Tiler Peck, a principal dancer of New York City Ballet noted for her exceptional musicality and command of the company’s jazziest repertoire, has this month unveiled her first ballet for her home company, on its program “New Combinations.” While it is hardly her choreographic debut—she has made works for Boston Ballet, Cincinnati Ballet, England’s Northern Ballet, Philadelphia’s BalletX, and several dance festivals—Concerto for Two Pianos, set to the 1932 work of the same name by Francis Poulenc, is certainly her most high-profile commission to date. Though she does not perform in it, Concerto is rich in both mischief and mystery, frequent hallmarks of her own dancing.
Peck is the latest of several prominent choreographers to have been struck by Poulenc’s irreverent composition, which pokes fun at the traditional concerto form. The late Liam Scarlett used it for Asphodel Meadows (2010), his breakout work for the Royal Ballet, while Christopher Wheeldon used it to make Concerto Concordia (2015) at the Dutch National Ballet. A year later, NYCB’s own resident choreographer Justin Peck (no relation) picked the same piece for Entre Chien et Loup, commissioned by the Paris Opera Ballet.
So while it is somewhat well-trodden ground, Poulenc’s work for two pianos (performed here by Stephen Gosling and Hanna Kim) and orchestra does provide seemingly endless avenues for dancers to explore. The piece juxtaposes allusions to Mozart’s piano concertos with the tunes of Parisian music halls and the rhythms of Balinese gamelan music, among much else. Poulenc often changes mood and tempo abruptly, veering from sections of unbridled frenzy to haunting lyrical passages, and sometimes teases us with the sounds of castanets, tubas, and muted trumpets.
Peck rises to the challenge with a fairly large cast of nineteen dancers: seven pairs in the ensemble plus five soloists, two men and three women. The fashion designer Zac Posen created the costumes—bodysuits for the men and short, sleeveless dresses for the women, all in grays and blues, except for the soloist Miriam Miller (in last Tuesday’s show), who stands out in deep red—and Brandon Stirling Baker devised the lighting.
The first of the three movements opens with a racing tempo. At the crash of a cymbal and a rapid descending run on the piano, the principal dancer Roman Mejia entered with a grand jeté jump, soaring in between the ensemble dancers. Though Concerto is abstract, the soloists take on personas suggested by different aspects of the music, often amplified by the corps. Mejia, in the central role, was animated by the concerto’s brightest elements, bringing a heroic energy to the jumping and turning sequences with a hint of flamboyance reminiscent of the male part in Balanchine’s Tarantella. Miriam Miller, by contrast, brought out the dreamiest melodies, with lush arm movements, gentle mid-air beats of the leg during lifts, and slowly unfurling arabesques, particularly prominent in the lyrical second movement, when she partners with Gilbert Bolden III (earlier, she teasingly rejected Mejia, her opposite in temperament). The other featured dancers, Emma Von Enck and India Bradley, formed a spunky, pixie-like pair, sometimes dancing duets and at other times teaming up with Mejia, Miller, and Bolden in turn.
Concerto is a ballet in service of music and does a wonderful job emphasizing Poulenc’s contrasting musical colors. At the end of the first movement, for example, when the tempo halves and the pianos play a simple hypnotic melody, the lighting becomes dim and watery; Mejia, lost without his bright melodies, sits at the front of the stage as the women bourrée in a line behind him, forming mesmerizing shapes with their arms and slowly dispersing left and right before returning to encircle him. In a memorable duet in the raucous third movement, Bradley and Von Enck perform a variety of single-leg hops on pointe as if echoing the staccato repeated notes on the pianos. More than anything, Peck’s Concerto makes you want to listen to Poulenc’s work more closely (or even whip out the score) to appreciate all of its zany details.
Flanking Concerto on the “New Combinations” program were Rotunda by Justin Peck, first performed in February 2020, and Alexei Ratmansky’s 2017 work Odesa. Rotunda features a dozen dancers in rehearsal clothing who repeatedly gather to stand in an inward-facing circle between solos, duets, and group dances. The performers seem to inhabit their own private world, often pausing to look at one another and using other sides of the room to spot for their turns, rather than the front of the stage. This quiet work features a score by the American composer Nico Muhly titled Cascades, which aptly describes its gently pulsing beat, inspiring Peck to choreograph partnered lifts that send the women sailing up and forward with outstretched arms and slowly down again, ebbing and flowing like soft waves.
Odesa, by contrast, is full of revelry, with over-the-top facial expressions, bold folk-inspired steps, and wonderfully gaudy costumes by Keso Dekker. Using music by Leonid Desyatnikov from the 1990 Soviet film Sunset, based in turn on Isaac Babel’s tales of Jewish gangsters in the seaside Ukrainian city, Ratmansky responds to strains of tango as well as klezmer, Jewish folk music from Eastern Europe. Featuring three pairs bolstered by an ensemble of twelve dancers, Odesa suggests but never spells out various plotlines in the couples’ dramatic partner dances. Besides the tango, Ratmansky also makes use of Apache, an energetic dance that originated in late-nineteenth-century Paris in which a couple feign slaps and falls, mocking the turbulent relationship between a pimp and prostitute. The piece ends mysteriously, with Sara Mearns turning slowly on pointe while holding the hand of her partner Tyler Angle, who lifts her overhead, mirroring the other two solo couples as the curtain falls.
