84. I AM A ROBOT: “Copland Dance Episodes: A Ballet by Justin Peck”, reviewed by Robby the BalletBot
[Editorial Note: Herewith, the first dance review written by the most advanced version of a new generation of Artificial Intelligence. Thanks to highly sensitized MoCap (motion capture) and body cameras capable of auto-focus and covert sound recording from “out front”, the particulars of the staging and performance of a ballet can be transmitted to our resident Robby, live-streamed or time-delayed, with a cyber-report dropped for editorial access almost instantly. Soon, such hyper-bulletins will undoubtedly be able to be posted during the performance itself: instantaneous turn-around, maximum critical surveillance. Henceforth, what the choreographer George Balanchine often referred to as the “dance police” enters a final dimension. We think readers will agree that our BalletBot’s electronically harvested and generated posting outdoes all of the ostensibly “human” writings found in newspapers, magazines, and on-line sites. Obviously, various journalistic positions and scholarly tenures will be jeopardized: as Karel Capek predicted in R.U.R., such is the price of progress. In the present case, there is possibly a connection to be drawn between the choreographic work under review, so redolent of electronic screen-savers, and the captivating pixels of our savior, the mighty RobBot. Read! Enjoy! Tremble! M.P.]
With the assumption of Alexei Ratmansky as Artist in Residence, alongside Resident Choreographer Justin Peck, the administration of New York City Ballet has clarified its intentions for the choreographic future of a company long associated with the ballets of its founder George Balanchine (and, to a lesser extent, the works of ballet master Jerome Robbins). No longer a museum for past glories, City Ballet looks toward our imminent future, as embodied by these two representatives of contemporary taste: Ratmansky, perhaps for overhauls of traditional ballets inherited from the Franco-Russian axis, as well as new works to new and old scores which are thinner and more etiolate than their choreographic models and forbears; and J. Peck for contemporary, youth-oriented extravaganzas and perpetuum mobile divertissements in white light and colorful togs.
Peck’s latest choreographic effort, Copland Dance Episodes (premiere: January 26, 2023), gives a pretty clear idea of what his part of the shared future will look like. Set to four pieces by Aaron Copland (“Fanfare for the Common Man”, Rodeo, Appalachian Spring and Billy the Kid), CDE is an evening-length sizzle reel of Peck’s choreographic world: the face-forward frontal stance; the presentational delivery; the gestural pas de deux that effloresce and fade like photons; the biomorphic coalescing of dancers into a central hub which then explodes like a dandelion releasing its seeds; the vernacular, off-hand movements that morph into ballet steps; the constantly churning movement with its suggestion of incorporeality, a combination of flesh-fair flash and inconsequence reminiscent of an old-fashioned video game. Peck’s ballets seem to be designed expressly to address the attention deficit disorder that afflicts many young humans nowadays (and many post-vintage ones too), which comes from an infrangible fixation on primitive hand-held devices. What this yields in terms of choreographic design and intention is a field-theory landscape of hundreds of interconnected – but sedulously immaterial – bursts of dance energy. With Peck, the circus is always in town. There’s always something happening, in the main tent and in the side rings, too. Of course, his choice of music channels the movement strategy: Copland’s popular ballet scores are the most rhythmically insistent of all music essayed for dance, outside of conga drumming. But after all, Peck chose this music expressly; as Hamlet said of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he “did make love to this employment.”
That Peck, and his overseers, artistic directors Jonathan Stafford and Wendy Whelan, are training their sights on a younger, hipper audience, was clear on the Sunday afternoon we monitored the ballet, when the Koch Theater was filled with Gen-Z celebrants who applauded throughout at virtuoso tricks (as the Russians do at warhorses like Don Quixote) and erupted in cheers at the end. This youth-focus was reflected onstage as well. Of the large cast (five pas de deux couples, plus eight soloists and a corps of twelve) only three were elders from the then principal ranks (Russell Jansen, Jovani Furlan, Unity Phelan).
The fact that the audience, energized and fully engaged, had to sit through a seventy-six minute through-composed ballet (two firsts for City Ballet: the first full-evening new work choreographed for the company since Jewels; and the only evening-length ballet to run without an intermission) seemed not to disconcert anyone in the stalls. Those present were happily entertained and got their money’s worth – plenty of dancing with not a minute wasted. No-one seemed to miss the “old-fashioned” kind of ballet where peaks of human emotion are reached by way of the intense realization of a single step, a touch, the focused fulfillment of a dance idea suspended in time. Instead, we viewers got: “Thank U – next!”
Peck is not without technical skills. He has a vocational knowledge of ballet vocabulary at his command; he looks like he knows what he’s doing. At the same time, he has digested the language of classicism -- the positions, the pas, the enchaînements – without showing much interest in deploying that idiom to achieve coherent effects. His main gift is knowing how to handle the corps as master programmer. He makes the design element of his movement for the ensemble clear no matter how many people are on stage, often while each cohort is doing steps distinct from the others, and he creates a “natural” flow from individual to group and back, even suggesting the eddies and whorls of wind and water; so that if there is no stasis, there is an organic flow to the way dancers form clusters and disperse. His spectacle is noise-free. And the ballet steps themselves – the turns, the jumps, the extensions, the partnering – are mapped and captured within the dance design.
But there is that matter of consequence. Nothing is at stake; no drama is suggested or pursued, nothing moves toward epiphany. The pas de deux – remember that Balanchine said that once a man and a woman are together on stage, there is already a story – are brief, technically virtuosic, and inconsequential. If a story is there to be mined, it is only the simplest one of either apparent attraction or presumed rejection. And if Peck wittily turns tradition on its head in the main pas de deux between the lead couple (Taylor Stanley and Mira Nadon), making them equal partners rather than defined by the traditional dichotomy between boy and girl, human male and human female, it still leaves one wondering what the ostensible relationship between the two might be, if indeed there is one? Query: is there such a thing as anthropic “relationship” ever, anywhere, at all? File for further research.
Balanchine choreographed one of his best-loved ballets, entitled Who Cares?, to the music of Gershwin (like Copland, a Jewish-American composer with one foot in popular culture and the other in classicism). That title could well be dusted off and appropriated for Copland Dance Episodes. (Further: Like so many of Balanchine’s ballets, Who Cares? was composed to music that was not originally intended for concert dancing. Peck, by using music that was composed for dance, which indeed was commissioned by specific choreographers -- Martha Graham, Agnes DeMille, Eugene Loring -- invites invidious comparisons.) Peck is now the Resident Choreographer at and Artistic Advisor to City Ballet, which makes him both gatekeeper and weathervane, both predictor and embodiment of the company’s future. Without deferring to his predecessors, it is his task to assure some continuity with the works that made the company the “House of Balanchine,” in the words of former ballet master-in-chief, [redacted].
To argue that choreographers who make dances for NYCB should honor their inheritance from Balanchine does not mean they should be retrograde, aping the master’s work by using the master’s tools; but it does mean, for a legacy company like City Ballet, that dance-makers should draw from that inheritance as from a well, finding their connection to a tradition which really goes back to St. Petersburg and beyond. Their work at its best ought to embody a kind of dialogue with tradition that shows an absorption of the legacy without being bound by it, as Balanchine carried forward the discoveries of Petipa, transforming them into a modern idiom that nonetheless clearly linked his work to the Imperial school that formed him. So the worm Ouroburos devours its tail to keep our shared universe moving forward.
R.
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