NEW YORK — Houston Ballet, in town for its 50th anniversary, lured me in with the promise of a real dance: That’s what Mark Morris makes. “The Letter V,” which he choreographed for the company in 2015, is better than that. It’s gorgeous.
Morris has a way, all too singular, of placing classical ballet in a setting of understated elegance. His steps are so clean that to watch anything afterward can feel like taking a bath in used water. By the end of Thursday night’s program at City Center, I realized that the only thing I want to watch after a ballet by Morris was another ballet by Morris.
Set to Haydn’s Symphony No. 88, the four-movement “Letter V,” a New York premiere, leads the program, which also includes works by Aszure Barton and Justin Peck. This pastoral delight is a braiding of choreography, music, lighting and costume, as well as another crucial element: the right dancers for the job. It’s not fashionable to move with beautifully rounded arms — lightly and smoothly — yet the Houston dancers did so with indelible loveliness and intention.
There’s much to take in here, yet the ballet doesn’t get cluttered. While certain actions repeat, they never become routine, as when a woman, holding a man’s hand, leans out and swings her body, landing on the floor as gently as a fresh, billowing sheet.
Morris, who comes from the modern dance world, knows a thing or two about getting dancers on and off the floor, a skill that doesn’t always translate to ballet choreographers, though they keep trying. Evidence of that came later in Peck’s “Reflections.” He loves it when dancers lie on their backs with, say, a leg stretched straight in the air; getting them to stand up again is when the situation gets awkward. (It’s like watching a ballerina run.)
But for Morris, the floor is the same as the air, and he uses both to luminous effect. In the poignant second movement, the dancers perform a plié in second position — a basic ballet position in which the knees bend outwardly — as their palms face forward. With a surgeon’s precision, they jump and land exactly as they started. How could something so simple be so ravishing?
“The Letter V” takes a livelier tone in the third movement, which draws on Morris’ background in folk dance; the men and the women move in separate circles, one placed within the other, and change places throughout. Occasionally they pause to look at one another, tilt their faces and raise their hands as if to say: “What? What’s wrong with beauty?”
Actually, I have no idea what it means; it’s just unexpected and fresh — like everything in this ballet, not least of which are Maile Okamura’s spectacular costumes. In a palette of greens and blues, stripes and gingham are overlaid with sheer fabric; the glow of Nicole Pearce’s warm lighting also helps to create the sense that the dancers are flitting around, not on a stage, but in a garden, enchanted by their own merriment.
In the joyful fourth movement, they zoom on and off the stage, gathering in formations that have them vigorously swinging a leg forward and back as their arms slice in the opposite direction. With the Haydn, it’s a wild pairing of high and low — like caviar and Coke — but it fits.
The remainder of the program was tougher to get through, especially Barton’s “Come In,” a work created in 2006 for Mikhail Baryshnikov and an ensemble of men from Hell’s Kitchen Dance. Set to music by Vladimir Martynov, this exploration of stillness, in which tension is used in gestural, largely unison choreography, was as overlong and sophomoric as ever. The evening’s final piece also had an air of the familiar, the New York premiere of Peck’s “Reflections,” created earlier this year for the company.
Pianists Katherine Burkwall-Ciscon and Yi-Chiu Rachel Chao performed Sufjan Stevens’ score opposite each other at the back of the stage. The pianos made for a dramatic sight, but they also seemed to cramp the stage, pushing the bustling, full-bodied dancing into the foreground.
Coming after “The Letter V,” Peck’s port de bras, or the carriage of the arms, seemed brittle, just as the constant swirl of motion — a continual hiccup of jumps and turns — felt frantic and at the service of rigid architecture.
But this homage to classical technique relaxed somewhat as it went along. Eventually, dancers began to stand out, namely the lyrical Karina González, who performed a duet with Charles-Louis Yoshiyama; she doesn’t strike a position as much as linger in shapes, in time with the music.
The ballet seemed like the usual from Peck: energizing and athletic, with increasingly recognizable components. Using dancers like a set, he created sculptures with their bodies, both in the opening pose in which they clustered closely, cascading like a waterfall, and at the end, when they stood frozen in different positions while soloists performed — and could be seen clearly — in the front.
Peck’s dance worlds are usually logical ones, and that’s fine. They have their place. But Morris’ “The Letter V,” showing the dancers at their best, made a case — and space — for real grandeur. That’s dance poetry. It felt new.
This article originally appeared in
.