Tiler Peck has been thinking about George Balanchine a lot lately. It\u2019s not a stretch. He was the founding choreographer of New York City Ballet, where Peck has danced for 22 years. She never met Balanchine, but she knows him through his ballets. And no one made ballets like Balanchine, especially the mammoth ones, with rows and rows of dancers stretched across the stage, kicking and spinning toward a synchronized, rapturous finale.<\/p>\n
His way of turning chaos into clockwork, of shifting the act of watching ballet to an out-of-body experience, might do a number on a choreographer trying to make a full-scale classical dance at City Ballet. Still, why hasn\u2019t anyone tried? Why don\u2019t choreographers make huge classical ballets anymore?<\/p>\n
These are the kinds of questions that obsess Peck, a perpetually sunny ballerina with strong opinions about the state of ballet. A flurry of them came to her mind when she was offered her second commission at City Ballet.<\/p>\n
\u201cI started thinking, \u2018What do I love about George Balanchine ballets, the big ones that I love to dance in and watch?\u2019\u201d she said. \u201cSo much of it is about, to me, the structure. So I started thinking, what is it about \u2018Symphony in C\u2019? It\u2019s the movements. It\u2019s kind of old fashioned in a way to do these sorts of structures.\u201d<\/p>\n
Newer choreographers might use the same number of principal dancers, but \u201ceverybody\u2019s onstage together doing different things,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Peck wanted to give each of her cast members a full dancing experience. In \u201cSymphonie Espagnole,\u201d<\/a> her new work for City Ballet premiering Thursday, she has choreographed \u00c9douard Lalo\u2019s five-movement \u201cSymphonie Espagnole\u201d for a cast of 40. In her time with the company, no new classical ballet has been as ambitious as that. (While grand, Alexei Ratmansky\u2019s \u201cPaquita,\u201d<\/a> from 2025, a restaging of the last act of the 19th-century ballet, used 16 dancers.)<\/p>\n A classical approach to ballet, as she demonstrated with \u201cConcerto for Two Pianos,\u201d<\/a> her first for City Ballet, is a lane Peck is making her own. For the new work, she is taking that further.<\/p>\n In the first movement, a couple dances alongside some of the company\u2019s sharpest female technicians; the second (for women) and the third (for men) pave the way for the fourth, a romantic, shimmering pas de deux. The final movement leads to what Peck has long found lacking in new ballets: a heart-stopping finale, with a big crowd of dancers coming together. \u201cIt\u2019s like you almost explode because it\u2019s just so much,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n In that classic Balanchine way, she is trying to make clockwork out of chaos.<\/p>\n \u201cI thought that could be really interesting to try and to have another something like that in our repertoire,\u201d she said. \u201cFill the stage! And this music needs that, and with this many dancers. I mean, it\u2019s almost to the point where I\u2019m like, \u2018do we have too many dancers?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Will she pull it off? \u201cI think it\u2019s scary, but I\u2019m up for it,\u201d she said. \u201cLike, let\u2019s try.\u201d<\/p>\n Experience shows it\u2019s unwise to underestimate Peck, 37, who in recent years has presented her own group at New York City Center and curated a Jerome Robbins festival at the Joyce Theater. She has coming commissions at Miami City Ballet and Northern Ballet. What started out as casually making dances at her mother\u2019s ballet studio in California is fast becoming a second career as a choreographer.<\/p>\n She knows what she wants. She cuts to the point. At City Ballet, she understands the dancers because she is still a dancer there herself. \u201cI\u2019m in this sort of really sweet spot right now,\u201d she said, \u201cwhere I know them all so well and the respect on both sides is so deep that I feel that\u2019s what makes the product that much richer.\u201d<\/p>\n Peck can string together steps in ways that enlivens the music and run a rehearsal with efficiency, humor and tough love. \u201cShe doesn\u2019t beat around the bush,\u201d the principal Mira Nadon<\/a> said. \u201cShe kind of gives it to you how it is.\u201d<\/p>\n In a rehearsal for the third movement, the men stumbled through double tour jumps to the knee. Peck piped up: \u201cGuys, seriously, do you know how many double tours are in this piece?\u201d she said. \u201cPractice them every single day after class.\u201d<\/p>\n