NEW YORK, NY.- Ten years ago, New York City Ballet held its first fashion gala, and with it came one of the most off-putting dances Ive ever seen. Bal de Couture, with choreography by Peter Martins and designs by Valentino, is still wedged in my memory bank for all the wrong reasons. Most egregious? The pointe shoes in shocking red and hot pink. Suddenly, the legs of dancers, usually so sleek and muscular, were transformed into balloon art.
It was a lesson Ive never forgotten: When it comes to dance and fashion, fashion with its resources, its stars, its seasonal newness has the upper hand. For the past 10 years, City Ballet has continued its annual fashion gala, relegating choreographers and dancers to second-tier collaborators. Beyond fundraising, how do these events serve ballet? And how do they hope to make smart viewers out of people new to the art form?
There are exceptions, but fashion gala ballets, and their costumes, rarely survive to become repertory; instead, the events tenure has shown a slow erosion of dance of steps, of musicality, of theatrical momentum. The clothes always get in the way. But fashion and dance should get along; ballet, like fashion, is part flesh and part fantasy. The glory comes when they are on equal terms, when one doesnt wear the other.
City Ballets push into the fashion world is the brainchild of Sarah Jessica Parker, who is a vice chair on City Ballets board; on Wednesday night, she was honored at the gala, although she was not in attendance. In a speech, her colleague and friend, writer, director and producer Michael Patrick King, said that Parker had a sudden and devastating situation that required her to be with her family.
More than a few were looking forward to her dress. I wanted to hear what she would have said as a former dancer who loves fashion.
Of course, the show went on without her. Leading off its program at the David H. Koch Theater, City Ballet played it safe with the fourth movement and finale of George Balanchines Symphony in C. It was a case of putting a showstopper at the beginning instead of the end. The evening featured premieres by Kyle Abraham and Gianna Reisen, and the first live performance of Justin Pecks Solo, originally choreographed for the companys virtual spring gala film, directed by Sofia Coppola, last year.
Without the angles and artistry of Coppola, Solo lost its luster, flattened out by the predictable patterns of the choreography and Anthony Huxleys wistful stares into what is known as the modern dance corner. Even with this superlative dancers presence, it felt a little melodramatic and a little aimless. And, no, fashion didnt elevate matters.
Instead of practice clothes, Huxley wore a new costume by Raf Simons polka-dot tights, a red top, shorts and a roomy blazer (well, part of one). Alone onstage, he looked like a relic from a forgotten ballet a jester who had lost his sleeves.
Sometimes I wish City Ballet would just hire Rei Kawakubo and be done with it. Shes done most everything the fashion gala has attempted, only better. When she designed costumes for Merce Cunninghams Scenario back in 1997, there was no posturing. Wearing designs from her collection garments enhanced with unsightly lumps and bumps the performers, moving with precision and abandon, changed the way a dancer's body (or any body) could be seen.
But beyond the costumes, the other curiosity at the gala came in the form of a composer: Solange Knowles, who, in curtain calls, was impossibly cool wearing a double-breasted black suit among gowns, she won best dressed hands down. For Play Time, Reisens third work for City Ballet, Knowles offered her first ballet score.
In this lively, jazzy composition, a repetitive and dreamy concoction featuring a persistent back-and-forth between piano and horns, the dancers were continually propelled through space and then pulled back into stillness. Legs struck the air in sync with the sounds of cymbals. The title wasnt off the mark.
But in the end, there wasnt much for Reisen, constrained by the structure of the score and her ballets costumes, to do. Her designer, Alejandro Gómez Palomo for Palomo Spain, created his version of 80s power suits with flamboyant, geometric silhouettes sharp shoulders, parachute pants and then caked them with crystals. Thousands and thousands of Swarovski crystals. What would Liza wear to brunch after jazz class? Maybe something like this.
It was flashy, and at times, cute as the dancers spun around the stage like pixies Indiana Woodward, with her winning vibrancy, burst into the air with refined radiance or drifted across it like sad clowns. Swooping out to greet and leap among their sparkly friends, the dancers mirrored the ebb and flow of the score by positioning themselves in family portrait formations.
But they were less living in a dance than existing inside a holiday display. Perhaps weighed down by their costumes and fearful of flying crystals, they spent more time separate than together; closing in on one another, they would turn in profile and undulate their arms a signal, it seemed, to keep a safe distance. This ballet had a puerile side an expensive game of dress-up. What do I wish for Reisen? That City Ballet would just let her make a dance with her own collaborators on a regular program. Her recent work for the City Ballet-affiliated School of American Ballet which she attended was a delight. She doesnt need a gimmick.
For the evenings final ballet, Abraham presented a follow-up to The Runaway, his hit from the 2018 fashion gala. In Love Letter (on shuffle), he chose to work, again, with designer Giles Deacon and set the dance to music by James Blake. It was a lot of melancholy.
Love Letter started off promisingly with a solo for Jonathan Fahoury, a talented dancer of subtle physical articulation, from his quietly shuddering shoulders to his hips and buckling thighs. The looseness comes with a buttery precision. Here and throughout, Fahoury melded into Abrahams classical and everyday positions; he both envelops them and lets them envelop him. If the ghost of Runaway, notable for the performance by Taylor Stanley, hung over Love Letter, it was now Fahoury who commanded the stage.
Love Letter, overly long and with excessively moody lighting by Dan Scully it made it difficult to grasp more than basic outlines of Deacons costumes, which highlighted Renaissance silhouettes and modern prints became exhausting. The cast was an exciting range of personalities and body types, but they started to blend into one another. The combination of the darkened stage and the costumes played tricks on the eye: Suddenly the dancers looked like characters from Cats, stripped of fur.
Tiler Peck, always excellent in contemporary work with her prickly attack and daring speed, soared across the stage with an equally deft way of inserting air and spirit into the more winding moments of the music. Ruby Lister, in brief solos and duets, graced the stage with a stylish, old-school elegance that evokes dancers from the 1970s. Christopher Grant and Peter Walker aligned in one section by their feathered headdresses made it to the end of their duet and slapped their hands together, a rare instance in a ballet of giving skin. And there was a delightful homage to the little swans in Swan Lake.
But as the sections and songs wore on, there was increasingly little hope that the fragmented Love Letter would produce a greater whole. The appeal of the darkness and remote somberness, so arresting at first, dissipated as did the varnish on the relationships, fractured and not, that Abraham created onstage. In the end, a romance, between Fahoury and Harrison Ball, was allowed to blossom, not in a cheesy, passionate embrace, but in the way that they simply walked into each others arms. In an evening consumed by make-believe, it was a rare moment of movement not just imitating life, but illuminating it.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.