Published on February 1, 2021, in no. 18
With its theater closed since March, the New York City Ballet (NYCB) organized the New Works Festival, which aired October 27–31, 2020 (but is still available to stream on the NYCB website), in which five choreographers, liberated from the theater’s confines, were let loose on the Lincoln Center campus, a sprawling complex of over thirty performance venues spread across more than sixteen acres. The resulting filmed dances foreground relationships between the architecture, the city, and the body—offering a new lens through which to view Lincoln Center.
The choreographers made use of many spaces, but most notably absent is the New York State Theater, designed by Philip Johnson and home to the NYCB. Johnson wasn’t particularly interested in understanding the needs of the ballet company and had little meaningful contact with George Balanchine, the company’s founder and preeminent choreographer, or any of the company staff. As Mark Lamster wrote in his 2018 biography, The Man in the Glass House, Johnson considered Balanchine and the company a collection of “blithering idiots.” The lack of communication resulted in a series of design mistakes, including the wrong kind of stage floor, an undersized orchestra pit, and offices and studios that were denied natural light. In interviews that follow the New Works Festival ballets, dancers express their delight at being able to perform outside in spaces they’d pass through every day but spent little time in.
Creating a site-specific work in a pandemic comes with unique challenges: dancers had to learn the choreography through Zoom and mostly rehearsed in their own apartments. But once they were able to work on site, the dancers and choreographers became attuned to the body’s relationship to the space of the city. Choreographer Sidra Bell describes how the work becomes “immersed in the world” in a way a traditional theater could never allow. Dancers recall how passersby would stop to watch them rehearse, visibly moved.
While the power of performance often lies in the fleeting nature of it being experienced as a live art, these pieces follow in the tradition of dance made for motion pictures. Justin Peck, NYCB’s resident choreographer, has choreographed for film a number of times and directed his piece for the festival; the rest were directed by Ezra Hurwitz, a former dancer.
The closest we get to Johnson’s State Theater is the roof. In Peck’s piece, we see dancer Georgina Pazcoguin rush across the roofing membrane to the northwest corner, where the camera sweeps across the Lincoln Center campus beyond. Peck poses the question, “We don’t have our traditional spaces where we are used to expressing ourselves, so where do we go to do that?” The answer is simple: outside. In leaving the theater, the dancers have rediscovered the city for artistic expression.