If there’s one thing the Whitney Biennial is known for, it’s starting conversations. And while the survey exhibition always gets the art world talking, one such exchange, between choreographer Justin Peck and visual artist Eamon Ore-Giron, reverberated all the way into the spring repertory of New York City Ballet. In Mystic Familiar, Peck’s newest creation for the company, the choreographer—alongside Ore-Giron, composer Dan Deacon, and fashion designer Humberto Leon—pushes his audience to confront their own expectations of the dance genre. “The ballet experience can hold the work of visual artists and kinetic movement, and new music,” Peck recently told Surface. “Mystic Familiar is a great example of delivering something that’s all new for the audience. We’re not doing Tchaikovsky.”
Peck, a School of American Ballet alumnus and former company dancer turned choreographer in residence at City Ballet, has played a considerable role in ensuring the company’s continued relevance and growth among new audiences. By harnessing the technical prowess and musicality of neoclassically-trained ballet dancers in imaginative ways, his work pushes both audiences and his collaborators to reframe the possibilities that a night at the ballet holds.
“The main thing that was exciting for me was this idea of the expanded field, thinking about painting beyond a gallery and beyond a wall,” Ore-Giron tells Surface. “To see the athleticism and physicality of the dancers, it’s a world that I never get exposed to. I’m living the thing that I have always wanted to do, to take painting somewhere else.”
That “somewhere else” is the stage at David H. Koch Theater, where a mammoth adaptation of a painting from Ore-Giron’s Black Medallion series takes on a life of its own. Here, it serves as a backdrop for Peck’s balletic exploration of the energy behind air, earth, fire, water, and ether. For his contribution to Mystic Familiar, Ore-Giron rendered the geometric motifs present in a previous body of work, Infinite Regress, in black instead of gold as a symbolic representation of negative space, permanence, and, ultimately, spiritual transcendence.
“The black can become this deeper space and then that can kind of spin out into different ideas about time and movement and celestial bodies in space,” he says. Onstage, lighting designer Brandon Stirling Baker—another frequent Peck collaborator—imbues the work with life, creating “certain transparencies, and shifts in light that change the quality of the piece entirely,” Ore-Giron recalls.
Some of the most illuminating moments at New York City Ballet can come from seeing the parts of a performance for the beauty they hold. For instance, for every blockbuster Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty, there’s a Firebird: the smoldering embodiment of George Balanchine’s own cross-medium collaboration with Igor Stravinksy and Marc Chagall.
“It’s a real privilege to get to think, ‘Who are those exciting voices of today, and can I invite them in?’” says Peck, whose last premiere at New York City Ballet featured a collaboration with the artist Jeffrey Gibson. “What makes us unique as an arts institution, and what we can provide for an audience is that a ballet is a kind of meeting point for all those mediums to come together.”
