The curtain rises in silence on an exact recreation of the photo, with Joseph Gordon kneeling by the supine School of American Ballet student Theo Rochios. They do not move from this pose for almost the first half of the ballet. The set is murky, with some rocky clumps lining the back of the stage. (Moritz Junge did the scenery and costumes, which included danceable civilian wear as well as black velvet leotards and dyed gauzy skirts.) The Third Movement Funeral March from Mahler’s 1st Symphony begins—a cruelly perfect accompaniment. This music riffs on the nursery rhyme “Frère Jacques” in a plodding, minor mode. It was painful to imagine the father’s wishful denial in the “dormez-vous?” echoes.  

While Gordon sat in stupefaction with the boy’s hand in his own, Mira Nadon and Chun Wai Chan led the excellent supporting cast of thirteen in a swirl of uneasy activity all around them. Chan pulled Nadon into him in attitude sissonne, but she arched back in resistance with retracted arms. This unsettling motif was taken up by the full group, as was a chilling trope in which two men hopped on one leg and held their knees, evoking amputees. Interestingly, Tiler Peck also used a knee clasp in her new ballet this season; there must be something in the air. But in Peck’s piece the move looked like the drawing back of an arrow, and it prefigured larkish bursts. What a difference context and execution make. In contrast, the steps in “Solitude” projected stuntedness and regression, the vocabulary featured fractured lines and backwards traveling lifts. One of the most striking passages in this movement involved the men disjointedly lowering the women to the floor in canon on the diagonal, as if they were collapsible push puppets. 

Slowly, the cast began to interact with Gordon and Rochios. Ashley Hod hugged Gordon, who still sat numbly, while Nadon and Sara Mearns ushered the boy away. Rochios was tossed twice by the men and eventually ferried offstage. Was he journeying to the great beyond, or did the group represent the fateful forces that had separated him from his father in the first place? The cast unspooled until Gordon was left alone. At last, he rose. His first steps were tilted and flattened, like his new reality. He repeated a leaning, écarté degagé with pancaked palms. Much of the positioning throughout “Solitude” was open like this—for Gordon and the group. It was as if they had nothing left to hide or protect; this kind of loss leaves one splayed and defenseless. At first, Gordon could hardly muster the energy to dance. The moment that really got me was a painstaking, molasses-like preparation for a single tour. One could extrapolate that just waking up in the morning would be a struggle for this poor man.