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.”
Peck’s background encompasses jazz, acting, and musical theater, so perhaps it is not surprising that over the last decade she’s emerged as an impresario. She choreographs, curates, acts, directs, and churns out snappy online content. Last winter, her first ballet for N.Y.C.B., Concerto for Two Pianos, was acclaimed for its musical prowess. “Turn It Out with Tiler Peck & Friends,” the program she fashioned for her 2022 City Center artist-in-residency, included commissions from a stylistically diverse set of choreographic luminaries—Michelle Dorrance, William Forsythe, and Alonzo King—and will be revived at City Center this fall.
For her Ballet Festival program, Peck has gathered together dancers she admires from N.Y.C.B., American Ballet Theatre, Paris Opera Ballet, Miami City Ballet, and the Royal Ballet. “I wanted to make sure that these Robbins ballets were danced by people who haven’t done them,” she explains. “Obviously, I wanted this program to be nice for the audience, but, selfishly, I wanted it to be beneficial for the dancers too. I wanted them to get debuts, to help them grow.”
To this end, Peck has selected rarities such as Concertino and Four Bagatelles, as well as hits like In the Night. She also sourced an intimate, chamber version of the Robbins masterpiece Dances at a Gathering. There are so many debuts that some of the casting is in triplicate: Peck will alternate her signature role in Other Dances with A.B.T.’s Devon Teuscher and Cassandra Trenary, both of whom are new to the ballet. “Other Dances is a place where you really grow artistically, and I wanted them to have that.”
Peck has also framed a thrilling mashup in the seldom-seen duet Rondo, pairing A.B.T.’s Chloe Misseldine with N.Y.C.B.’s Mira Nadon. These leggy, raven-haired phenoms have been dazzling audiences across the plaza from each other in rapid, parallel ascendancies. Until now, they haven’t shared a New York City stage. “For Rondo, I was very excited at the thought of putting Chloe and Mira next to each other,” Peck says. “I thought that the two of them could push each other in beautiful ways.”
Amid all this mentorship, Peck continues to expand her own artistry. Though Balanchine ballerinas are among the most musical of dancers, Peck stands in a category unto herself, bending time onstage like Salvador Dalí melted clocks. It would seem like a no-brainer for her to star in A Suite of Dances—a 14-minute battle of musical wits between a dancer and an onstage cellist—except that Robbins made this virtuoso solo for Mikhail Baryshnikov, and no woman has ever danced it. Peck is undaunted by its technical challenges.
“I feel very honored,” she says. “I don’t think we’ll have to change anything. I can’t jump as high, but I really want to do it the way it’s supposed to be done.” And Peck will have some playfully stiff competition closer to home as she switches off in the role with her new husband, the bravura N.Y.C.B. principal Roman Mejia, fresh off their honeymoon.
The Jerome Robbins Ballet Festival will be on at the Joyce Theater, in New York, from August 12 to August 17
Faye Arthurs is a former dancer with New York City Ballet. She writes about dance for Fjord Review, Dance Magazine, and the George Balanchine Foundation
