TWO BY TWO
Like designers, choreographers each work most brilliantly at one particular scale. For Christopher Wheeldon that scale is certainly the pas de deux. A current program at NYC Ballet’s Here/Now festival showcases four of his well-known dances, and the one that stands out is Polyphonia, a work for eight dancers set to ten short piano pieces by Gyorgi Ligeti. Here the dancers remain in pairs, and their pulsating, cyclical coming together and breaking apart is thrilling. Each piece has its own distinct mood: wild, elegaic, jittery, ecstatic,
melodramatic. Yet the movements are all of a piece, and each one stays in the mind.
The couples, all male-female, are not romantic – they aren’t burdened with any narrative. Instead their bodies approach one another, become entangled with one another, and move apart from one another like objects governed by physical force. When the man and woman join they become one instrument, one organism, one blossom, one many-limbed beast. They move in unison, slowly, cutting surreal figures in profile, which are held for precious seconds with syntactical clarity. They spin together rapturously and then, entropically, split apart. There is, as each piece concludes, a separation, and with it, an eery cessation. It’s as if staying still is a kind of death.
Everything about Polyphonia feels exactly right: the blank shadowed backdrop the dancers move against, the ripe plum color of their costumes, the troupe of eight, and the cerebral, investigatory quality of the music. The two dances that open and close the evening’s program, Mercurial Manouevres (set to Shostakovich) and American Rhapsody (set to Gershwin) each employ larger numbers of dancers, many of them paired, with principals performing in front of an undulating backdrop of supporting performers. Compared to the ravishing precision and strangeness of the pairs in Polyphonia, these spectacles fall flat.