*Left,* Jerome Robbins, circa 1955; *right,* Tiler Peck in *The Barre Project (Blake Works II),* a dance by Peck and William Forsythe, performed at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, in London, 2023.

A Match Made in Dance Heaven

For the first time, Manhattan’s Joyce Theater organizes its Ballet Festival around a single choreographer, Jerome Robbins, in a program curated by Tiler Peck, a principal dancer at New York City Ballet

By Faye Arthurs

The Joyce Theater is Manhattan’s downtown, contemporary counterpoint to all the uptown tutus. But in late summer, when the city’s Swan Queens have flown upstate or migrated overseas, the Art Deco jewel box presents a ballet festival. Next Tuesday through Sunday, the Joyce Ballet Festival will focus for the first time on a single choreographer—Jerome Robbins. The guest curator is Tiler Peck, a senior ballerina of famed musicality at New York City Ballet, where the works of Robbins and George Balanchine symbiotically coexist.

Peck dominates the repertory of both masters, playing her tornado turns against her sophisticated phrasing. “Balanchine is revealing technically. Robbins is more revealing of you as a person,” she tells me in a stolen moment between rehearsals and the planning of her June nuptials. “A lot of Robbins is just about being, which I think can be the hardest thing—just standing onstage and feeling comfortable. The more mature I get as a dancer, the more I understand it.”