Justin Peck’s latest work for New York Metropolis Ballet, his twenty fifth, known as “Mystic Acquainted,” a title that seems to be telling. These two phrases encapsulate the rise and fall of its aspirations and limitations. It’s a dance that tries to be mystic, however largely it’s simply acquainted.
The title is borrowed from an album by the digital composer Dan Deacon, whose commissioned rating is predicated on the track “Grow to be a Mountain.” Music from an earlier Deacon recording drove Peck’s 2017 hit “The Instances Are Racing,” which featured costumes by the designer Humberto Leon and lighting by Brandon Stirling Baker. That group has reassembled for “Mystic Acquainted” — hoping, you think about, to rekindle the spark of “The Instances Are Racing.”
This time, the group is joined by the artist Eamon Ore-Giron, who contributes a symmetrical backdrop of shiny rays in triangular groupings. And a sign distinction is reside music, with Deacon becoming a member of the Metropolis Ballet orchestra within the pit.
“Mystic Acquainted,” which had its premiere on Wednesday, is split into 5 sections, every named after a component: air, earth, and so forth. One part flows into the following, because the music modifications character and the 14-member solid modifications costumes. At first, the dancers put on puffy, poofy white sleeves and drift throughout the stage like clouds. Then Taylor Stanley enters, carrying inexperienced and strolling slowly in the other way, and we all know that “Air” has ceded to “Earth.”
These first two sections, not less than, are totally different from “Instances Are Racing.” The place that work was all youthful verve in sneakers, this one opens in a pastoral temper, with flute. Stanley’s twisty, looking solo — marked with gestures of weighing choices and gathering one thing to the self, a weak reflection of solos made for Stanley by Kyle Abraham — is accompanied by piano four-hands and marimbas, a sound with a mystical shimmer.
However then the opposite dancers rush in carrying “elevated” road put on; they clump round Stanley, and “Fireplace” seems to ignite in Peckland. The music takes on a Philip Glass-like pulse and harmonic development, and the dancers tackle a Peck-like physicality: hunched within the shoulders, alternately stretching their limbs in ardent aspiration and snapping again in a sort of balleticized hip-hop transfer. They take turns in the course of a communal semicircle and lie throughout the entrance of the stage as Tiler Peck is lifted and floated by Gilbert Bolden III.
By all this, Deacon is singing “Grow to be a Mountain,” his small voice electronically altered. On the album, the track sounds in components like Glass performed by a Eighties arcade sport. Right here, it feels like pseudo-Glass performed by a mediocre orchestra. The lyrics are a meditational mantra. “Shut your eyes and develop into a mountain,” he sings. “All of time is correct right here, proper now.”
Deacon has defined that the track is about somebody “making an attempt to learn to be self-compassionate.” That’s an all-too-familiar sentiment in Peck dances, so a lot of which appear to be about fragile younger folks battling maturity. Deacon’s lyrics flip mystic oneness with the universe into self-help, and Peck’s attraction to this looks like repetition compulsion.
The rest of “Mystic Acquainted” exhibits the choreographer’s traditional ability. “Water” is a twinning duet for Naomi Corti and Emily Kikta, who overlap in a rolling sample as they advance downstage. That attention-grabbing concept dries up, and “Ether” is a regular finale, with multiplicity contained by symmetry and the principals flying down the center repeatedly as the identical loop of music tries to repeat its strategy to rapture. They’re hopping, palms up, because the curtain falls.
That was the tip of an odd program. It began with Christopher Wheeldon’s “From You Inside Me” (2023), a good-looking, painterly work that responds to the excessive drama of Schoenberg’s “Verklärte Nacht” with an excessive amount of restraint.
And within the center got here George Balanchine’s “Variations Pour une Porte et un Soupir” (1974), probably the most absurdly excessive remedy of one in all his core themes: a person in fruitless pursuit of an unattainable girl. Right here the person is a gnome (the selfless Daniel Ulbricht) who grovels and crawls on his knees and elbows on the ft of a Siren-like showgirl with a Louise Brooks bob and a stage-spanning black cape (Miriam Miller, in a strong however not fairly commanding debut).
Because the sound rating alternates between a sighing noise and the creaking of a door, the door-woman finally squats over the sigh-man like a spider and envelops him. For Balanchine, it was a uncommon return to the Weimar expressionism he was uncovered to in his youth. However it’s a cabaret intercourse joke prolonged approach too lengthy. Like Peck or any artist, Balanchine returned to the identical topics again and again, typically to the identical items of music, figuring out some obsession. At his finest, he pushed previous the non-public into transcendent, even mystical artwork. At Metropolis Ballet, that top aim is the usual. Nothing on this program meets it.
New York Metropolis Ballet
By Sunday on the David H. Koch Theater; nycballet.com