Review: At City Ballet, Bending the Form’s Rituals and Codes
“I would rather fail at something interesting than do something boring.”
That quote, from an interview with Pam Tanowitz in Dance Magazine last year, came to mind during the premiere, on Friday, of “Law of Mosaics,” her third work for New York City Ballet. Set to a string score of the same name by the contemporary American composer Ted Hearne, this odd, convention-bending ballet is a lot of things; boring is not one of them.
Not long ago, it was a big deal to see even one Tanowitz work on the David H. Koch Theater stage. Her first City Ballet commission, in 2019, arrived in the wake of multiple rejections from the company’s in-house choreographic institute. And with her downtown roots and firm interest in deconstructing the classical, she remains something of an outsider. But City Ballet is letting audiences get to know her. Showing us two sides of Tanowitz, Friday’s program, under the heading “Visionary Voices,” also included the company premiere of her poignant “Gustave le Gray No. 1” — a 2019 dance created for members of Miami City Ballet and Dance Theater of Harlem — alongside recent additions to the repertory by Jamar Roberts and Justin Peck.
“Law of Mosaics” begins jarringly, with three dancers, momentarily still and silhouetted, activated into busy motion by the emphatic first note of the score. The opening section of the music (conducted here by Hearne) is titled “Excerpts from the middle of something,” and that’s how the dancing feels: like part of a story that’s been unfolding before we arrived, presented without introduction. We just have to catch up.
The vocabulary registers instantly as Tanowitzian, full of idiosyncratic footwork and gesture: little trots in place with swinging arms; a hand circling the head as if wielding a lasso; heel-clicking jumps with flexed feet. The energy tends toward the clipped and fragmented, with what could be single sweeping movements broken down into their component parts.
As more dancers arrive — including the regal Miriam Miller, who takes on a kind of conductor or instructor role — strange tensions simmer. The attractive costumes for the cast of 10, Easter-egg-colored unitards by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung, suggest springtime, joy; the music is more tangled, troubling, its eeriness heightened by Brandon Stirling Baker’s excellent lighting.
At times, the choreography seems like a patchwork — yes, a mosaic — of allusions to ballet rituals and codes. Early on, a group clusters casually on a far edge of the stage (Tanowitz likes to use the fringes), as if preparing for across-the-floor class exercises. A solo for Miller, in silence, hovers between practice and performance. In a pivotal duet, Sara Mearns and Russell Janzen introduce what look like smudged, softened versions of story-ballet mime. (Here Tanowitz repurposes material from her second City Ballet work, a short film starring Janzen.)
Much of the movement plays with that relaxed quality and with images of fatigue. Standing behind Janzen as he points, princely, into the distance, Mearns rests her head on his arm, as if giving up mid-pas de deux. In a section for several couples, the women plop down to the floor, heavy and wooden. At the other extreme, more traditional displays of virtuosity ring out like alarms, as when Preston Chamblee whips through a series of fouetté turns, or when Ruby Lister, a striking new corps member, commands the stage alone with alert, springing jumps.
From some angles, “Law of Mosaics” looks haphazard, structurally confused. From others, its piecemeal nature reads as more deliberate, a pointed challenge to expected order, not only for the audience, but for Tanowitz and the dancers. The core of the dance, curiously, seems to be its ending: a stark, shadowy solo for a barefoot Sara Mearns. Lately Mearns, in her collaborations outside of City Ballet, has been leaning into imperfection (or so she says). As she balances and bourrées, her limbs wafting and jutting against violent jolts of the music, a real vulnerability comes to the surface. In retrospect, she appears to be the main character in this mystery.
The shorter “Gustave le Gray No. 1,” to a lush and meditative piano score by Caroline Shaw, is more harmonious, less fraught. Four dancers — Anthony Santos and Alexandra Hutchinson from Dance Theater of Harlem, alongside City Ballet’s Daniel Applebaum and Naomi Corti — share the stage with a grand piano and its player, Stephen Gosling. The work has an egalitarian air: All of the dancers are onstage for (nearly) the whole time, flocking together in beautifully billowing red costumes (again by Bartelme and Jung). At one point, they push the piano across the stage; Gosling ambles along with them, his fingers not leaving the keys. With a grounded simplicity and sense of play, the piece resolves as almost a mirror image of where it started.
The other ballets on the program — Roberts’s “Emanon — In Two Movements” and Peck’s “Partita,” both of which had their premieres this past winter — were bigger and bolder. (“Emanon,” to a jazz score by Wayne Shorter, greatly benefited from the addition of a live orchestra.) In comparison, Tanowitz’s work may seem harder to grasp. But it also bristles, unmistakably, with the excitement of an artist always pushing herself in new directions.
New York City Ballet, “Visionary Voices”
Program continues through May 1 at the David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center; nycballet.com.
