It was like any matinee at New York City Ballet until something odd happened: One lead dancer turned into a ballerina tag team. On Saturday afternoon at Lincoln Center, Sara Mearns, dancing the gorgeous, taxing role in George Balanchine’s “Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2,” suddenly wasn’t there for an entrance. Instead, in came Unity Phelan, in costume but with little discernible makeup, taking Mearns’s place — whipping off fouetté turns with ease. Phelan has a breezy way of making hard things look easy. This came in handy.
After Mearns returned for the next entrance, dancing with Tyler Angle, Phelan popped back in for the finale. At this point, she gave Angle a wide-eyed grin — it seemed a combination of “hi!” and “help!” — and off they flew.
Later, a representative for the company said that Mearns’s calf had started to bother her, so Phelan, who had been rehearsing in the building, was brought in to help. In dancer shorthand, this is what’s known as being thrown on. It’s scary sounding, isn’t it? Phelan, on Instagram, wrote that she was given about four minutes’ notice.
“Piano Concerto” is a special ballet, one that pairs regal presence with a mix of technique and abandon to turn a dancing body into music. (Its redesigned costumes, however, remain an eyesore.) Phelan was impressive in both her command and ease; she is scheduled to make her role debut on Thursday, “with a bit more hair spray and makeup,” she wrote on Instagram. (She is also owed a curtain call, which she didn’t receive on Saturday.)
Despite the drama, Mearns, in “Piano Concerto” and in Christopher Wheeldon’s “This Bitter Earth” — a duet that is mushy as ever — demonstrated the quiet rhapsodic texture of her dancing that has grown with each passing year. Every time she steps onstage, there is majesty. And Angle, her partner in both, captivated with his poise and generosity.
In another cast, the elegant Chun Wai Chan made his debut in “Piano Concerto” with Tiler Peck, his dancing instilled with innate aristocratic vibrancy. His quiet solo bow at the end of one scene was so noble, so serene. Then there was Peck, dancing with a lush daring that made her seem more tuned into the music than to the audience watching her.
Grand rather than knowing, Peck danced with such spontaneity that you couldn’t quite distinguish between the passionate notes of the piano, played by Hanna Hyunjung Kim, and the delicate and piquant notes of Peck. She did what the ballet asked of her: She was the music. It was the first performance on the first night of the season. It could have ended there.
The piano also propels Lar Lubovitch’s “Each in Their Own Time,” a City Ballet premiere, set to selections from Brahms’s Eight Piano Pieces. Here, the instrument sits onstage. As Susan Walters played in the center, Adrian Danchig-Waring and Taylor Stanley, two illuminating dancers who shone brighter together, filled the stage with flowing, ever-expansive movement.
Wearing loose pants and button-down shirts, the dancers displayed a palpable connection even when they were dancing apart. First choreographed for New York City Center’s Fall for Dance Festival in 2021, the ballet offered an intriguing counterbalance in its casting: Danchig-Waring, with tousled beach hair, moves with a relaxed fullness, while Stanley brings a crisp, understated refinement. Music drives them; Lubovitch instills the duet with athleticism and heart.
There were also other ballets to be seen, including Jerome Robbins’s “Glass Pieces” and “The Four Seasons” — which featured a jaw-dropping, virtuosic “Fall” performed by Peck and Roman Mejia — and Balanchine’s “Duo Concertant,” created for the 1972 Stravinsky Festival. That famed festival produced another ballet that gave the first week an extra glow: Balanchine’s mysterious “Divertimento From Le Baiser de la Fée.”
After several attempts at choreographing “The Fairy’s Kiss” (or “Le Baiser de la Fée”), Balanchine made this new work for the festival; two years later he added a final, heartbreaking section to the ballet in which a couple exits the stage walking backward in opposite directions: Their backs arch as their arms open wide, their gazes up.
Two casts, each stellar, made this ballet, which starts with joy and ends in deep pathos, come to life: Megan Fairchild and Anthony Huxley in one program, and Indiana Woodward and David Gabriel, making their debuts, in another. Stravinsky, who composed the music in homage to Tchaikovsky, quotes from “None but the Lonely Heart,” among other things. It lands.
For Fairchild and Huxley, established partners, their technical attributes — articulate feet, sizzling turns and jumps — mirrored their glistening focus. The ballet features a magnificent solo for the male dancer, and Huxley soared seamlessly through it as if a pair of wings were attached to his back. They return as partners in “Coppélia” this week, and it’s easy to see why.
The debuts of Woodward and Gabriel were startlingly wonderful and perhaps the sign of a future partnership. They had never danced together before: Physically they more than fit, and they both possess depth and imagination in how they translate dance language into emotion. There’s room for wildness. (If only they too were a “Coppélia” cast!) Gabriel, a soloist since June, is a true talent whose dancing whisks together lightness and expansiveness. His hands, so expressive, add to his radiance.
And Woodward, the most effervescent dancer in the company — and possibly its best actress — is always full of subtle details. In “Baiser,” it’s how her buoyancy can slip into sorrow with the shift of the shoulders, a turn of the head, a glance. In one of the ballet’s most charged moments, Woodward rushed across the stage to clasp Gabriel’s waist, throwing back her head and torso as she balanced on two legs, one stretched in front and the other bent underneath her. She arched deeply, exposing not her chest but her heart. Her anguish was exquisite.
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