Driving their bodies past the point of exhaustion, they suddenly turn to face us, penetratingly still. Here, the cast wears Jermaine Terry’s costumes in shades of lavender - dresses with pleated skirts rising just above the knee and unitards for the men that reminded me of tuxedo T-shirts - giving them the look of a wedding party. The ballet would have seemed less skeletal with more bodies, especially in the end - a group unison passage that starts out as a choreographic sprint but soon starts to seem, in a good way, like a marathon. But the work also lacks structural variety: Picture a diagonal line with two women dotting the ends, performing basic pointe-work, and a man dancing his heart out in the middle. That makes sense - dancing in or choreographing for the pointe shoe is not part of Roberts’s lineage. “Emanon” is uneven the men’s dancing is more challenging, more expansive than the women’s. In this ballet, Fahoury is something from the real world: a plaintive, mournful hero, and the counterpart to another dancer, Anthony Huxley, whose lively, pristine dancing leans into the pleasure of catching the air and changing it, once again, into a place of balletic delight. He’s a superlative partner in general, as his recent debut in Balanchine’s “La Valse” made clear: He looks at the person he is dancing with, and that connection, in “Emanon,” gives the steps an otherworldly sweep as though the pair were gliding on ice. The elegant, compact Jovani Furlan is a courtly partner to Emma Von Enck. Gradually, with an underlying insistence, Roberts’s ballet begins to grow on you. (The lighting and scenery, by Brandon Stirling Baker, make the back of stage look letterboxed, with the bottom portion illuminated.) Next, Indiana Woodward takes over, her fleet feet crossing in the air. It’s a pretty, yet predictable introduction: Emily Kikta and Peter Walker run in and meet at the center. It starts with a solo for Unity Phelan that has her unfurling her long legs and swinging a foot down emphatically as her curving arms - more flowing than ever - frame her lovely face. But while the music has many moods, the dance - aside from a standout solo for Jonathan Fahoury - coasts along in an atmosphere of euphoria.
Even as the dancers spin and soar, they sometimes strain to appear carefree. In “Emanon,” part of a program in which all the choreographers have roots in modern or contemporary dance rather than ballet, the stage can feel strangely empty. Part of that has to do with ballet’s sprightly tone - delight - in which dancers, often constricted to contained areas of the stage, dash off swift, articulate spurts of footwork. Much of his new ballet brushes the notes at their surface. In “Emanon - in Two Movements,” set to Shorter’s “Pegasus” and “Prometheus Unbound,” Roberts doesn’t exactly interfere with the music, though he doesn’t really reveal a different, dancerly side of it, either. I occupy myself with how not to interfere with the music.” George Balanchine once said of dance and music: “If you see music simply as an accompaniment, then you don’t hear it. At New York City Ballet, Roberts translates the need for pleasure into a dance in which the jazz composer Wayne Shorter’s music drives a cast of eight - first in solos and duets, then in trios and, finally, as a collective - to achieve a state of abandon. Who would disagree? It’s February, and the pandemic is still out there, faded but always looming. “I realized that this is exactly what I want to be doing,” she said.Clearly, the choreographer Jamar Roberts had a feeling about what the world needed now: a lift, a boost, a jolt of hope. But after she returned to the stage this fall, any doubts disappeared. The pandemic also made Phelan question whether her time as a ballerina was coming to an end she has a bachelor’s degree in economics and was looking around at finance job openings. Three of the retiring dancers - Maria Kowroski, Gonzalo Garcia and Ask la Cour - intended to leave in the 2020-21 season, but because it was canceled, they decided to stay on for a farewell season.Įarlier in the pandemic, Lauren Lovette decided she wanted to pursue dance outside the realm of the company Abi Stafford opted to retire after 21 years with the company and Amar Ramasar, who was temporarily fired and then reinstated after a nude photo-sharing scandal, will leave in the spring. Six is an unusually large number of retirements for one year.
The young dancers will help to fill the void left by a group of departing veteran principals. He joined the corps in 2017, debuting roles in Edwaard Liang’s “Lineage” and Ratmansky’s “Voices.” Mejia, 21, was born in Fort Worth, where he started ballet training at age 3.
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