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<\/a>Ashly Isaacs, Claire Kretzschmer, Taylor Stanley, Lauren Lovett in Peter Martins's Mes Oiseaux<\/em>. Photo: Paul Kolnik<\/p><\/div> I can\u2019t say that Peter Martins\u2019s new work for the New York City Ballet\u2019s spring season is refreshing in that way. Martins, as the company\u2019s ballet master in chief, has responsibilities that go beyond falling in love with an idea or a piece of music and being consumed with choreographing a dance to mate with it.\u00a0 The company\u2019s Spring Gala, at which his Mes Oiseaux <\/em>premiered, was titled \u201c\u00c0 La Fran\u00e7ais.\u201d In accord with that, Martins set his salute-to-France ballet to contemporary composer Marc-Andr\u00e9 Dalbavie\u2019s Trio No. 1\u2014an intriguing piece expertly played by Kurt Nikkanen (violin), Ann Kim (cello), and Cameron Grant (piano). The costumes (for the women, tricky puzzles of black and faux-skin with flippy little skirts of different colors) are by the French fashion designer Gilles Mendez.<\/p>\n Martins also has the job of fostering new talent within the company. So his ballet features a trio of corps de ballet women (Lauren Lovette, Ashly Isaacs, and Claire Kretzschmar), with a man (Taylor Stanley\u2014also a corps dancer) to help them out and show them off. Mes Oiseaux<\/em> resembles Balanchine\u2019s great Apollo<\/em> in its setup, but the talented Stanley doesn\u2019t play a young harnesser of the muses. He\u2019s a no-nonsense facilitator with stage presence; a fine, bold technique; and a certain grim attention to duty. After heavy piano chords have made an announcement in the dark and Mark Stanley has brought up the lights, the first thing he does is to lift each woman in turn, playing no favorites. Then he does that again.<\/p>\n Claire Kretzschmar and Taylor Stanley in Mes Oiseux<\/em>. Photo: Paul Kolnik<\/p><\/div>\n As you might expect, the four come and go, unite in duets, display themselves in solos, and, for example, crisscross the diagonals of the stage with leaps. In this brisk little ballet, they don\u2019t relate to one another in particularly meaningful ways. Martins didn\u2019t go easy on his cast. Dancing to turbulent piano and a buzz of strings, Isaacs goes through her very demanding solo, with a go-for-broke amplitude that\u2019s touching but comes close enough to instability to make you fear for her. Lovett\u2019s solo is crisper and saucier, making a thing of the pinup-girl stances that Balanchine may have picked up in his early days of choreographing on Broadway; she attacks the steps with grave charm, hampered slightly by a fashionable coiffure that all but covers one of her eyes with a slash of hair. It may have been in the duet by Stanley and \u00a0Kretzschmar (a lovely, leggy blonde) that I noticed how often in this ballet, people arch their bodies or throw their heads back\u2014countering actual strength with illusory weakness or abandonment.<\/p>\n The end takes you by surprise. I\u2019m not even sure what happens. They\u2019re dancing, and suddenly someone\u2019s gone, someone\u2019s going, others are staying, and the curtain comes down like a guillotine. The birds have flown.<\/p>\n The ensemble women in Benjamin Millepied's Two Hearts<\/em>. Photo: Paul Kolnik<\/p><\/div>\n Benjamin Millepied was born and raised in France, but he\u2019s not making a large French gesture in his choice of music and costumes for his new Two Hearts<\/em>. The startling commissioned score is by Nico Muhly, with whom Millepied has collaborated before, and the costumes were created by Kate & Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte, who designed the attire for the film Black Swan<\/em> (for which Millepied served as choreographer and performer). \u00a0Roderick Murray created the striking lighting.<\/p>\n The six women of the ensemble are divided in two by their outfits; they all wear fluffy white skirts with bands of black, but the heavy black lines on their bodices are arranged differently. These distinctions could prime the observer in search of a theme to see them as opponents in a board game, which they are not. Tiler Peck and her partner, Tyler Angle also have related black-and-white outfits.<\/p>\n Two Hearts<\/em> begins with a solo for Angle. He\u2019s both thoughtful and playful\u2014 watching his feet do their clever things\u2014and this very sensitive dancer brings out all the inherent dynamic changes in the choreography.\u00a0 He attracts six additional men, and here Millepied works the possibilities of unison and counterpoint with offhand skill. Peck has six female companions (the men swoon over them and exit).\u00a0 Millepied seems to be trying to establish a community\u2014weaving patterns and establishing hints of plot. The women flirt and project a sisterly camaraderie. Peck dances attended by three men before Angle grabs her and, without stopping, carries her off.