"A bona fide work of art . . ." Copland Dance Episodes at New York City Ballet [by Mindy Aloff]

The "long-footed godesss" Mira Nadon , aloft, and company in ‘Copland Dance Episodes’ Photo © 2023 Erin Baiano

People are talking about Justin Peck’s new ninety-minute ballet, Copland Dance Episodes, for thirty principals, soloists, and corps de ballet members of New York City Ballet. It is a bona fide standing-room only, standing-ovation hit and also aesthetically controversial. Against audiences excited by it as a work of non-narrative theatrical dance are some who register strong objections—or simply dismiss it as bland and inconsequential. I’ve seen it twice; the first time, I was among the objectors; the second time, I suddenly saw its parts anew and its references clearly. The second time, what had seemed blurry and unspecific suddenly snapped into a bona fide work of art, complete with fascinating textual engineering and a haunting visionary subtext. What originally had seemed to be mere repetition had the “mere” swapped out for “meaningful.” Both times, the dancers were thrilling, but the second time they also seemed in service of a statement larger than themselves—a chilling statement about the entire country. The structure of the libretto in the program—twenty-two chapters or sections, each with its own title-- gives a clue that, although there is no declared narrative, the ballet is not storyless. The fact that my second sighting of Copland Dance Episodes occurred the night of the President’s State of the Union address was purely coincidental.

The score for this ballet is derived from four of Copland’s most beloved compositions: the anthemic Fanfare for the Common Man and the dances Rodeo, Appalachian Spring, and Billy the Kid—in other words, Copland’s most popular music, all richly melodic and dynamically orchestrated and dating from the build-up to World War II and from the terrifying years of the war itself. All are also brilliantly optimistic sound paintings marked by brass and percussion, even Billy, whose drama is tied to the murderous costs of the country’s westward expansion. Justin Peck, a native of Washington, D.C., spent much of his childhood in San Diego and most of his young adulthood in New York. He’s partly a westerner biographically; however, the American West that Copland created was cleared, plowed, and barn-raised from the heritage of American song—“a couple of cowboy tunes,” he once told me in an interview, out west in Portland, Oregon: the kind of music that doesn’t need explanations to make its case with anyone who listens to it, thanks, of course, to its harmonic and rhythmic presentation by a student of Nadia Boulanger. NYCB’s orchestra, led by company music director Andrew Litton, played the Copland sumptuously, with pleasure and commitment.

Peck’s choreography responds to each of Copland’s long musical lines, canonic interludes, and unexpectedly accented phrases with the assurance of a person in his own home. He does not, like Balanchine, set up a conversation with the music; he marries it, registering its emotions and its tonal variety while also creating imagery that invokes “common man” situations, such as horseplay among peers, a romantic couple on a carousel, a trio who share space and light but not interior worlds. Toward the end of the ballet, when we’re listening to the part of Billy the Kid that creates a gunfight through percussion, the marvelously variegated lighting by Brandon Stirling Baker suddenly throws many crossing figures into silhouette (the section is titled “Shadowboxer”), and we’re rocketed out of one couple’s dysfunction into a hallucinatory enlargement--today’s gun-sickened streets of Newark or L.A., Dorchester or East New York. Manipulating light, space, and choreography, Peck effects astonishing transformations. A hand that is tendered in a moment of submission becomes, once grasped, the agent of disunion. A head gently resting on a heart (a detail that Peck has slyly plucked from Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo and recontextualized), placed on that heart once too often, lightly yet decisively becomes the lever for divorcement. A section that ends with several male figures Biblically pointing straight skyward is revised in a subsequent section that ends with several female figures pointing forward into the future on a forty-five-degree angle, and that image is subsequently revised by a group of male and female figures seated in a circle, each lifting one leg with the foot pointed (the circle invoking a nocturnal moment in Billy when Eugene Loring’s outlaw is triggered into ruminations by a campfire). Tiler Peck’s variation to the “Simple Gifts” tune from Appalachian Spring does not quite lasso the entire herd of conflicting emotions that animate the Bride of Martha Graham’s frontier-wedding masterpiece, but how charming the analogy is. Peck’s pairing and then uncoupling of the long-footed goddess Mira Nadon and />the elementally mutable figure of Taylor Stanley was, for me, a risk worth taking. Their duet, with its partnered cartwheel and little catch step piquantly sited on the music, is one of the loveliest of Peck’s I know, and the intensity of its communication through dance movement made me think of the works of Alexei Ratmansky, who is about to join NYCB as a choreographer in residence. Peck’s ballet is bathed in color as well as pure light: Greeting the audience is Jeffrey Gibson’s drop, both minimalist in its geometric targets and triangles and maximalist in its multicolored profusion of forms, as he puts it in the program “inspired by indigenous American artifacts with the lyrics and psychedelic palette of disco music.” The program also notes that although Gibson’s painting “fuses his Choctaw-Cherokee heritage and experience of living in Europe, Asia, and the USA,” its references “span club culture, queer theory, fashion, politics, literature and art history.” The cast is costumed in Ellen Warren’s leotards and tights, each person given a unique combination of deeply saturated, contrasting hues, with no single, overall colors allowed. Welcome to the twenty-first century. In case the audience forgets that’s where we are, the ballet opens on a tableau of the full cast, each person uniquely positioned and wrapped in a transparent tulle-like packaging. Nearly everyone then runs off into the wings to remove the wicked caul of yesteryear and returns in up-to-the-minute living color, bright-eyed with eagerness to, once again, embark on Peck’s westering of their spirits. 

Mindy Aloff's book of essays, Why Dance Matters, was recently published by Yale University Press.

[Editor's note: The New York City Ballet will perform "Copland Dance Episodes" during its spring 2023 season. Buy tickets here. sdl]

Comments

[Mark C. Minton]

I saw it twice as well, and I too had a deeper impression of its qualities after the second viewing. In fact, on reflection, it is my favorite Peck dance. And I've seen them all. " Everywhere We Go" remains a very close second favorite. Thank you to the reviewer and this blog for the best review I've seen. The NYT review was serious critical malpractice!