Tiler Peck, Choreographer

As everyone knows, Tiler Peck, a principal dancer at New York City Ballet since 2009, is a dynamo, both onstage and behind it. During the pandemic, in addition to teaching daily dance classes on Instagram from her parents’ home in California, she commissioned works from William Forsythe and Alonzo King. Those she later turned into a show, “Turn it Out With Tiler Peck and Friends,” that toured to London and California. That program also included a ballet, “Thousandth Orange,” set to music by Caroline Shaw, by Peck herself. Quietly, in the past few years, she has been developing her choreographic portfolio. Finally, that creative work has found its way to her home company with the premiere of “Concerto for Two Pianos,” a ballet for nineteen dancers set to Poulenc’s orchestral work of the same name.

Movingly, she dedicated it to her father, a former football coach featured in many of her Instagram posts, who died just before the holidays.

One certainly can’t fault Peck for lack of courage: both her ballet and the Poulenc piece to which it is set are bold, muscular, extroverted. As she said in a recent interview, “playing it safe gets you nowhere.” The concerto begins with a literal bang, a loud chord followed by furious scales on both pianos, vigorously played in the orchestra pit by Hanna Kim and Stephen Gosling. In response Peck has made a ballet that overflows with bravura, speed, attack. Leading the onstage activity is the virtuoso Roman Mejía, a dancer who gulps space with a kind of glee. Like a toreador or a flamenco dancer (there are castanets in the score), he snaps his fingers and claps his hands, even as he rockets across the stage, spins endlessly, and even lowers himself down to the floor in the middle of a phrase (not once but twice).

Roman Mejia, Mira Nadon and Chun Wai Chan in Tiler Peck’s “Concerto for Two Pianos.” Photo by ErinBaiano

Mejía’s energy is contagious. The whole cast looks energized, from the corps of 14 to the four other soloists, Mira Nadon, Chun Wai Chan, Emma von Enck, and India Bradley. More interestingly, Peck, with her well-honed sensitivity to music, has created musical “characters” for each. Chan is sunny and heroic–and competitive with Mejía—, Nadon sultry and at times romantic, and Von Enck and Bradley full of pluck and play, partnering and one-upping each other with the sharpness of their footwork, and even flicking Chan away to the sound of an insistent gesture in the music.

In the calmer second movement, which evokes the simplicity and melodiousness of Mozart, Nadon is partnered by a bevy of men who move with languid lyricism. Nadon basks in their attention, swooning sultrily in their arms, even as she shows off her long, witty legs and flashes her eyes like a Hollywood sylph in a 1930’s spectacular. The scene is reminiscent of a similar scenario in Alexei Ratmansky’s 2010 ballet “Namouna, A Grand Divertissement,” and there are other moments in the ballet that evoke his “Concerto DSCH.” This is not a criticism, but a recognition of the fact that Peck has been watching closely, and learning.

If there is any conclusion to be taken from “Concerto for Two Pianos” it is that Peck has taught herself well, and is ready, now, to build a career as a choreographer, even as she continues to dance with her usual polish and assuredness. May many commissions come her way.

The new ballet is the middle work on a program that begins with “Rotunda,” by Justin Peck (no relation), and ends with Ratmansky’s 2017 work “Odesa,” not performed for several years, and now spelled in the Ukrainian manner, with one “s.”

“Rotunda,” set to music by Nico Muhly and unveiled just before the pandemic, in February of 2020, has not aged well. It seems stuck in a honeyed, friendly space, perhaps the “somewhere” described by Stephen Sondheim in “West Side Story.” The dancers support each other and smile warmly, or gaze out at the empty expanse above the audience’s heads. They gather in circles only to disperse, pausing as if to reflect before scattering casually. The choreography has an unresolved, aimless quality that echoes that of Muhly’s orchestral pieces, which feature this instrument and then that, and end unexpectedly, without resolution. The central figure, originally Gonzalo García, here Daniel Ulbricht, is a daydreamer who lies in repose on the stage, or performs quick, run-on sequences of steps, alone. Alone, that is, until the others return and gather around in another supportive circle.

“Odesa,” in contrast, is a stylish period piece, even if the period isn’t made completely clear. The costumes, by Keso Dekker, consist of short, slithery dresses for the women and tight trousers and button-down shirts for the men. The ballet’s source material is layered: Isaac Babel’s stories of 1920’s gangsters in the Jewish quarters of Odesa have been filtered through the lens of a 1990 Soviet film entitled “Sunset,” the music for which was written by the Kharkiv-born Jewish composer Leonid Desyatnikov. Ratmansky’s ballet uses the Desyatnikov music, a suite of louche tangos, blazing cabaret numbers, and haunting violin solos (played by Kurt Nikkanen) that evokes a nocturnal world of nightclubs, showgirls, and assorted lowlifes. The score even includes the spooky-sounding flexatone, a musical instrument made out of metal that sounds like musical saw. The only other score I know that includes a flexatone is Aram Khachaturian’s Piano Concerto, which Ratmansky used in his 2020 ballet “Of Love and Rage.”

Megan Fairchild and Daniel Ulbricht in Alexei Ratmansky’s “Odesa.” Photo by Erin Baiano

The action and atmosphere are dream-like, even, at times, surreal. Three couples emerge from the shadows and engage in mysterious interactions, two of them fraught, the third plaintive. These are interrupted by the other characters. A line of showgirls snakes its way forward, hips jutting suggestively. In one section, a man and woman (Anthony Huxley and Indiana Woodward) battle it out to the sounds of a hyper-accentuated tango; he throws her to the ground, she runs and jumps onto his back. It’s a cartoonish, pseudo-melodramatic barroom brawl between gangster and moll, the sort of scenario related in countless tawdry tango lyrics. In another, a man (a touching Daniel Ulbricht) tries desperately to reach his partner (Megan Fairchild), but is pulled away from her by a group of male dancers who act as faceless forces, like bunraku puppeteers. When, in turn, they lift her and toss her high into the air, her fall is like that of Alice in Wonderland descending down the rabbit hole. When she lands, she slaps Ulbricht without mercy; whether the slap is deserved or undeserved is unclear. He sits, bewildered, clutching his face.

At the end of the ballet the tone shifts, and, in a final dream-like sequence set to a keening lament, the cast enacts a ritual of slow-motion balletic exercises, tendus in every direction. Meanwhile, the third couple (Unity Phelan and Adrian Danchig-Waring) dances together, almost in slow motion, Phelan’s body increasingly liquid, stretched out into space.

It’s a wonderfully ambiguous work, full of contrast, encompassing a range of tonalities: irony, humor, grotesquery, violence, longing. When it premiered, a critic found its suggestions of violence shocking, and it was subsequently shelved. But the violence, like everything else in the ballet, is wrapped in an aura of irreality and fantasy, an evocation of an artificial time and place, Babel’s Odesa, as experienced through the looking glass. It’s a fine ballet and it’s good to see it again.

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