<\/p>\n Tiler Peck floating over Tyler Angel in Two Hearts<\/em>. Photo: Paul Kolnik<\/p><\/div>\n But nothing prepares you for the narrative turn that Muhly\u2019s score takes. Dawn Landes begins to sing, very slowly, in a lovely, unaffected voice, the ancient grisly ballad of Lord Thomas and Fair Ellender. The corps dancers leave the stage, letting us know they\u2019re friends. Peck and Angle reappear\u2014 she having shed her skirt for their final pas de deux. These two superlative performers know how to make movement meaningful. They focus closely on each other and minimize effort in order to keep a flow going and make difficult movement look natural. Their earlier duet in the ballet involves a constant, gentle creation of arches to be slipped under. This one is more floor-bound, and in the end, he\u2019s seated, and she\u2019s lying draped across his lap, as if they have grown together.<\/p>\n Two Hearts <\/em>juggles pure dance with bare hints of a story in ways that become much murkier with the introduction of the ballad. Its marry-for-love-vs.-marry-for-money triangle ends with all three dead and contains this no\u2013nonsense line: \u201cHe took off his sword and cut off her head\/ And threw it against the wall.\u201d<\/p>\n Jared Angle, Teresa Reichlin , and chorus in Balanchine's Kammermusik No.2.<\/em> Photo: Paul Kolnik<\/p><\/div>\n The NYCB season is enriched by two important revivals: Balanchine\u2019s Symphony in C<\/em>\u00a0 (1947) and Kammermusik No. 2 <\/em>(1978).\u00a0 The latter is a brusque, knotty work, in keeping with its score by Paul Hindemith (written between 1923 and 1933).\u00a0 Hindemith engages the piano in dialogue with a small orchestral ensemble, and Balanchine, accordingly pits his four principals against a group of six men.<\/p>\n These men are a peculiar lot. Definitely a chorus in the Greek sense. A soloist deserves a frieze behind her. The oddest thing they do is to squat like monkeys, holding drooping hands in front of them, then run with smooth, bent-kneed steps. (Did Balanchine pick this up from some 1920s revue, where it may have been a novelty, as in \u201cLet\u2019s do the Puppy Dog\u201d? ) Amar Ramasar, one of the principals, manages to make the gesture look jazzy.<\/p>\n For these people, canon is practically a way of life. You lead, I follow, maybe one beat later. The two women, Teresa Reichlin and Sara Mearns, dance in synchrony for a time, then break into chasing each other rhythmically, hardly moving from one spot, and almost as close and rapid as the guys who perform the male duet in Agon. <\/em>The pairing of these two women is fascinating. Mearns is an amazon; her limbs whale the air, while Reichlin\u2019s slap it.\u00a0 Even when the two are in perfect unison, Mearns looks as if she wants to race her friend, and she can make a pirouette look faster than it actually is simply by the way she attacks it.<\/p>\n In this ballet, Balanchine paid cursory attention to emotion in the two pas de deux\u2014Mearns with Amasar, Reichlin with Tyler Angle. The first two play a little game with hands, which ends when Mearns takes her partner\u2019s hand and places it on her cheek. One gesture performed by all involves a hand pressed to the brow, but whatever meaning it might imply is brushed away in the speed of the choreography. As in Agon<\/em> and other ballets to 20th<\/sup>-century music, the steps deviate at times from strict classicism; the dancers\u2019s legs turn in as well as out. But while Agon <\/em>is stinging in its clarity, Kammermusik No. 2<\/em> functions in air that\u2019s thicker, if no less fresh.<\/p>\n The season\u2019s other notable revival, Symphony in C<\/em>, bore a different name when Balanchine \u00a0created it in 1947 for the Paris Opera Ballet. <\/em>Perhaps Marc Happel, the designer of the new costumes, was thinking of that former title, Palais de Crystal<\/em>, when he delicately peppered the women\u2019s white satin tutus with Swarovski crystals. The women\u2019s bodices, their cleavage filled in with flesh-colored netting, extend out over the tutus in four pointed petals (the modest cleavage for the corps de ballet women is more becoming than the deeper V for the principals). The men, as usual, wear black, with only the subtlest of decoration.<\/p>\n
\nHave you noticed that many new ballets look like older ballets?\u00a0 Either that, or they introduce kinks that take them far outside the classical vocabulary. The best ballet choreographers have a way of making steps that every advanced student dancer does many times a day look newly expressive, or interweave with the music in deeply satisfying ways.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>