Alexei Ratmansky’s new ballet, “Solitude,” which recently premièred at New York City Ballet, begins with a devastating image: a father holding his dead son’s hand. The dance is dedicated to “the children of Ukraine, victims of war,” and Ratmansky has said that this image comes from a photograph of a father in Kharkiv sitting on the ground at a bus stop with his child, killed in a Russian air strike. This is Ratmansky’s second dance alluding to the war, but there is nothing outwardly political about it. The dancing is abstract and classically based, with no narrative and few outward signs of violence and death. Ratmansky’s canvas is not war but the human mind, and what he has managed to stage, with fourteen dancers and one child, is the disorienting experience of grief.
The opening tableau, sculptural in composition, brings to mind the war-scarred art of Käthe Kollwitz. The man kneels silently in a corner of an empty stage, eyes blankly staring into semi-darkness. The lifeless boy whose hand he holds lies on his back in a bright-blue T-shirt, his face turned away from us, toward the father. We see everything; they see nothing. No one moves. The figures are presented without anything that might suggest their whereabouts or their lives. We could be them, and the sight is etched into our minds before the music begins and the lights rise.
The dance is in two parts, each set to music by Mahler: the Funeral March from the First Symphony, followed by the Adagietto from the Fifth—death followed by grieving. As the Funeral March begins, with a minor-key version of “Frère Jacques,” the lighting, by Mark Stanley, slowly forms a kind of eerie sunset, faintly illuminating an abstract design, by Moritz Junge, resembling rubble at the back of the stage. A blackness rises from the rubble and covers the backdrop to the height of a man: the dancers will perform against this eclipse, which in the course of the ballet creeps upward, further extinguishing the light. The dancers enter wearing costumes that blend with the shadows. I found myself squinting and failing to make it all out, and then realized that this was the point: we were seeing this hazy and barely decipherable world through the eyes of the father, not our own. The dancers appear disorientingly remote, and their angular, arrested movements jarringly interrupt the waves of music and feeling that seem to belong to the father alone.
There are plenty of steps for these dancers to do, and they push, pull, slide, swing their arms—the stuff of choreography—as they make their way toward the child and eventually fall into a jagged line at his side, bodies simultaneously dead and pointing at him in a way that seems accusatory, violent, empathic, resigned. The community has suffered, too, but the father barely notices. A woman sits beside him and hugs him—or, rather, gives him a hugging gesture as he looks at her blankly and remains frozen, without affect. The world whirls on; the man and the boy don’t move. As Mahler layers his dirge with vernacular and klezmerlike themes, two women walk the boy away and he disappears and reappears, through the turns and jumps of the other dancers, like a lost ghost wandering through a moody nightscape. When the minor-key “Frère Jacques” returns, the boy resumes his funeral march, and, as the movement closes, the father finds himself kneeling again in his downstage corner, staring into space. This time, he is alone.
Mahler’s Adagietto begins. Here we find ourselves in new musical territory. The Fifth Symphony marks Mahler’s move away from the “folk utopias” (as one scholar has put it) of his early symphonies and into a more metaphysical realm. He composed it in the wake of a health crisis and while falling in love with his future wife, Alma, and the Adagietto seems to flow out in waves of yearning and serenity. Mahler, deeply drawn to interior worlds, worked on the Fifth while also working on the “Kindertotenlieder,” songs to dead children, set to Friedrich Rückert’s poems of mourning. The parallels with Ratmansky’s artistic evolution are striking: the choreographer began with his own kind of “folk utopias” using Russian and Ukrainian music and themes—such as “The Bright Stream” and “Songs of Bukovina”—and reconstructions of nineteenth-century classics. His choice of Mahler for “Solitude” marks a break, and it’s telling that he did not choose “Kindertotenlieder” but something wordless and abstract.
The father (Joseph Gordon) rises from his knees and executes a lyrical and weighted dance on an empty stage. The idiom is classical, stripped of ornament and deepened with open-chested lunges and expansive ports de bras. Every movement has volume and tone, and nothing is thrown away. Gordon’s restraint reminded me of Agnes Martin and the ways that line can make grief possible by containing feeling so deeply inside form. This restraint is perhaps ballet’s greatest formal paradox: an art that shows the body at the peak of life also testifies to what is lost when the body is gone. Such coexistence of life and death, beauty and destruction, may be why people are drawn to ballet at moments of trauma and loss. Gordon’s turns, jumps, reaches, and falls, responding to Mahler’s heightened sonorities, exist somewhere between feeling and numbness, as he carries us with generously rounded movements into pain, fear, even madness.
