New York Fashion Week kicks off today, yet there are other more intriguing events to see in the Big Apple, apart from following a bulimic calendar packed with collections that may end up being completely useless, especially in light of the recent developments regarding fashion shows. One of such events (especially for fans of costumes designed by artists…) is the New York City Ballet's performance of "The Most Incredible Thing".
We mentioned the ballet on this site around four years ago when it was staged at London's Sadler's Wells, directed and choreographed by Javier de Frutos (with costumes by Tony Award-winning designer Katrina Lindsay) and music by the Pet Shop Boys.
This edition is completely new and features choreography by Justin Peck, the New York City Ballet's 28-year-old choreographer-in-residence and soloist. Peck has managed in the last few years to convert a younger generation to ballet, winning the heart of many people, including Opening Ceremony Creative Directors Humberto Leon and Carol Lim who, as you may remember, chose him to choreograph their S/S 16 runway show.
While this is Peck's most ambitious work to date since it features a cast of more than 50 performers, the ballet also includes a score composed by The National's Bryce Dessner and costumes and scenery designed by David Zwirner-represented artist Marcel Dzama.
The story is still taken from the eponymous fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen. Written and published in 1870, the plot focuses on a bizarre contest launched by a king: the inventor of the most incredible thing will win half his kingdom and the hand of the princess in marriage.
In the story a young man, The Creator, designs a clock that manages to conjure up at the stroke of the hour various figures – Moses, Adam and Eve, the Four Seasons, the Five Senses and many more. He is proclaimed the winner, but then an evil character, the Destroyer (a man with a club-shaped arm in this New York City Ballet production) smashes the clock. Everybody thinks that this act is actually the most incredible thing they have ever seen and the wedding is therefore arranged. During it, though, the figures from the clock reappear, fight against the Destroyer and defeat him, reuniting the Creator and the Princess.
The Sadler's Wells version was a blend of ballet, pop videos, cabaret moments/spoof TV shows and film installations, and, in more or less the same way, this 45-minute run, part of the NYCB winter season's Artist Series, focuses on a strong visual component rather than on the body.
Peck's choreography often combines geometric and agile movements, but, as a whole the ballet comes out as a series of sketches and divertissements stifled by the power of the elaborate costumes. Indeed, quite often the dancers look as if they were created as accessories for Dzama's sets and costumes.
Dzama's designs look like the result of a visual retro-futurist marriage between Alexandra Exter's Constructivist shapes and silhouettes for Yakov Protazanov’s Soviet sci-fi Aelita: Queen of Mars and the costumes for the Triadisches Ballett (Triadic Ballet) developed by the Bauhaus' Oskar Schlemmer (see also the illustration for the programme). Dzama also looked at other inspirations, including art movements, literary works and artists such as Francis Picabia (the polkadots on the children's costumes reference a 1910 ballet by Picabia's with dancers in polka-dotted underwear).
Dzama actually has a fascination with dance, and some of his early works feature figures arranged in various dance positions (while he also mentions as a source of inspiration for this work Hans Christian Andersen's "The Red Shoes"). Ths is actually not the first time Dzama designed dance costumes: one of his designs appeared also in Jay-Z's "Picasso Baby" music video, but in this case his works – brought to life by Marc Happel, New York City Ballet's Director of Costumes – contribute to the creation of vivid vignettes.
There are indeed some intriguing characters such as the Nine Muses in matching Louise Brooks bobs and black and white optical costumes (in a formation that calls to mind Thom Browne's Bauhaus inspired S/S 13 collection show) that echo in their whorls Marcel Duchamp's rotative sculptures (Duchamp's passion for chess inspired Dzama's Art Series installation on the David H. Koch Theater Promenade at Lincoln Center).
The Seven Deadly Sins in flame-coloured, hand-painted unitards call to mind Nijinsky's faun, while the King is portrayed by two dancers in a rigid twin-like costume (a rather interesting and fantastic effect), and the scarlet Spring Bird (Gwyneth Muller) dances at times like Loïe Fuller, moving the sleeves of her costume to create flickering flames.
Yet there are also dubious appartions: despite The Creator is supposed to be a tremendous innovator, there is no futurism in his costume, but he looks like a pastiche out of a vintage Western comic book (think Tex Dawson, Western Kid, and you get an idea); clad in their identical tiered triangular hooped dresses (slightly reminiscent of Pierre Cardin's hooped designs) that turn them into unidentified flying objects the Five Senses look indistinguishable and rather clumsy.
