by Leigh Witchel
Most ballets look better after a year. Justin Peck’s Copland Dance Episodes, which New York City Ballet brought back for an encore run, also looked better, but it still didn’t make sense.
The opening encapsulated the problem with the ballet. Peck began with the full cast frozen in a tableau that seemed lifted from Glass Pieces, but with the dancers swathed in gauzy coverings. The action started, the dancers walked off, and we never saw those coverings again. It was a gimmick.
Andres Zuniga walked forward to set up the men in their next formation – a starting block – and they were off. A male trio, KJ Takahashi (who had to step in for Roman Mejia), Sebastían Villarini-Vélez and Cainan Weber, formed, and fifteen men flew about heartily, doing what Peck does at the beginning of a ballet when he’s spinning his wheels: exchanging places and making formations.
Takahashi charged through turns, his arms slapping and windmilling until he jumped into Samuel Melnikov’s arms. He confronted Melnikov, but in a Mutt and Jeff joke, eye-to-eye wasn’t possible; Takahashi could only manage eye-to-chest. Peck was working with vigor, but was this better than what Agnes de Mille made in Rodeo?
A quintet of men led by Melnikov brought in Chun Wai Chan. Four men then sat with their legs dangling into the orchestra pit. Then they left. The idea was ingenious, but neither used or explored. It was just precious. How many things was Peck going to do without investigating them? Copland felt like Americana Lite: 50% of the folksiness, none of the calories.
Mira Nadon came in, a single lady among the gents. But who were these men slamming the floor? That’s what we got an inkling of in The Times are Racing and didn’t here. The one similarity Nadon has with Sara Mearns, who originated the role when it was the standalone ‘Rōdē,ō: Four Dance Episodes in ‘15: just put Nadon onstage, and things will somehow work out.
The Corral Nocturne (Peck calls it Tumbleweeds) was for Chan and four men who arched and rolled on the floor. Chan worked to give this a sense of yearning, reaching and falling when the men let go of him. But soon enough, they all looked up at nothing.
With Russell Janzen’s retirement, Peter Walker made his debut partnering Nadon. He’s a good height for her and if there’s a dancer smart enough to make something of what Peck had given, it’s him. He supported her, and she in turn gave him her hands as he did a penchée. He sought a relationship, playing hide and seek, ducking his head while partnering Nadon, and then when the music briefly paused, staring into her eyes. Give Nadon that much to work with and she’ll give right back. We knew who these people were.
At the Hoedown (which Peck calls At the Rodeo), Nadon charged out, her legs flying. Weber soared through a duet with Villarini-Vélez, but Villarini-Vélez, who had been filling in for all the shorter men who had been sidelined this season, looked as if he were going to run out of gas. The section to Rodeo ended with the cast pointed their fingers up at nothing. You really could tell when Peck was reaching into a bag of well-worn tricks.
Without pause, the women drifted and turned onstage to Appalachian Spring. The women met the pointed fingers of the men. Peck got that he needed to tie those motifs together, but what about emotionally? This wasn’t just a jigsaw puzzle. And everyone came onstage once again to point at nothing.
Peck then brought back the Glass Pieces pose briefly. It’s not that he didn’t know how to create a motif through repetition. It’s that he did it too often without earning it.
Subbing in for Tiler Peck, Alexa Maxwell leaped side to side in front of the women. Chan arrived and held to his lyrical, searching persona. After a long duet she sweetly took his hands and led him off. Walker and Nadon ran in, but the next dancing went to a female trio, Unity Phelan, Indiana Woodward, and Ashley Hod. Hod showed off her jump, and a prancing solo for Woodward featured her ability to maintain any open position after a turn. Phelan, who like Maxwell, was getting roles piled on her this season, looked as if she woke up, charging through the enchaînements and more consistently animated than she had been for the past two weeks.
Maxwell and Chan made something of an interlude with simple, repeated steps: developpés, lifts with both her legs retracted. Chan took her round before they left.
Phelan stated the main theme, the memorable hymn, Simple Gifts. Peck gave her an endless, pretty combination, but he turned the highest point in Copland’s score into an enchaînement. Isn’t there more to it than that? Maxwell did fouettés to end as if it were The Nutcracker. Peck fashioned Simple Gifts into a competent ballet finale, but that’s a low bar to clear.
