Peck Distills Millennial Experience in New Ballet
Lincoln Center Comes of Age
New York, New York | January 27 2017

Last night’s New York City Ballet premiere of Justin Peck’s new work The Times are Racing was a tour de force representation of the millennial generation; a summation of lives that were conceived in the late 1980s and that have grown up with hip-hop as music on the radio and on our screens, lives who are witnessing the dramatic scientific breakthroughs and moral controversy of stem cell research, and who have entered this century as young adults with the hive-mind created by social media deeply ingrained in our psyches.
The ballet opens up with principal dancer Robert Fairchild as our protagonist opposite the corps: a breathing, vibrating sphere of humans in colorful costumes designed by Humberto Leon that scream of the baggy streetwear of the 1990s, the belted dress craze of the 2000s, and the high-waisted short shorts I wore almost every day last summer. Pointe shoes are traded in for white sneakers here, yet another symbol of the culture and its years Peck is telling us about. Fairchild and the corps engage and disengage; he at times being physically engulfed in that pulsating mass of beings immediately brought to mind how at many times during the day I’ll tap an app on my phone and be welcomed into the fray of 2,223 facebook friends sharing their lives with me. We are at once singular and plural; more willingly and easily a single consciousness than any generation before us.

Peck uses movements as melodies in this ballet; one dancer tapping upon the shoe of another became a motif that wove in and out of the work in beautiful ways, and was just one example of how Peck comes up with movements that are quickly shown to be germane to the world of that particular ballet and help thread the various facets of the story together. One of my favorite facets of Peck’s style of choreography is the deftness with which he switches between different rhythms of moments, and his drawing from both ends of that tempo spectrum: like engineering a moment with such intensity that time nearly stops (when the lovers first embrace), giving the visual scene time to ruminate in the minds of the audience. Peck also utilizes break dancing moves, capturing their often under-appreciated eloquence, and even creates a double-helix out of the dancers, bringing the beauty of humanity on a microscopic level to center stage.

Peck’s duet with Robert Fairchild channeled the tap dancing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and it smoldered with intensity. It felt brave and raw, at times lighthearted but often anything but. Peck wears his heart on his toes, and (forgive me, Damien) this segment made me wish that Peck had choreographed La La Land.
What percentage of Millennials have experienced falling in love for the first time in the last ten years? Millennials are the group of people in the world right now experiencing the act of falling in love moreso than any other, and even though I have seen principal dancer Tiler Peck in many roles, including Sugarplum in The Nutcracker where she danced the pas de deux with her husband Robert Fairchild, I’ve not seen her be given a choreography that allowed her to portray the act of being madly, joyously in love as much as in this ballet. Peck gave her and Amar Ramasar a series of stunning, poignant moments portraying the uber-human experience of falling in love; moments that were effective in part because it threw away the stylized affection that runs rampant through ballet’s revered canon and allowed a truer-feeling series of movements permission to emerge.

The score Dan Deacon (who has a painfully topical twitter username: @ebaynetflix) provided for the ballet, played via loudspeaker, was a mirror of both the music our generation grew up with, like metallic-y, grungy rock that fairly sparkled with its silver overtones and dark, aggressive beats, and the music that Spotify often seeks to add to my Discover Weekly playlist: soft minimalism, waves of pastels and slowly moving parts. Baltimore-based Deacon is well-known in the new music world, frequently collaborating with mainstays like So Percussion (they gave him his Carnegie Hall debut) and traditional symphony orchestras.
Deacon’s maximalist style was well-suited to this particular endeavor, and gave Peck a great deal of intriguing structural elements to work with. Perhaps the best display of the choreography interacting with the music was in Peck and Fairchild’s duet, with two distinctly different sets of movements being paired up with two distinctly different soundworlds in Deacon’s score; the dancers and the music vacillating back and forth in a perfectly synced-up changing between two charged moods.

The end of the ballet saw the entire corps on stage: a vivid aggregate of color and muscle dancing a unified choreography. I was waiting for the end to be big and loud — I knew that if it was I would be leaping along with the audience out of my seat and into a standing ovation. Peck went for something more demure though, and the soft ending instead prompted a moment of heartfelt and stunned silence from an emotionally, visually, aurally overwhelmed audience before the applause crescendoed into a roar.
With Peck’s latest ballet distilling so much of a generation into 25 high-density minutes of culturally topical movement, Alan Gilbert hitting the dab during the live broadcast of Stephen Hough’s Emperor concerto with the New York Philharmonic two weeks ago, and the MET’s first production (finally!) by a woman composer in 113 years, L’Amour de Loin by Kaija Saariaho — with its storyline about two people falling in love without having ever physically met feeling a great deal like the online relationships many of my generation have had — Lincoln Center and the people who comprise it are acknowledging my generation and allowing the truths of our three decades of life to emerge in the music, movement, messages, and imagery it chooses to radiate out into the world.
So, go see the The Times are Racing because that moment when the lovers first embrace is a moment that will single-handedly vault this ballet into the contemporary cannon. Go see The Times are Racing because courtesy of Peck’s brain, stem cells and break dancing are visually cohesive. Go see it because the times ARE racing, and we’re getting older, and middle age might not be as exciting for Peck to write about as his first three decades.