Beckett told Haglund to revisit Voices, an experimental effort by Alexei Ratmansky for New York City Ballet, first performed in 2020. Rather than fitting ballet steps to music, Ratmansky attached them to a mostly unintelligible voice recording of five women — their ramblings further obscured with single piano recorded by Peter Ablinger that recalls the tradition of the Theater of the Absurd. The voices belong to women artists of the mid-20th century and are sourced from interviews or words read by them. It doesn’t matter what the women are saying because most of their words can’t be deciphered. Maybe that’s one of the points; maybe not. In the choreography, the women cut loose from complacent classicism in solos while the men control the stage with their testo-tribal authority. In the end as the curtain drops, they all have fallen into line — the same line — and are engaged together in the same thing. Okay.
Last week while listening to Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter jabber away in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at the Hudson Theatre, Haglund realized that his own focus should not be on the words and their nonsense as it was some 50 years ago when he first read the play. The words, themselves, don’t matter. Nothing matters. Waiting around for Godot to show up to explain everything is a waste of time, because even if he did show up, whatever he said wouldn’t matter. Perhaps what might matter is the simple need and effort to communicate — not that what was being communicated matters. It’s not a human need but a need inherent in all forms of animal life – birds, goats, and humans alike. In the play when the character Lucky babbles away incoherently with the quiet authority of a religious or political leader, one cannot possibly comprehend his streams of nonsense, but one is completely captivated by his melodious sincerity.
Props to Ratmansky for his sincerity in creating Voices but it still doesn’t speak to Haglund. It doesn’t matter. The steps, at times, respond to the rhythm of the dialogue or piano or to an occasional word that apparently inspires a mimicking choreographic response—onomatopography. There — we said it out loud on this blog. Onomatopography. We can occasionally appreciate Ratmansky’s dabbling in absurdity or even absurd abstractionism. It can be fun, like when Haglund opened the Playbill to the casting of Voices and saw no dancers but immediately saw a tree:
The evening’s program included Jamar Robert’s Foreseeable Future with Iris Halpern’s costume designs which were definitely giving strong Victoria Secret vibes. The huge wings attached to the women, beautiful as they were, limited the women to choreography that protected their wings rather than allowing them to dance freely. The choreography for all was unsophisticated with a lot of arm waving that the dancers tried in vain to make special. Of course, when a choreographer throws Taylor Stanley onto the stage, he knows that the artist can bring any rigamorgraphy to life. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the NYCB dancers just live to have stuff like this made on them. BS.
Thrown into the mix was William Forsythe’s pas de deux from Herman Schmerman – not enough to save the evening but a respite from the drivel. Forsythe, inspired by Balanchine’s and Arpino’s use of hyperextensions in choreography, spawned a slew of imitators who haven’t possessed his breath of balletic knowledge or imagination but have run with the ideas of dislocating dancers’ joints by tortuously stretching their limbs. Herman Schmerman’s shm-reduplication throughout the choreography illustrates both admiration for and derision toward conventional ballet. This performance was filled with surprises from Tiler Peck whose message to Roman Mejia seemed to be “be ready for anything”. Peck is simply a once in a generation marvel of an artist, and Mejia is doing an increasingly effective job of making their pas de deux a lot more than the sum of their parts.
Also on the program was Composer’s Holiday by Gianna Reisen, a collection of phrasal nothings that looked like they could have been made by Beckett’s Lucky. We can no longer tolerate NYCB’s continued subsidizing of this DEI emblem or the other amateurish choreographers who don’t know how to utilize the company’s talent. Get back to business. New work should come from the experts, not the novices and wannabes.
To borrow from Beckett, there was no lack of void in this program. It is evenings like these that drive us away from New York City Ballet and lead us out the door. Let’s go. We can’t. Why not? We’re waiting for Balanchine — and Ratmansky.
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