waiting in place as women speed through to reach them. The men lift them, carry them a short distance, and set them down, whereupon they speed off. But the unceasing movement continues into the next section, and the choreography starts to feel crowded with too many dance ideas. A change of pace finally comes with the introduction of quiet harp and piano. Four men walk about slowly, searching and looking up. Why they would do that and where it’s leading is not clear. Throughout are many passages involving only a few dancers, but the egalitarian, alphabetical cast list (ten women, nine men) means that it is hard to name dancers other than the ones you already recognize.

Emily Kikta and Mira Nadon in Pam Tanowitz’s “Gustave le Gray No.1.” Photograph by Erin Baiano

After the intermission came a pair of short dances separated by a pause. Both were costumed in primary red. In a nice touch, the solo electric violinist of “Red Angels,” the guest artist Mary Rowell, wore matching red cowboy boots. “Red Angels,” commissioned from Ulysses Dove in 1994, features two couples in starkly red tights and leotards against a black background. Lit from above, many parts of their bodies, including their necks, were cast in dark shadows throughout, evidently a deliberately hard-edged effect.

There were two pairs: Emilie Gerrity and Davide Riccardo; Dominika Afanasenkov and Joseph Gordon. All the partnering was forceful and explosive, demanding and unrelenting. Despite several viewings, I couldn’t decipher the tenor of the couples’ connection. The rare gentler moments stood out: Riccardo swinging Gerrity back and forth, her legs drawn up in frog position, is perforce pendulum slow, and his own lovely pas de chats, with the second foot lowering deliberately, slowly.

Connection is not an issue in “Red Angels’ ”second half, for it is a series of four solos. Each was high octane and nonstop, the pace and ferocity set by the first solo, danced by Gordon. The applause at both performances was huge, many people shouting their enthusiasm.

Pam Tanowitz’s “Gustave Le Gray No 1,” after Caroline Shaw’s piano piece, is made for four women—Naomi Corti, Emily Kikta, Ruby Lister, and Mira Nadon—and the onstage pianist, Stephen Gosling. They are clad in bright red costumes of ingenious trapezoidal design. Over turtlenecked, long-sleeved unitards, Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung have attached lengths of red cloth from shoulder to ankle that open in a loop when the dancers move and drape statuesquely when the body stills. Every time I see this work, I find myself anticipating how the cloth will loop or fall. The choreography, which is a series of walking steps and various balances on one leg, abets this preoccupation. Near the end, the dancers roll the piano across the stage and nearly into the wings. Gosling sportingly continues to play, at a crouch, until a piano bench is set beneath him. His back now to the stage, the piece ends on a one-way relationship between pianist and dancers.

The final work in the contemporary program is Justin Peck’s 2017 “Times Are Racing.” It well sums up the resident choreographer’s preoccupation with the possibilities of groups. Costumed in street clothes plus sneakers, the dancers in “Times” begin with a huddle. There is a second huddle, then a third. Huddling is a regular Peck motif. At one point, a man (Harrison Coll) is flung to the ground, or perhaps he flings himself. He is helped up but for a long time he remains an outsider. Then another man (Peter Walker) moves downstage and the duo, standing slightly to the side, does an extended tap dance shuffle. Later, hip hop is quoted by the excellent corps member India Bradley and the always-distinctive Taylor Stanley as they take turns balancing on one hand while legs twist in the air. All the while, the stage is a shifting pattern of dance, alluding to the title: nothing and no one stands still.

Peter Walker in “Stars and Stripes” by George Balanchine. Photograph by Erin Baiano

The third program was all Balanchine. Balanchine’s one-act “Swan Lake” was an overwhelming favorite last year, as it was again this year. The single act contains the lakeside scene only, the plot simplified to love and loss. On a hunt, the prince and courtiers encounter the swans and swan queen in their human form at night, and he loses her when she must return to the magician’s domain. The Prince’s explicit pledge of love is omitted, as is his later inadvertent betrayal of the Swan Queen at court, when he is deceived by the Black Swan.

This time when she is pulled back into Rothbart’s realm, I felt keenly that the Prince and she occupied two distinct worlds, and that the swan flock made this clear. Costumed in knee-length black tutus, their black headdresses descending in a point over the forehead, they had a severe look, their home the severe icy world of Alain Vaes's stage set. They also proved to have a crowd life of their own and moved on their own waves of emotion. Over the whole stage, they ran in long, looping lines, their arms moving up and down, running through and around the prince, ignoring this human who was having a crisis in their midst, unable to find the woman he has fallen in love with. It made us feel, after the fact, that they had to separate. (By contrast, the delightful pas de neuf, led by a serene Megan LeCrone, and the scintillating Valse Bluette, led by Emma von Enck, show, as my companion remarked, their sense of freedom without the prince, without Rothbart.) The principals, Isabella LaFreniere as Swan Queen and Andrew Veyette as Prince, both debuts, did not make as much of an impression. There didn’t seem to be chemistry between them. LaFreniere was skilled, her long arms especially effective, but the emotion didn’t much register. She is sure to grow into the role.

The “Coppélia” was recreated by Alexandra Danilova and Balanchine from their youthful memories of the Mariinsky. The Act 3 excerpts performed were the waltz of Dedication of the Bells, led by Baily Jones, and the dances of Dawn, Prayer, and Spinner (Mary Thomas MacKinnon, Miriam Miller, and Olivia MacKinnon, respectively, all debuts). All danced well, but it is tough to compete with 24 children. Auditioned from area ballet schools and revealed in attractive patterns of skills that varied from youngest to oldest, they received the bulk of applause.

The concluding “Stars and Stripes,” to John Philip Sousa’s marching band music, is an unabashedly cheerful ballet for three regiments, two female and one male, plus the jaunty duo Liberty Bell and El Capitan. Everyone was parade-ground snappy, letting loose with big kicks. Liberty Bell was Mira Nadon, and El Capitan, Peter Walker (subbing for Roman Mejia, making this Walker’s third program at SPAC, in three very different roles). They had debuted as a pair in this work in the fall; both were effortlessly perfect in tossing off their steps. But the performance belonged to K J Takahashi, leader of the male regiment. His every moment had verve and energy, topped off by a big infectious smile. There was no irony, just exuberance. You felt as happy as he looked. He did double tours en l’air, both left and right. This role has celebrated predecessors, but Takahashi definitely owns it now.

Eva S. Chou

Eva Shan Chou is a cultural historian of China, currently at work on "Ballet in China: A History." She has published articles on the establishment of the Beijing School of Dance, on China's firstSwan Lake, the founding figure Dai Ailian, and China’s cultural policies. ForBallet Review(New York)she wrote on performances by Stuttgart Ballet, Pennsylvania Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Opera Ballet of Rome, as well as companies from China performing in the US.Sheis professor in the Department of English, Baruch College, City University of New York.

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