Robert Rauschenberg and other choreographers
I. Rauschenberg the choreographer
Robert Rauschenberg, who died in 2008, remains a complex force in the arts. Although best known as a painter, he devoted much of his talent between 1954 and 2007 to designing for choreographers - above all for Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown. Dance theatre for him included extremes of lighting, video and television, and startlingly unorthodox fabrics; he was always inspired by the ideas of Marcel Duchamp. At one point this even led him into choreography. Eighteen years after his death, his best-known dance creation - “Pelican” (1963) - had been reconstructed (by Tara Lorentzen) in New York, at Brooklyn’s Xanadu Roller Arts , on Monday May 18.
The ballerina Ashley Hod, a much-noted soloist with New York City Ballet, danced, on point (black point shoes) the role created in 1963 by Carolyn Brown (then halfway through her historic twenty-year career as Merce Cunningham’s main partner in his choreography). In 1963, Rauschenberg himself performed one of the two male roles, with Per Olof Ultvedt - both of them on roller skates. (Alex Hay later took this other male role.) Today, those roles are taken by Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener, eminent Cunningham alumni now leading lights of New York’s downtown dance scene.
Two men on roller skates partnering a woman on point? Rauschenberg didn’t stop there. He costumed himself and his male colleague in circular wing-like sail material. The movement highlight occurs when these two rolled-skating men partner their ballerina: while they circuit her on their skates, she, on one point, pivots. The image of pointwork collaborating with rollerskates is wonderfully entertaining and innovative. Very Rauschenberg.
This “Pelican” closed a triple bill at the May 18 gala for the Trisha Brown Dance Company; the other two works were by Brown (1936-2017) herself. Brown was a curious phenomenon, a postmodern dancer-choreographer whose finest works of 1980-2011 have gradually emerged as sensuous marvels of dance invention. (Paradoxically, her contemporary Twyla Tharp, whose were so thrillingly substantial in the last century, amounts to less on every revival.) But this gala gave us two slight 1960s of Brown’s, her schematic “Rulegame” (1964), in which five performers - walking, crawling, dry-swimming - move slowly along straight lines and her enjoyably dotty solo “Skunk Cabbage, Salt Grass, and Waders” (1967), which begins with the lone woman positioning herself three different ways in a few inches of water in a hip-bath. These pieces were enjoyably performed; I have no objection to them. But they amount to little, whereas “Pelican” exhilaratingly expands our idea of what dance can be.
II. Changing fare at New York City Ballet
The marvellously industrious New York City Ballet, giving seven performances per week, has been presenting four programmes of thirteen one-act ballets by eleven choreographers (most of them living, three of them women). At any other company, this kind of fluent turnover of repertory would only be found in a festival; but at City Ballet, it’s par for the course. (This weekend -
May 22-24 - the three-act “Coppélia” returns to repertory. I will report next week.) You go to see choreography rather than dancers. (Casting is only announced two weeks in advance)
In many ways, the company, soon to be seventy-eight years old, is in remarkably healthy condition. “Concerto Barocco,” originally made by founder-choreographer George Balanchine for the short-lived American Ballet Caravan’s 1941 tour of South America, has always been a radical pure-dance classic, a thrilling and fascinating counterpoint to its score, Bach’s concerto for two solo violins. There have been seasons when the company’s dancing has been too polite here, but not so at present. There are two casts this season; in one, the universally admired young Mira Nadon has taken classical purity to peaks not seen since Kyra Nichols, who retired in 2007. Nobody shows better than she how a slight change of bodily angle can become the sparkle of light that makes the diamond gleam anew; her clarity of physical line and musical phrasing blithely dramatise space and time.
A Bach double bill of Balanchine’s “Concerto Barocco” and Jerome Robbins’s ninety-minute magnum opus “Goldberg Variations” gives City Ballet a generous taste of its Founding Fathers. “Goldbergs” is no masterpiece: it has several longueurs. Still, I like what it tells us of Robbins’s mind: his way of quietly enlarging ballet with non-Balanchine devices - man partnering men, women partnering women, and more. I find, too, that it adds up differently at every viewing.
Most of City Ballet’s current repertory, however, is by living choreographers. The company has long associations with the ballet world’s three foremost living choreographers - Alexei Ratmansky (who has been artist in residence since 2023, and who has made a series of exceptional creations for City Ballet since 2006), Christopher Wheeldon (who was resident choreographer to the company in 2001-07), and Justin Peck (resident choreographer since 2014, and artistic advisor since 2019). The company has recently acquired Wheeldon’s “Continuum”, created for San Francisco Ballet in 2002. It’s an overly post-(and sub-)Balanchine ballet, very much along the lines of Wheeldon’s highly accomplished but ultimately forgettable “Polyphonia” (2001): both are to Ligeti music. Wheeldon is a master of vocabulary, but his use of space and rhythm is tiresomely neat and contained. In one pas de deux, hardly travelling in space at all, Emily Kikta and Gilbert Bolden III move on a Titanic scale that has more power than the ballet’s faster and more seemingly mobile sections.
Ratmansky’s “Concerto DSCH” (2007) is one of several masterpieces he has made for the company. Responding with energetic wit to Shostakovich’s second piano concerto, he brings the music’s early-Soviet idealism to wonderful life: its characters are a community of frisky, tender, fallible young athletes. The marvel lies in how intimately its movement connects with its music: movement motifs that lovably recur. It looks as fresh today as when it was new.
There will be more to say of Justin Peck’s “Heatscape” (originally made for Miami City Ballet) next week. Something that characterises today’s City Ballet is a p.c. determination to give same-sex duets the same attention as opposite-sex duets. I half-heartedly applaud both Lar Lubovich’s “Each in Their Own Times”, a duet for two men (Adrian Danchig-Waring, Taylor Stanley), and Edwaard Liang’s “Distant Cries”, a duet in which a lone woman (the marvellously decisive Alexa Maxwell or the vividly fresh Ruby Lister) is partnered by a dream man (Ryan Tomash) who emerges from darkness before returning to darkness - both Lubovitch and Liang have made many worse works. But in truth Lubovich’s male couple are just too prettily polite, while Liang’s couple is Romantic cliché. Let’s hope both duets soon drop from repertory.
The three ballets by women are “Rapsodie Espagnole” (2026) by Tiler Peck (to Lalô music), “Standard Deviation” (2023) by Alysa Pires, and “Composer’s Holiday” (2017) by Gianna Reisen. I look forward to writing more of them next week, but I note now that, though many ballet companies now have commissioned works by female choreographers, New York City Ballet is keeping some of those woman-made ballets in repertory. There will be much more to say.
@Alastair Macaulay 2026