NYCB – Liebeslieder Walzer, Glass Pieces 1/20

On Wednesday night no fewer than eight dancers debuted in two long established ballets in the repertoire and all brought freshness and individuality to their roles. Balanchine’s Liebeslieder Walzer premiered 55 years ago with Diana Adams, Melissa Hayden, and Violette Verdy among the first cast members. Glass Pieces, a groundbreaking piece by Jerome Robbins whose choreography helped make the Philip Glass minimalist style of music accessible to additional masses of people – the composer likes to call it “music with repetitive structures” – arrived 23 years later with a cast that included Heléne Alexopoulos, Lourdes Lopez, Joseph Duell among others.

Repetitiveness in our society during the era of the premiere in 1983 had long been seen as the scourge to creativity and to a life worth living. Whether on the assembly line in an auto factory, toiling over a sewing machine in a crowded room in the Garment District, or hand-washing dish after dish in a restaurant’s kitchen, repetitiveness killed the joy of life eight or more hours a day, everyday for years, decades, entire lives. Every day millions of people got up at the same time, walked the same routes to the bus or train, performed the same work tasks, and left to go home at the same time.The working class life was rigid and predictable as if pre-plotted on a piece of single quadrant graph paper like the one that hangs as the backdrop for Robbins’ Glass Pieces.

Robbins and Glass each captured the positive energy in the repetitiveness and rituals of everyday life. Robbins’ opening section Rubric had masses of dancers walking individual straight paths across the stage, crisscrossing, avoiding collisions, moving at the same speed. They were a living, breathing collection of y=mx+b against the graph squares behind them – people representing the little equations that make up life’s big formula. Their energy suddenly stopped, recalibrated, and then continued. All the while, the pulsing of Glass’s rhythms never varied except to grow more dense and more crowded.

Our soloists in this section (Ashley Hod, Daniel Applebaum, Meagan Mann, Joshua Thew, Laine Habony, and Cameron Dieck) delivered the energy if not always the preciseness that was expected.

The middle section PdD, Facades, was danced by Sara Mearns and Adrian Danchig-Waring. Of course, they performed all of the adagio acrobatics extremely well, but Sara didn't convey the clear lines and the arc length of curves as have the many others who danced this before her. She looked fine in the bright blue unitard but the ratio of legs to torso wasn’t as appealing as we have seen in other interpreters.

The final section of Glass Pieces is set to an early section of Glass’s opera Akhnaten wherein the Egyptian Pharaoh has just died and the Scribe announces the ascension of his soul. For the ballet, only the instrumental is used, not the lyrics. The rhythmic drumming and chirping scales of wind instruments accompanies a corps of men who on this night filled the stage with a collective driving force that was electric. As if in contrast to the Scribe’s unsung words of ascension, these dancers drove their energies into the ground. At the conclusion of the ballet, a man behind Haglund said that it made him want to look up every opera that Philip Glass has ever written and run to see it. The music and the movement had tapped into his inner sense of ritual, something we tend to try to control and suppress these days but which is still very much a part of being human.

Where Glass Pieces challenged the viewer to see the beauty and uniqueness in so much repetitiveness, Liebeslieder Walzer challenged the viewer to find the beauty and uniqueness in choreography that was arguably minimalist since it did not include massive pirouettes, grand jumps, skittering allegro or any of the other things that we have come to depend upon in ballets we love. This was just fancy waltzing, mostly in character shoes and massive Vienna-style costumes, although the ladies did change into pointe shoes for a period of time. This ballet did not speak to Haglund thirty years ago, but now the atmosphere created by the simpler dancing, elegant costumes and scenery, and gorgeous on-stage singing of Johannes Brahms' songs from Opus 52 and 65 is a much richer experience.

Megan Fairchild, Rebecca Krohn, Lauren Lovette, Tiler Peck, Jared Angle, Chase Finlay, Russell Janzen, and Amar Ramasar seemed to be truly enjoying themselves in this ballet. Several of them were debuting in roles, and this ballet appears to be one that dancers can’t wait to be handed, like Robbins’ Dances at a Gathering. Each woman was beautifully exactly who we expected her to be. There was no acting, only honesty. Maybe that was one of the ballet's main attractions. Rebecca’s deeply expressive upper body and Lauren’s just-coming-of-age beauty and confidence were particularly lovely. The gentlemen all personified elegance and fine manners. Chase Finlay was nearly busting out of his shoes with energy; it’s been a while since he’s done any real moving on this stage due to injury.

The H.H. Pump Bump Award, a gold Egyptian style sandal that any pharaoh would be thrilled to wear, is bestowed upon the men’s corps de ballet in Glass Pieces for their driving force in Akhnaten.