Still, Maxwell and Chan, like Walker and Nadon, made this look like something. Maxwell led Chan off, Nadon and Walker crossed to find one another briefly but didn’t meet. A swirling group led to the male and female trios combining into a sextet. Peck made a Les Noces pillar formation as the music died down. Groups left, then returned. Finally everyone came to a circle, folded over as if a flock of swans were cast in an Esther Williams water ballet reset in the West.
Originally done nonstop, an intermission has been added before the final section to Copland’s Billy the Kid. Maybe that wasn’t such a great idea. Not only did the painted curtain by Jeffrey Gibson get stuck, when it rose again after intermission on the exact same pose, the audience thought it was a joke.
The Glass Pieces pose recurred once again, neatly appearing at the opening of each section. Yes, it was a motif. No it didn’t seem to mean anything.
More shifting formations to what Copland titled The Open Prairie led to a charming circle dance, a place where Peck used his favorite devices, such as exchanging places, amiably. Later, Peck added another successful invention, an interesting experiment where one person in a sextet of men or women was the opposite sex.
By this point, Villarini-Vélez looked very overworked. Unlike last year, he didn’t seem to have the stamina to sell anything in his performance.
Maxwell and Chan returned. There were groans when Maxwell’s substitution was announced, but the part was one of the earliest arguments for Maxwell’s rise in the company. She handled it like a ballerina. Villarini-Vélez came back in and pushed through a solo, but had trouble sustaining his turnout while doing pirouettes in second position. He was running on fumes.
Nadon and Walker had an angst-ridden duet with chopping arms and a collapse to the floor. They faced one another, then backed away. In a slow, yearning section Nadon danced behind while Walker remained in shadow at the front, then they switched. Walker deliberately led with his shoulders, hunching. They kept seeming to want to meet, and when they finally did they pulled apart, the lights flooded and they raced away.
The section Peck calls Shadowboxer was to the music Copland called Gun Battle. The whole percussion section, hell the whole damn orchestra, was imitating gunshots and a gun fight. There was nothing else it could possibly be taken for.
That wasn’t what Peck wanted to stage, but any concept he had fell apart here and he gave up, staging the dancers racing about doing steps in silhouette. It was a complete cop out. Like it or not, that’s a gun battle. It would have been better to try and deal with it instead of having people race around as if this were Billboards.
Nadon and Walker tried to make something more of it, acting as if they were pulled back, but that wasn’t much for what Copland conceived of as a gunfight and death. Nadon leaned on Walker, and they were left alone in a spotlight for another slow pas de deux, and a reprise for them of the chopping and collapse motif. This is one way Peck is Peter Martins’ progeny. When he doesn’t know what to do, he retreats into craft.
Nadon and Walker reached to one another but Walker left, and a daybreak light cue by Brandon Stirling Baker led to a reprise of The Open Prairie, and Peck staged a reprise of his opening as well. But did he earn it? What journey did he take us on?
The ending, with the full cast rushing into lifts into leaving before a blackout felt like Glass Pieces again, only with some of The Four Temperaments thrown in. A second painted curtain came down as if it were a statement, but it wasn’t.
Copland Dance Episodes looked better than it did the year before, and the dancers have made more of it as well. But was that enough for all the resources this work demanded out of an hour and a half of dancing to three major ballet scores?
What did Peck have to say about Copland beyond making up steps to the music? Was there any reason to start with Fanfare for the Common Man besides the fact that it’s famous?
The American landscape. The West. Populism. Manifest Destiny. Competing narratives. Our folk traditions. Our convoluted history. These are just a few things Peck could have alluded to, instead of satisfying himself by ticking a box with two drop curtains by Native American artist Gibson that had little integration into the ballet itself except for hanging on the same stage.
As the title Copland Dance Episodes suggested, Peck wanted to trade on Copland’s music (and name) without digging into it. By refusing to engage the music in more than a paint-by-numbers way, the whole ballet stumbled.
Peck didn’t have to write a PhD dissertation to tap into the wider connotations of music. He’s made three great American ballets without that. But all were to music that was contemporary to him.
Copland’s America is not Peck’s America, and it didn’t seem to inspire him. If it did, he could have made something as great as The Times are Racing. Instead, he made a whole bunch of steps. Unlike Balanchine, and like Robbins, Peck’s no time traveler. He’s best off working in his own era.
copyright © 2024 by Leigh Witchel
Copland Dance Episodes – New York City Ballet
Lincoln Center, New York, NY
February 11, 2024
Cover: Mira Nadon and Peter Walker in Copland Dance Episodes. Photo © Erin Baiano.
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