NEW YORK, NY.- A few months ago, Justin Peck, the resident choreographer of New York City Ballet, was entertaining his baby daughter with a set of building blocks as he listened to the first movement of Caroline Shaw’s a cappella “Partita for 8 Voices.” He was thinking about how to approach the densely packed music, layered with speech, vocal effects and wordless harmonies, when he noticed that his daughter’s toy set contained eight shapes. Together, they began to move the shapes around to the music.
“We came up with the structural pattern that starts the ballet!” Peck said, referring to “Partita,” his new work for New York City Ballet, which will have its premiere Thursday, the opening night of the company’s delayed winter season at Lincoln Center.
Set to Shaw’s Pulitzer Prize-winning composition and performed by eight dancers in sneakers, the ballet has vibrantly colored hanging fabric sets, designed by Eva LeWitt, the daughter of artist Sol LeWitt, whose “Wall Drawing 305” was an inspiration for Shaw’s score.
“It has really felt like a back-and-forth conversation, from Caroline incorporating text from Sol LeWitt’s instructional drawings, then me interpreting that work and bringing in Eva to create her own response to the music and dance,” Peck said. “The whole experience feels like the most alive thing I have been part of in terms of the creative, artistic expression.”
In a joint video interview a week before the premiere, the three creators discussed their responses to one another’s work and how practical parameters and pedestrian elements were important to each aspect of the ballet.
Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Q: Justin, you originated the project?
JUSTIN PECK: Yes. When I first heard “Partita,” after Caroline won the Pulitzer, I was totally blown away. Sometimes as a choreographer you will hear music and think, let’s choreograph it tomorrow. But with this work, I felt I had to live with it, listen to it steadily for several years. I consider it to be one of the most important compositions of the last decade, so I didn’t take it lightly.
In April last year, I worked up the courage to reach out to Caroline, who I had worked with on small things. She was really supportive of the idea, and I felt like City Ballet was the place to do the work because the dancers have such musical sensitivity.
Q: How did you discover Eva’s work?
PECK: While I was doing a lot of deep-dive listening and research on Caroline’s process, I noticed that a lot of the lyrics were pulled from the LeWitt instructional drawings. Through that rabbit hole I stumbled on Eva’s work, and was immediately blown away by that too. You can feel a little bit of her father’s influence, but it’s so uniquely her own voice, and has a dimensionality and theatricality that I thought would work well in a live performance setting.
Q: Caroline, “Partita” alludes to Baroque dance suites in the names of its sections: Allemande, Sarabande, Courante, Passacaglia. Did you think of it as a score for dance?
CAROLINE SHAW: I didn’t literally imagine it being choreographed, but it felt really visual and as if I were choreographing with sound rather than dance.
When I wrote the piece, which was over three summers, I was freelancing as a violinist and singer in New York, and also accompanying dance classes all over the city. So all those counts and rhythms were swirling around my brain at the time. I truly fell back in love with music through dance.
I was playing a lot of Baroque violin pieces at the time, and Bach uses all these dance forms, so it felt like a great jumping-off point. Each movement in “Partita” does relate to the original Baroque dance, but they are abstractions, holding seeds of those original meters and feels, but quickly moving further. It was a playful experiment with form, and a conversation with the past.
Q: Eva, were you influenced by the score? How did you approach the design?
EVA LEWITT: I had done an exhibition at the ICA in Boston, and Justin really liked the asymmetric, random quality of that work, so I took that as a freedom to kind of paint with sculpture and fabric. I wanted to leave space for the dancers, to frame them, but also be idiosyncratic with colors and spacing, and I was definitely influenced by energy of “Partita.”
Gravity is very important in my work; the pieces really have to hang, that’s what creates the shapes, defines the circles and forms. That’s so linked to dance, to humans moving through space, and to the voice too. Those gravitational universes are important to all our art forms.
Q: Justin, does each dancer correspond to a voice in the score?
PECK: Not exactly. I thought about that a lot, and made a very meticulous, mapped-out text that deciphered each voice and how the dancers could hear and count it. It was a level of preparation that I have never done before. There were moments when I thought maybe one dancer would correspond to a certain voice, but it became too much of a constraint. Vocally, it’s eight individual voices, and I think choreographically it feels like eight individual dance voices.
Actually, from the play with the building blocks, I’ve got notes that read “Harrison [Coll] is the lime-green rhino, Taylor [Stanley] is the yellow leaf,” and so on!
Q: You have created movement with a distinctive loose-limbed, grounded quality that seems different from your previous work. Did this come from your sense of the music?
PECK: Yes, the music is so unlike anything I have worked with before. But it also came from what Eva created. There is so much in her work that is about the tension and the harmony of the line versus the curve. That very simple, mundane visual quality really influenced the choreography. There is so much in it that is geometrical, and about those tensions and harmonies.
Q: Why did you decide to put the dancers in sneakers?
PECK: I went back and forth for a while whether it should be in pointe shoes or sneakers, and decided that sneakers felt right. The physical language feels to me like modern Americana folk dance, where I am able to pull influences from beyond ballet and incorporate them into dance language that feels very current, and deeply personal to me as a New Yorker. There is a comfort and relatability that I think communicates a different experience for the audience.
SHAW: I really like the decision to do it in sneakers because it relates to the way I wrote the music. Everything in it comes from speech, and the spoken word isn’t highbrow. I wanted to use natural ways of speaking, all the sounds we make, just American voices, and turn that into music. It’s something pedestrian, shaped into something else.
LEWITT: I love that idea and the practical parameters of making something for the stage. A lot of my work is made with fabric and plastics, and has an inherent sway to it, and I realized I could create an environment for the dancers in which the set too had movement.
PECK: The music, the dance, the design, it all feels in motion, never static. That’s the quality we were aiming to achieve. We’re doubling down on what makes live performance so great; that it’s happening in the moment, that you feel the energy coming from the stage, the performance. This is the closest I’ve gotten as an artist to having that quality on all fronts.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
