The first Art Night of the 2016 season brought out an enthusiastic crowd of hip newcomers to New York City Ballet. As soon as one walked through the double doors of the theater, you could feel the difference in the energy. There was more noise, more jostling, more shoulder bumping, more clubby behavior than Lincoln Center manners. Comp tickets were spotted throughout while most paid the special $30 price for the performance.
This Art Night program was designed to appeal to visual artists. Unlike the first few years of Art Night, NYCB didn’t try to impress by bringing out Balanchine’s big guns - Serenade, Agon, Symphony in C. Nor did it go the other direction and present a mixed-bag evening where the only theme was no orchestra in the pit, as it did in 2014. This year’s selection was all about the costumes and scenery. Christopher Wheeldon’s Estancia featured the imaginative wild horses of Carlos Campos and stunning backdrop and front curtain by Santiago Calatrava. (His magnificent NYC subway hub that suggests a huge flying bird is scheduled to fully open next month.) Robert Binet’s The Blue of Distance with its exquisite blue and white tutus by Hanako Maeda was on the program as were Myles Thatcher’s Polaris (costumes by Zuhair Murad) and Troy Schumacher’s Common Ground (costumes by Marques/Almeida).
This year the costumes for Justin Peck’s premiere The Most Incredible Thing (barely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s folktale), were designed by Brooklyn artist Marcel Dzama. The execution of the designs were by NYCB’s brilliant Director of Costumes, Marc Happel, who also managed all of the productions mentioned above.
So, it was a feast for design-sensitive eyes, but unfortunately, not for choreography-sensitive eyes except in the case of Wheeldon’s Estancia from 2010 which may mark an important transformation point in his choreographic path that had been aimlessly wandering through plotless abstraction for several years.
You can’t fault someone for trying. So we won’t. And given the reduced ticket price for the performance, we are further reluctant to complain. But it’s our responsibility to complain when pretentious goop is passed off as the most incredible thing in ballet these days. And we’re not just talking about Justin Peck’s new ballet that premiered last night – 75% of which was disappointing.
After a Trump-sized media campaign that promoted the connection between the Andersen folktale and the choreography, it turned out that Peck told little of the story and explored hardly any of its themes. Rather, he took a small part of the tale that described the protagonist’s incredible clock and ticked off the hours. Then he inserted a battle scene. This was Wheel of Fortune ballet where the viewer had to fill in the blanks and guess what was going on. Here’s the story. You can read it in about sixty seconds, and it is jam-packed with meaning, most of which was absent from the ballet.
The good news is that we know exactly how to fix the problem and get everyone back on track. Yes, we have the most incredible answer. Because, you see, no matter how badly an artist's work is bashed or destroyed by everyone, the creativity within the artist will survive. Incredible, but true. (We picked up on that Andersen theme last night.)
So let’s start with what was good.
The costumes were outlandishly incredible. In fact, they were the story, not the choreography and certainly not Bryce Dessner’s uninspired music that droned on and on like background music to a bad movie. Some how, some way, Marcel Dzama’s crazy imagination was translated by Marc Happel into a mostly fabulous collection of fairytale sized costumes some of which can be seen at this link. Best costumes: The Four Seasons which had Brittany Pollack sporting a huge brown empty nest - an eagle-sized nest, Andrew Scordato transformed into a glistening winged summer grasshopper, Gwyneth Muller as the spring redbird with gigantic flag-like wings, and Marika Anderson’s wicked black crow.
Other great costumes were The Seven Deadly Sins/The Seven Days of the Week: each an orange/red unitard with different designs painted on it. The tutus for principals Sterling Hyltin (Princess) and Tiler Peck (Cuckoo bird) were gorgeous. We wanted to imagine a whole stage full of each one. There was a “miss” or two, however. Daniel Ulbricht’s black & white shorty shift with black trunks underneath that represented gambler’s dice allowed him the freedom to dance some challenging steps but without dignity.
As far as the actual choreography was concerned, it was bland, classroom assignment stuff augmented by running around and pedestrian nonsense. We've seen most of it before to the point where it is now mundane. Only Taylor Stanley (the artist who built the clock) was able to create drama out of his movement, but he did so with his unique theatrically emotive face and distinctive style, not the steps created by Peck. Tiler Peck as the Cuckoo Bird nearly made something out of her steps, but it was all totally predictable. Ditto with Sterling Hyltin's choreography. There was too much predictable re-hashing with a very limited vocabulary.
Here’s our solution. Justin Peck should commit himself to broadening his education in Petipa, MacMillan, Ashton, Fokine, Neumeier, Grigorovich, Cranko, Yacobson, and others who made their great works and reputations without the prophylactic advance media campaigns designed to steer the tone of criticism. For the next year, he should sit in theaters in other parts of the world watching live performances of these masters. He must concentrate on using more of the classical ballet vocabulary, not just saute arabesque, finger pirouettes, and developpes augmented by what he thinks is his own brand of genius.
There would be no shame in adopting Merce Cunningham’s practice of randomly selecting steps and forcing oneself to design choreography to at least include them. Peck's greatest weakness right now is his limited use of the vocabulary and his lack of intense exposure to the great works of the art form's masters other than Balanchine and Robbins. And NYCB should stop creating wild expectations. It angers the core audience when it then fails to even come close.
The HH Pump Bump Award is bestowed upon Marc Happel’s costume department for – once again – saving everyone's asses by making nothing into something.
3-D printed shoe by Janina Alleyne