The Brooklyn Rail

A black dance floor gleams, white tape mapping the rectangular boundaries of a tennis court. The chirping of crickets barely peeps through the noise of an audience settling into their seats. Leisure and nature stand ready to collide. When Paul Singh runs onto the stage, anything could happen. Singh lounges, towels off, stretches, and poses in a lunge, head tilted in expectation, as Claude Debussy’s score begins. He rolls his shoulders and shimmies backward in a series of circles that trace and retrace, wind and unwind.

In this introduction to Christopher Williams’s 2023 reimagining of Jeux, echoes of the past immediately mix within a contemporary setting. The work was first choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and premiered a century ago. Debussy was commissioned for the original production, though he initially balked at what he thought was a ridiculous scenario: tennis. He also did not approve of Diaghilev’s gay fantasy cast of three young men. Though eroticism, and homoeroticism, had been present in previous Ballets Russes productions, such as The Afternoon of a Faun, Nijinsky and Diaghilev ultimately settled for casting one man and two women in Jeux. A program note mentions this may well have been the first time a ballet mined a theme from contemporary life, rather than retelling a folk or fairytale centering a princess or imaginary creatures. More than likely, this ballet marks the first time a tennis ball flies in from offstage at Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC).

Singh pirouettes and runs off as Kyle Gerry follows the surprise ball, only to return quickly. The pair circle each other, peering around the tennis racket between them, eventually graduating into partnered promenades. When Carlo Antonio Villanueva enters, the game complicates as the trio weaves in and out of petal-like patterns. Like a match point fought back to deuce, dreamy episodes of mirroring, near kisses, and almost embraces are interrupted and thwarted by the introduction of this third player. Villanueva’s white dress and loose-fisted shaping of the hand, as if holding an invisible racket, references Nijinsky’s vision via Millicent Hodson’s 1996 reconstruction of the original ballet. In casting three men, Williams restores Diaghilev’s initial desire for a male ménage à trois.

The world premieres of Jeux and A Child’s Tale, commissioned by and seen at BAC October 12–15, are a continuation of Williams’s years-long project of “queering” ballets from the Ballets Russes canon. After The Prayer of Daphnis and Narcissus, in 2020 and 2021 respectively, featuring New York City Ballet principal Taylor Stanley, new versions of The Afternoon of a Faun and Les Sylphides were shown at the Joyce Theater in 2022. That all-male cast included Stanley in the title role of faun, heartily devoured by a tribe of water nymphs. Those works blurred boundaries between human and creature. Notably that choice brought a more visceral, as opposed to ethereal, approach to the corps de ballet—an approach that seemed intent on dismantling traditional social constructions of gender. With Jeux and A Child’s Tale, Williams finds a more playful tone that extends the queer lens far beyond the rhetoric of gender and sexual identities.

Humor is one way Williams upends expectation. In Jeux, the choreography and Joe Levasseur’s lighting design map a tempo and time signature in constant flux. Comedic flourishes navigate some of the larger chasms. In one bit, two dancers become a horse parading the third dancer as if a princess in her litter, bobbing heads and tails in an uptempo rhythm before melting into an adagio. In another, Villanueva falls from a lift and Gerry quickly averts Singh’s eyes in quick syncopations, as Villanueva stretches into the drama of playing dead. Oh, and tennis balls rain down from the rafters in a thunderstorm. This deluge marks the beginning of an otherworldly turn. A plane crashes, dancers stagger around, lights flash, and we hear a staticky voice warbling on a blackbox radio in a soundscape by Tei Blow.

In the second section that follows this disaster, much of the choreography repeats with another cast of dancers: Christiana Axelsen, Dominica Greene, and Caitlin Scranton. Their roles fluid, the dancers move with an intention of spontaneity and discovery. The first cast looms in the periphery, dancing a shadow pas de trois in tandem, dressed in costumes that have changed from white to black, hems now frayed, and eyes blackened like wraiths. In one moment, the men of the first trio lick at the heels of the women; later on, their sextet of arms clasp in a kaleidoscopic bit of partnering.

In Williams’s world, queer is synonymous with alternate ways of seeing and being. Through repetition and variation, and doubling, this parallel universe is felt, collapsing time and the distance in an intergenerational flirtation. The crisp positions of the dancers—some of whom are familiar from the last iteration of the Lucinda Childs Dance Company—and their adept partnering, along with an intuition for comedic timing, add layers of delight to the coquettish games.

The graphic black and white costumes by Reid & Harriet Design and Andrew Jordan, evoke the uniform dress of school children in short pants and simple dresses, but the allure lies in the details: sheer fabrics, high-cut leg lines, and color blocking that utilizes the lines of the court. Likewise, the costuming of A Child’s Tale, from this same cohort of designers with additional costume and puppet fabrication from Monkey Boys Productions, is inventive and adds surprise and drama to the folktales of the sorceress Baba Yaga.

Remaking Léonide Massine’s 1917 suite of dances Contes Russes (Children’s Tales) as A Child’s Tale is a natural choice for Williams, as he is also an accomplished puppeteer. The bright dresses and vests of the villagers, with their spray of colorful circles, is a fresh take on Slavic folk garb, matching with the circular patterns of their red booted feet and swooping arms. That celebratory spring energy opposes the brooding march of Baba Yaga disguised as three henwives. With sharp prosthetic noses and even bonier, elongated hands, the crones contort their bodies, twisting their arms, and curling their spines in exaggerated positions that spell a curse on the villagers (for attempting to steal a chicken). A new bride in the village miscarries, but another strange child, Mac Twining, appears in the woods.

In an all-too-short variation, Twining crawls as well as he walks, with an elastic quality both animalistic and youthful. Head on a swivel, alert and instinctive, Twining lends credibility to the fantastic idea that this foundling child could be mistaken by village hunters for a beast. Unable to escape their spears, the house spirit Kikimora, danced by Caitlin Scranton, steps in to save him from death.

In a large spotlight, Scranton uses the expanse of her limbs as a warning. Half her face white, with a pitchfork in her wild hair, she reaches the extra-long fingers of her costume to maximum effect, beckoning the bride and child to sit closer as she spells another misfortune. Her movement conjures a spirit tormented, seamlessly modulating between the control of extended balances and loose, almost rag doll sequences of steps. When the hen wives return with an improbable companion—a magical hut walking in on giant chicken leg stilts—Kikimora offers herself as a sacrifice to Baba Yaga, flinging her body over the pleading villagers. A window in the hut pops open to reveal a smiling face—a fun, winking final gesture to let us know all ends well.

So much of the canon of the Ballets Russes was queer in its own time for its overt sexuality and break with the theatrical norms of narrative ballet at the turn of the twentieth century. Williams, in recognizing and building on this sympathy, has clearly found his calling. As he adds new productions to this series of re-created works, his choreographic hand is growing in confidence and perspective. While Faun and Les Sylphides were darker and more gruesome explorations of a queer sensibility, the lighter touch with which Jeux and A Child’s Tale are rendered is masterful.