New York City Ballet Premières for the “No Kings” Era
Spectres are haunting the New York City Ballet—the spectres of kings and emperors. “The Naked King,” a new ballet by Alexei Ratmansky, the company’s artist-in-residence, is based on the Hans Christian Andersen tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” The score is Jean Françaix’s “Le Roi Nu,” which was first played at the Paris Opéra, in 1935, with choreography by Serge Lifar. Ratmansky has said that he was inspired by the spirit of the recent No Kings protests. “We don’t need kings,” he said of the ballet’s message. “They’re just so ridiculous.” Meanwhile, Justin Peck, a resident choreographer at N.Y.C.B., premièred “The Wind-Up,” set to the first movement of Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the “Eroica,” a piece with a legendary anti-imperial past. (Beethoven had planned to name the symphony for Napoleon Bonaparte, but, after Napoleon declared himself Emperor of the French, in 1804, the composer angrily erased the general’s name from the title page.) The symphony’s atmosphere of heroic struggle has also been tied to Beethoven’s realization of his growing deafness, but Peck says that the heroism he’s interested in is that of his dancers—the ways they drive their young bodies to extraordinary extremes against the press of time and physical limitations. He wants to push them further than they’ve ever gone.
For Peck, Beethoven is a bold move. Best known as the self-styled millennial choreographer of slouchy T-shirt-and-sneaker ballets, he has made dances at the N.Y.C.B. to the music of Sufjan Stevens, Dan Deacon, and Nico Muhly, and worked on Broadway (“Carousel,” “Illinoise”) and in Hollywood (the “West Side Story” remake). For him to take on Beethoven is all the bolder given that George Balanchine, the company’s by-now mythic founder, once enigmatically commented that Beethoven’s music was “impossible” to choreograph, an odd taboo that Peck has understandably ignored. Still, although Peck is one of the most skilled choreographers we have, his taste for light music and sentiment can make his dances feel shallow. Now in his late thirties, is he finally setting himself a more serious task?
The answer is: sort of. “The Wind-Up” begins with the dancer Daniel Ulbricht tearing onto an empty, brightly lit stage to Beethoven’s opening chords and taking us into the first theme with fluid, classically based movement. He is immediately joined by five other dancers wearing simple costumes with colorful geometric patterns, which seem to refract their bodies as they leap, slide, and somersault over one another in a disarmingly playful tangle of balletic forms which culminates in an almost architectural tableau, bodies posed low to high (selfie!). This group sequence and snapshot is an anchor—a theme that, reflecting Beethoven, reappears throughout the dance, sometimes turned sideways or at an angle.
What follows is pure dance, a joyously propulsive, non-stop sequence of duets, trios, ensemble dances. There are brief solos, but the individuals are not the point here, and everything quickly veers into a group. The movement is largely conventional (lots of traditional ballet tricks for the men), but there is also a distinctive twisting, a wind-up torquing through the spine and torso, which the dancers ingeniously unravel. They are physically galvanized: this is sophisticated dancing at its peak, an achievement we should not underestimate. The difference between dancers executing steps expertly and accurately and dancers truly dancing depends on an alchemy of light, costumes, dancers, choreography, audience, and the whole spirit of the production. This is signature Peck, and it matters that he has assembled a team of artists he knows well. The dancers appear free of themselves and the world, utterly engrossed in music and dance in a way that is generous and fully alive.
But there is a problem: Beethoven begins to disappear. In the energy and flow of the dancing, the “Eroica” starts to sound like an accompaniment or a favorite song pulled off Spotify. Watching it was a strange experience. I couldn’t feel Beethoven’s depths, and I began to notice that the darker emotions of the score, including premonitions of the funeral march later in the symphony, were choreographically missing or relegated to the margins. Sometimes I could see hints of this side of the music in the lighting, by Brandon Stirling Baker, as when the backdrop shifted, from color to a luminous black. Or in the dancer Mira Nadon, whose body contains a natural shadow, revealing a tension between musical dissonance and the relentlessly demanding and athletic steps she is pushed to perform.
