City Ballet's 'Slice to Sharp' Doesn't Cut It

The quest for new choreography has not always been a smooth one for the New York City Ballet, but it has led the company to exhilarating heights -- namely, the discovery and nurturing of Christopher Wheeldon, a former City Ballet dancer who has blossomed into the choreographic phenomenon of the new century. Wheeldon is one of two bright lights in the company's recent commissioning efforts -- the other being former Bolshoi director Alexei Ratmansky -- and his "Mercurial Manoeuvres" was the highlight of City Ballet's program Thursday at the Kennedy Center Opera House.

But City Ballet has also opened the door to the banal. Witness "Slice to Sharp" by a pet of the ballet world, Jorma Elo, which formed the centerpiece of Thursday's program and offered a dismal contrast to Wheeldon's far superior creation. The evening ended with George Balanchine's "Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet." It's not one of Balanchine's best, but perhaps it was added so as not to make the Elo look so out of place.

In both Elo's and Wheeldon's pieces, the two men shared a fascination with a severe, body-baring aesthetic -- the women in "Mercurial Manoeuvres" wear tiny majorette dresses; in "Slice to Sharp" they are in leotards and bare legs. Both choreographers use the body as a graphic device, capitalizing on the curious, splayed-out forms it can take. But Wheeldon's work has order, intensity and meaning, and Elo's is all explosive scraps.

"Mercurial Manoeuvres" starts big, with the stage flooded in red light that expands the space up and out to what feels like stadium size. My first thought was: Hmm, what a big ego Wheeldon has. But the grand, rock-concert opening isn't a call for attention -- not entirely. It sets the stage for the theme of expansion and contraction, the macro and the micro. Under the red lights stands a man, Gonzalo Garcia, captured in silhouette, looking dwarfed and iconic at once. Then the lighting changes, dancers appear in rows around him, and suddenly we're watching a jumbo company showcase. The music also combines pageantry and introspection -- Dmitri Shostakovich's brightly textured Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Minor for piano, trumpet and string orchestra, with Cameron Grant on piano, Ray Mase on trumpet and Maurice Kaplow conducting the New York City Ballet Orchestra.

It's a magnificent display, those advancing rows of dancers with such agile footwork, but the most important part of the ballet is still to come, and it's shockingly small -- just a pas de deux, though it's an extraordinary one. With it, Wheeldon shows us how two dancers -- Tiler Peck and Tyler Angle, luxuries from the troupe's middle rank -- can fill the space as well as two dozen. They dance big -- he swirls her like a toreador's cape, rolls her wide-legged over his back.

This showy romp yields to a gentler part, no less dazzling for the magic of Angle's partnering and Peck's composure. When a man helps his partner turn a series of pirouettes, he usually stands behind her, both hands paddling her around at the waist, spinning her like a top. It was different here: Peck pirouetted with the serenity of a weathervane as Angle stood casually to the side, touching her hip around with one hand now and again. Wheeldon is known for the novel ways he can get a man and a woman to dance together, but this effortlessness was of another order. Not mercurial at all, but Apollonian. From this small, tight, atomic core pulsed all the rest of the work's grandeur.

Search as you might through "Slice to Sharp," you'll find no such framework. There was a great deal of energy, and one limber pose shifting into another. And a host of tics: A dancer might slap his thigh, or slap his head, or hold a hand in front of his face as if checking for bad breath. The Vivaldi excerpts give the work its only structure, for the choreography has none. Elo seems to be arguing against phrasing or the use of any kind of concept, yet it's an empty renunciation, for he puts nothing better in its place. Though he clearly likes the idea of a pas de deux -- the work comprises a string of them -- he rejects expressiveness.

What Elo taps into is ballet's athleticism and visual excitement, but what makes ballet exciting can also be monotonous if it's not given a purpose that goes deeper than extremes of flexibility and new ways to flaunt them. I look for something more than surface effect in Elo's work and don't find it. Viewed in the cold light of evaluation, "Slice to Sharp" neither satisfies nor unsettles; it offers no emotional release or intellectual discipline. The more it says, the less it says.

"Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet," accompanied by Schoenberg's orchestration of Brahms's Piano Quartet No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 25, doesn't have a great deal to say, either. But it has its moments of drawing-room sophistication and its seductive riffs, particularly in the climactic "Rondo alla Zingarese," with Teresa Reichlen as part Hungarian Gypsy, part Vegas cocktail waitress. Her timing wasn't always well supported by the orchestra, but she injected a refreshing sense of play into a piece that had difficulty getting off the ground. The delicately built Yvonne Borree, with her fast, light footwork, elevated the Andante movement, but her partner Andrew Veyette seemed to have trouble lifting her. After such subtle partnering in the Wheeldon work, the push-pull effort was jarring.

This New York City Ballet program repeats tomorrow afternoon. The company performs different programs this afternoon (repeating this evening) and tomorrow night.