The New York City Ballet’s riches include its priceless repertory of ballets, especially those by George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. It might surprise us, then, that the company commissions more new dances than any other ballet troupe. Thursday night at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, four of these contemporary works demonstrated the great variety of ways in which NYCB keeps pirouetting into the future.
Some of these recent dances share our culture’s obsession with speed and appear to cater to our ever-shortening attention spans. The opening of Amy Hall Garner’s brand new ballet, Underneath, There Is Light, races its 19 dancers through short solos, duets, and ensembles, so rapidly that we can’t process all the information. Similarly, some passages in Justin Peck’s 2017 hit, The Times Are Racing, have the speed and hurtle of The Golden Section from Twyla Tharp’s The Catherine Wheel but without Tharp’s unifying utopian vision.
Amid all this flash and dazzle, Pam Tanowitz’s austere 2019 work, Gustave le Gray No. 1, first danced by NYCB in 2022, meditated powerfully on both motion and stillness. Four women—Naomi Corti, Emily Kikta, Ruby Lister, and Mira Nadon—dance an increasingly mysterious ritual. They wear baggy red costumes by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung that billow out before and behind like priestly surplices. In unison, they angle their legs in opposite directions, then cock their arms. They dance with their palms extended upright before them, parallel to the ground. They fling their arms through space like ragdolls. They always appear to move in concert, and we can only guess at the meaning of their hypnotic gestures.
Onstage, pianist Stephen Gosling played Caroline Shaw’s eloquent Gustave le Gray, which at times reimagines Chopin. Eventually the dancers drew him into the action, moving his piano across the stage while he walked behind it, still playing, more and more necessary for the beautiful ritual of this dance.
Immediately before, Ulysses Dove’s Red Angels—hardly a contemporary ballet at 30 years old—featured Dominika Afanasenkov, Emilie Gerrity, Joseph Gordon, and Davide Riccardo. Mary Rowell played Richard Einhorn’s percussive, sometimes violent electric violin score while the dancers alternated classical extensions, arabesques, whipping fouettés, and jetés with modernistic crunches, stoops, flings, and manipulations. Red Angels looks somewhat dated but remains fun to watch.
In Peck’s The Times Are Racing, a ballet in sneakers performed to Dan Deacon’s electronic rock score, the cast of twenty dance a great deal at high speed, but its genius comes alive in two duets, smack in the middle. One pairs Harrison Coll with Peter Walker in a largely unison sequence that mashes up tap, hip-hop, and softshoe with thrilling energy. Then, in a kind of hip-hop love duet, Taylor Stanley and India Bradley, premiering in the role, lie on the ground and repeatedly raise their legs, which rotate and dance in the air. Their pas de deux feels overextended, perhaps a flaw of The Times Are Racing generally.
After its hectic opening, Underneath, There Is Light offers great pleasure in its solo material, especially for Mary Thomas MacKinnon and Miriam Miller. Miller’s long extensions and steady balances enticingly melt down, and she flails her arms wildly, in contrast with her elegant leaps. Near the ballet’s end, the women discard Marc Happel’s handsome black dresses for yellow ones, while the men swap their smart black shirts and slacks for bizarre blue tunics and briefs, suggesting that underneath, there is . . . underwear.
At the end of Underneath, There Is Light a mechanical mishap prevented the stage curtain from closing completely—but then, one never wants the curtain to close on a New York City Ballet performance.
NYCB’s Contemporary Choreography program returns to SPAC Saturday at 7:30 to close the company’s 2024 residency. Ticket information is available at spac.org.
JAY ROGOFF is a poet and dance writer who lives in Saratoga Springs. His new book of literary essays, Becoming Poetry, won the Lewis P. Simpson Award for outstanding criticism. His latest poetry collection is Loving in Truth: New and Selected Poems, from LSU Press.
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