Finally, when we arrive at a famous series of dense, dissonant chords struggling for resolution, we find Roman Mejia on the side of the stage struggling to solve a partnering problem with Tiler Peck. On the final chord, she disappears into the wings and he is left empty-handed—a vaudevillian gag! Clever, except that Justin Peck has physically and visually smoothed over a musically complex moment. I couldn’t hear the dissonance I knew was there. In part, the problem is Peck’s emphasis on friendly collectivity. He gives no space or time to the individual or to the embattled terrains of the inner life so powerfully rendered in Beethoven’s score. Peck seems to hear the “Eroica” as purely triumphant and celebratory and to be oblivious to Beethoven’s vast human range.
The dance ends by winding back to the start: Ulbricht alone onstage, this time turning endlessly on one leg with the other extended, as the curtain falls. It is all harmless and fun, but artists, like heroes and heroines, larger-than-life figures who walk the world stage, come with tragic flaws and the shadow of their own mortality. There was no sign of that here. The Republic of Peck is still a sleek, sunny realm, of forever-youths giving it their all but perpetually ending up back where they began.
Ratmansky’s “The Naked King” is something quite different: a satirical strike levelled directly at President Donald Trump. Françaix’s music begins with a lively fanfare, and the curtain opens on a tableau of an absurdly corpulent king dressed like Louis XIV, vainly gesturing at a portrait of that French monarch propped high in front of a draped royal-red curtain. The queen—blond, leggy, wearing dark glasses and a red flapper dress—lounges on an armchair while ministers in suits delight their childish king by dancing with him, turning him and his big belly in cartwheels and the like. Enter a rock-and-roll trio of fashion-designer tailors with red, black, and frizzy brown hair, all wearing wildly colorful countercultural garb. They perform a typical story-ballet dance mixed with gestures of pointing, scheming, and sewing. Then we have the royal entourage, three couples in sleek red tights and flowing skirts doing smooth ballet steps, followed by the townspeople—working folk outfitted à la “Oklahoma!,” with Stetsons, jeans, skirts—performing a more raucous routine.
For the next half hour, the stage business unfolds with dull-witted predictability, notwithstanding Françaix’s spirited and charming score. The designers convince the dopey king that they will weave him a sumptuous new outfit that only members of the highest society can perceive. The court sycophants, and the king himself, are so fearful of being excluded that they gesture and cavort, pretending to see the fabric that doesn’t exist, and, when the king is paraded through the town, stark naked in his purported new costume, a child rushes up and shouts the truth. Ratmansky’s puffy king shrinks and covers his genitals with a fig leaf; the ministers, quivering and quaking, twirl and flip him, as everyone rushes around to hide the shocking fact they all know to be true. Finally, the defeated king slinks offstage. The townspeople perform a celebratory dance with the tailors, and the ballet ends with the boy jumping onto their shoulders in a triumphant pose. Power to the people!
This is an odd change from the original Hans Christian Andersen story, and from the 1935 Paris Opéra scenario. In the Andersen, the exposed king isn’t expelled and doesn’t dare slink away—he knows he must maintain the pretense or lose everything, so he continues the procession in his naked grandeur. In the Paris Opéra version, the king is so enchanted with the big lie that he appoints the head tailor Prime Minister of his realm. Ratmansky, by contrast, earnestly turns this light but pointed farce into a bland American morality tale.
“The Naked King” belongs to a side of Ratmansky’s work that indulges a taste for lavishly reconstructing or reinventing old or forgotten ballets, full of courtly manners and bygone pantomime tropes. His revivals of Russian Imperial classics such as “The Sleeping Beauty” and “Paquita” at least have historical interest, but “The Naked King” is more like his opulent confection “Whipped Cream,” from 2017, in which decoratively costumed pastries danced and frolicked to a Richard Strauss ballet score from 1924. It is the Imperial ballet master in Ratmansky, and watching these productions makes me feel like I am sitting at a dying court.
So, when Ratmansky talks about “The Naked King” as inspired by protests on the streets of today, I want to say, But how is it as a dance? How is it as theatre, now? Have his courtiers told him how empty and boring it is? Does he see the decadence—the money, the costumes, the dancers, the orchestra, all expended on a flimsy escapade? If he wishes to protest, a truly great ballet (and he has made many) would be to my mind a far stronger weapon. A great ballet is undeniable. With “The Naked King,” I fear Ratmansky has come to believe in something that is not there. ♦