For her second commission at New York City Ballet, the principal dancer is abandoning traditional choreography in favor of an overwhelming kinetic density designed to force the theatergoing public into an exhausted submission.
The problem of the empty stage has plagued the theater since the dawn of the proscenium arc; it is a void that demands a structural answer, which Tiler Peck has ingeniously resolved in her new ballet, Symphonie Espagnole, by simply cramming forty human beings into the available square footage until no oxygen remains. This is, we are told, a leveling up for the choreographer, a nod to the company's Balanchine heritage that seemingly interprets that vaunted legacy strictly through the lens of fire-code violations and the raw arithmetic of biological mass. Rather than contrive an arrangement of steps to delight the eye, Peck has marshaled a small militia, trusting that the sheer, terrifying presence of so many limbs operating in close proximity will successfully intimidate the David H. Koch Theater into offering a standing ovation out of pure, survivalist instinct.
One is naturally reminded of the historical precedents for such demographic panic; much as Marius Petipa utilized the hypnotic repetition of the corps de ballet in La Bayadère to evoke a spiritual infinite, and as Vsevolod Meyerhold crowded his 1922 biomechanical theater with mechanical apparatuses to obscure a profound lack of emotional resonance, Peck has recognized the strategic value of overstimulation. Yet, her specific deployment of bodies—a chaotic swarming that threatens to spill into the orchestra pit at any moment—owes less to the classical tradition than it does to the tumbling, rabid zombie hordes scaling the walls of Jerusalem in Marc Forster's 2013 cinematic diversion World War Z. It is a triumph of logistics over aesthetics; an exercise in which the primary choreographic tension lies not in the phrasing of a pirouette, but in the imminent threat of a multi-casualty backstage collision.
We discovered early in the rehearsal process that if you put forty heavily breathing artists in a confined space and instruct them to simply take up as much room as physically possible, the audience's visual cortex will eventually shut down out of self-preservation; it is in that precise moment of optical surrender that the magic of ballet truly happens.
The ballet, set to the swelling chords of Édouard Lalo, is ultimately less a dance than a localized demographic crisis; a crowding event masquerading as a cultural milestone that operates on the assumption that quantity possesses a quality all its own. For the modern theatergoer, accustomed to the sparse, apologetic minimalism of contemporary works, the sight of forty principal and corps dancers frantically maneuvering for stage space is undoubtedly a spectacle to behold. Whether this constitutes a meaningful evolution of the Balanchine tradition, or merely a frantic, late-imperial horror vacui designed to distract us from the void at the center of the modern artistic endeavor, remains to be seen; though one suspects that as long as the stage is full, no one will have the room to ask.