Jennifer Homans reviews two new pieces at New York City Ballet: “Solitude,” Alexei Ratmansky’s Mahler-soaked response to the war in Ukraine, and “Concerto for Two Pianos,” Tiler Peck’s choreographic début, set to music by Poulenc.
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.
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.
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