Justin Peck’s newest work for New York City Ballet, his 25th, is called “Mystic Familiar,” a title that turns out to be telling. Those two words encapsulate the rise and fall of its aspirations and limitations. It’s a dance that tries to be mystic, but mostly it’s just familiar.
The title is borrowed from an album by the electronic composer Dan Deacon, whose commissioned score is based on the song “Become a Mountain.” Music from an earlier Deacon recording drove Peck’s 2017 hit “The Times Are Racing,” which featured costumes by the designer Humberto Leon and lighting by Brandon Stirling Baker. That team has reassembled for “Mystic Familiar” — hoping, you imagine, to rekindle the spark of “The Times Are Racing.”
This time, the team is joined by the artist Eamon Ore-Giron, who contributes a symmetrical backdrop of bright rays in triangular groupings. And a signal difference is live music, with Deacon joining the City Ballet orchestra in the pit.
“Mystic Familiar,” which had its premiere on Wednesday, is divided into five sections, each named after an element: air, earth, and so on. One section flows into the next, as the music changes character and the 14-member cast changes costumes. At the start, the dancers wear puffy, poofy white sleeves and drift across the stage like clouds. Then Taylor Stanley enters, wearing green and walking slowly in the opposite direction, and we know that “Air” has ceded to “Earth.”
These first two sections, at least, are different from “Times Are Racing.” Where that work was all youthful verve in sneakers, this one opens in a pastoral mood, with flute. Stanley’s twisty, searching solo — marked with gestures of weighing options and gathering something 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.
But then the other dancers rush in wearing “elevated” street wear; they clump around Stanley, and “Fire” turns out to ignite in Peckland. The music takes on a Philip Glass-like pulse and harmonic progression, and the dancers take on a Peck-like physicality: hunched in the shoulders, alternately stretching their limbs in ardent aspiration and snapping back in a kind of balleticized hip-hop move. They take turns in the middle of a communal semicircle and lie across the front of the stage as Tiler Peck is lifted and floated by Gilbert Bolden III.
Through all this, Deacon is singing “Become a Mountain,” his small voice electronically altered. On the album, the song sounds in parts like Glass played by a 1980s arcade game. Here, it sounds like pseudo-Glass played by a mediocre orchestra. The lyrics are a meditational mantra. “Close your eyes and become a mountain,” he sings. “All of time is right here, right now.”
Deacon has explained that the song is about someone “trying to learn how to be self-compassionate.” That’s an all-too-familiar sentiment in Peck dances, so many of which seem to be about fragile young people struggling with maturity. Deacon’s lyrics turn mystic oneness with the universe into self-help, and Peck’s attraction to this feels like repetition compulsion.
The remainder of “Mystic Familiar” shows the choreographer’s usual skill. “Water” is a twinning duet for Naomi Corti and Emily Kikta, who overlap in a rolling pattern as they advance downstage. That interesting idea dries up, and “Ether” is a standard finale, with multiplicity contained by symmetry and the principals flying down the middle again and again as the same loop of music tries to repeat its way to rapture. They’re hopping, palms up, as the curtain falls.
That was the end of an odd program. It started with Christopher Wheeldon’s “From You Within Me” (2023), a handsome, painterly work that responds to the high drama of Schoenberg’s “Verklärte Nacht” with too much restraint.
And in the middle came George Balanchine’s “Variations Pour une Porte et un Soupir” (1974), the most absurdly extreme treatment of one of his core themes: a man in fruitless pursuit of an unattainable woman. Here the man is a gnome (the selfless Daniel Ulbricht) who grovels and crawls on his knees and elbows at the feet of a Siren-like showgirl with a Louise Brooks bob and a stage-spanning black cape (Miriam Miller, in a solid but not quite commanding debut).
As the sound score alternates between a sighing noise and the creaking of a door, the door-woman eventually squats over the sigh-man like a spider and envelops him. For Balanchine, it was a rare return to the Weimar expressionism he was exposed to in his youth. But it’s a cabaret sex joke extended way too long. Like Peck or any artist, Balanchine returned to the same subjects time and again, sometimes to the same pieces of music, working out some obsession. At his best, he pushed past the personal into transcendent, even mystical art. At City Ballet, that high goal is the standard. Nothing on this program meets it.
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