The Eight Monks resemble instead wizards, and there are way too many birds, from the Winter Crow to the above mentioned Spring Bird and the Cuckoo Bird (Tiler Peck; this figure substitutes Moses in the original tale). The latter wears a tutu comprising cascades of gold brocade feathers, that quite often distract from the fast and unfinished steps, and her costume is not to be confused with the Princess (Sterling Hyltin)' tutu with a silver tulle bodice designed to resemble metal scales, but looking a bit like feathers.
The double-faced Destroyer is probably the character who is most alive: he looks like a guard out of Aelita (and so do the Three Kings…),but his club arm becomes a tool to create complicated choreographies with the Princess (Sterling Hyltin) who loses instead her passion in the supposedly romantic pas de deux with the Creator (Taylor Stanley).
Costumes are also accompanied by headpieces, wigs, and masks, that add a disquieting element to the tale, but an unmistakeable Dzama touch.
The visual power of the performance is actually better appreciated when the event is put in an arty context and seen together with the current exhibition at David Zwirner entitled "Marcel Dzama and Richard Pettibon: Forgetting the Hand" (on until next week).
This show is the result of a collaboration between the two artists that started last year when Pettibon handed some drawings to finish to Dzama. The drawings and collages created followed therefore the surrealist "exquisite corpse" method in which a partner is only given portions of an otherwise concealed drawing to work on.
The pieces were collected in a zine for Printed Matter's New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 (September 2015) and further works were then produced jointly by the artists for this exhibition.
The drawings are the result of two different artistic styles and visions, but, if you look closely at some of the details in these densely populated images that often conjure up the fears and anxieties generated by our modern and claustrophobic existences, you will be able to spot disturbingly carnivalesque and dark theatrical elements such as Dzama's trademark flaming red capes, bandit masks, polka dots, swirls and whorls that appear also in "The Most Incredible Thing".
It was indeed this exhibition and Dzama's 2012 Dadaist-inspired video "Une Danse des Bouffons" (A Jester's Dance), featuring Kim Gordon as Maria Martins, a sculptor and lover of Marcel Duchamp, that actually prompted Peck and Dessner to call the artist to work on a ballet with them. The event also gets visitors the chance to see Dzama's new video, "A Flower of Evil", that also offers some correspondences and links with the costumes in "The Most Incredible Thing" (see Tha Gambler's black costume covered with large white polka dots).
In a way "The Most Incredible Thing", Peck's 10th new work fo the New York City Ballet, is overshadowed by the whimsical and inventive costumes produced by Dzama, and while the production may be dismissed as a clever trick to get modern artists together and attract new audiences to a traditional form of art, Andersen's tale is particularly symbolic.
In this age in which we daily try and find the next big thing only to discard and destroy it, "The Most Incredible Thing" still fascinates us since it tells a story in which goodness and art prevail over chaos, tyranny and destruction and an ambitious Creator restores a much needed balance in his clock and in the entire universe. Though this may not be a great performance choreography-wise, there is therefore still a lot to see in it and a great metaphor to grasp.
"The Most Incredible Thing" runs on February 11 and February 19, at the David H. Koch Theater, New York. It returns to repertory in April and May. "Marcel Dzama and Richard Pettibon: Forgetting the Hand" is on view at David Zwirner, 533 West 19th Street, New York, until February 20, 2016.
Image Credits for this post
7. Marcel Dzama and Raymond Pettibon
The ghosts in these walls, 2015
Pencil, ink, gouache, and collage on paper
14 x 11 1/8 inches (35.6 x 28.3 cm)
Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London
8. Marcel Dzama and Raymond Pettibon
The circle of the lustful, 2015
Pencil, ink, gouache, and collage on paper
21 1/4 x 16 1/8 inches (54 x 41 cm)
Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London
9. Marcel Dzama and Raymond Pettibon
Sunbather, 2016
Pencil, ink, watercolor, gouache, and collage on paper
15 x 11 inches (38.1 x 27.9 cm)
Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London
10. Marcel Dzama and Raymond Pettibon
Be witness to me, O thou blessed Mother Moon, 2016
Pencil, ink, watercolor, gouache, and collage on paper
18 x 21 1/2 inches (45.7 x 54.6 cm)
Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London
11. Marcel Dzama
Still from A Flower of Evil, 2015
Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London
12, 13.Marcel Dzama and Raymond Pettibon
Installation views from the 2016 solo exhibition Forgetting the Hand at David Zwirner, New York
Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London
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