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!