But this is not a solo, and soon the other dancers return, moving around Gordon like dim memories or shades. Things happen, but in the logic of this bending mind space we are not sure how or in what sequence, and my own memory and notes scribbled in the dark blur and overlap. The boy reappears; the father dances with him; the boy takes the father’s hand; until, finally, boy and father huddle on “their” side of the stage, peering across some liminal divide at a clump of dancers on the other side, a life and a world they will never rejoin. Suddenly, the dancers throw themselves protectively around the boy as a flash of light momentarily floods the stage and the ballet winds back to the moment of death; the boy falls to the floor and the father drops to his knees, takes the boy’s hand, and steadies his gaze. We are back at the beginning. Now the blackness has reached its apex, occluding all but a sliver of light. On the horizon the rubble glows red, as the curtain falls.
This season at City Ballet also featured Tiler Peck’s first dance for the company. Peck (no relation to the dancer-choreographer Justin Peck) is best known as a principal dancer there, where she has performed for nearly two decades. She is probably the sunniest dancer I have ever seen. Her style is light and her astonishing virtuosity appears natural; difficult steps and musical phrasing seem to make her happy, and her performances brim with an irrepressible spontaneity and joy. I have always thought of her as a kind of forever child, all innocence and smiles.
No more. Her ballet, “Concerto for Two Pianos,” shows Peck to be a choreographer of considerable skill and range. Set to the double-piano concerto by Francis Poulenc, the dance she has devised is a perfect match: a mercurial and moody rush through styles and ideas for nineteen dancers which leaves us somehow lighter—and full of the great good energy of Poulenc and the dancers. In an era inclined to narrative and political art, Tiler Peck is not afraid to give us the pure pleasure of music and dance.
The ballet begins with the curtain down as the orchestra strikes Poulenc’s first dramatic chords. As the curtain rises, we see several couples already dancing—and they won’t stop or take a breath until it falls. There is no plot, no set, only dramatic lighting by Brandon Stirling Baker and simple costumes by Zac Posen in a palette of blues and grays, with the exception of a glamorous red dress for Mira Nadon. Peck effortlessly moves colors and dancers through an array of mercurial patterns.
The dancing felt familiar, like a memory I couldn’t quite locate, until I realized that it was flowing out of everything Peck has danced in the course of her long career. The enormous repertory of the N.Y.C.B. is in her body, and her knowledge of Balanchine, in particular, but also of Petipa, Robbins, Ratmansky, is profound. She is not quoting them, and her touch is so deft that we barely notice the wisps from past ballets floating through the dance, but they are there, beginning with the midstream opening: Balanchine’s “Allegro Brillante” (1956) starts this way, too.
If Peck’s skill appears effortless, we should note its thoughtful construction. She responds to Poulenc’s loving homage to Mozart, at the start of the second movement, with a nod to Petipa’s “La Bayadère” (1877), transposing the Old Master’s procession of classical arabesques for all-female shades into a line of melancholy men winding their way in a wilting prance.
Yet this is not the classicism of Petipa, or even of Balanchine; it is today’s classicism, an accumulation of what today’s dancers have each and collectively made of their art. And what Peck has made of it is, if anything, simplified and clarified. When Roman Mejia performs a circle of leaps, for example, there are no embellishments, only the clean and moving fact of his body flying through space. Not tricks; just dancing. Following Poulenc, Peck stays away from sustained themes or development. At one point, she begins a dance between Mejia and Nadon, and we expect a romance, but she immediately brings in Chun Wai Chan, who falls into unison with Mejia in an intriguing emotional doubling. Soon she drops that idea, too, and moves briskly on. As the music races to its close, Peck has Mejia center stage, turning and jumping, and the dancers flying in all directions. In the last seconds, she scatters them into a surprisingly intimate off-center and asymmetrical portrait—which itself disappears before we fully take it in. The curtain falls so quickly that we are not sure we have seen what we saw, and I for one rushed out into the street happy to have been there. ♦