Jennie Somogyi Farewell
“Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3,” “Liebeslieder Walzer”
New York City Ballet
David H. Koch Theater
New York, NY
October 11, 2015
by Leigh Witchel
© 2015 by Leigh Witchel
Jennie Somogyi began her career as a prodigy and ended it as a fighter. Plagued with three career-ending injuries, she came back to the stage from each.
New York City Ballet applauding Jennie Somogyi Photo © Paul Kolnik.
At 38, after a year and a half of rehabilitation and surgery that replaced a damaged tendon with a donated one, she came back for the last time, to leave on her terms. She said farewell in the perfect ballet, “Liebeslieder Walzer.” Logistically, it’s long and gorgeous, but not – to use Arlene Croce’s phrase – a gut-cruncher. The women are partnered at all times. Somogyi has a history with the ballet. At the end of 2000’s winter season, Pascale van Kipnis, who danced the role Violette Verdy originated, got injured in class; Somogyi was thrown in and performed the role that night.
Her sections in Part 1 of “Liebeslieder” present a range of emotions from glee to foreboding. They're self-contained; it's better to view each individually as a sonnet that she reads to us rather than all stitched together as a narrative or character study.
She performed her first, brief dance with Tyler Angle very much as she first did fifteen years ago: aerially. She rose skyward in a partnered diagonal, but then a change from how she did it earlier. At the close she collapsed into a chair theatrically, as if the dance had winded her. The second duet is darker: Angle shielded his face as if trying to avoid her.
Her trio with Angle and Justin Peck painted the social milieu of the ballet. In a satin gown with her hair swept up high and across her forehead she looked like a bourgeois lady who jumped into polka steps relishing the chance to kick up her heels. After the dance, Somogyi let Justin Peck loose, sending him back to Ashley Laracey with a contradictory glance. Angle led Somogyi away as if to end that game.
Her last duet in Part 1 is the greatest: a nocturne where she revolved in arabesque supported on Angle’s back. He directed her gaze heavenward and finally carried her supine across the stage. That enigmatic pose – is she imagining sleep, or something darker? – had more bittersweet connotations at The Last Dance than it ever had.
Part 1 belongs to the Verdy role, but her duets in Part 2, braided with Jillana's, take a back seat to the stunning quartet of duets – two consecutively each – of Diana Adams and Melissa Hayden. Sara Mearns put all her drama to good use in Adams’ role – she gave it a melancholy cast as she was suspended in Ask la Cour's arms or spun away from him in despair. Sterling Hyltin and Jared Angle melted through the great Hayden duet: his partnering was stellar as he brought her up from the floor to pointe in one smooth motion over and over. Somogyi's performance in the second part – her last on pointe – was delicate and simple. Nothing was out of her range; if you didn't know her history you wouldn't have seen it in the dancing.
“Liebeslieder” ended on a quiet, lustrous note as the women return to their seats in their ball gowns, escorted by their partners. The dancers listened to the final song and its lyrics by Goethe, and graciously applauded the singers.
Now it was our turn. We applauded the whole cast, and finally Somogyi alone. The ritual for NYCB farewells in the 21st century varies little: A line of partners bearing bouquets and hugs, then principal dancers and single roses, then the company and finally a shower of streamers, Mylar and petals. Somogyi, both delighted and embarrassed, wiped away stray tears and kept fidgeting away from center stage, yet getting pulled back. Her husband and young daughter came out bearing an armful of blooms. She tried to bring her daughter to center stage to share the burden of the adulation with her. The little girl refused adamantly – twice. A stage career is not in the wings.
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Somogyi’s last bow was preceded by “Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3.” Typical for Balanchine’s cosmogony, the women in the ballet are women as imagined by men: sirens, Amazons, heroines, princesses. This time, the women seemed to be themselves.
The female in the Élégie usually recalls a movie star in an old tearjerker – perhaps “An Affair to Remember” before the wheelchair. But when Rebecca Krohn was discovered in a crowd by Russell Janzen, she looked caught and momentarily ashamed. Then you saw her longing. At the end, she walked past him with heavy regret and arched back to reach him, but long before, he had receded and it had become her story. Perhaps that’s the same story it always was, but this time it was happening to one woman, not Woman.
The Valse Mélancolique with Megan LeCrone and Justin Peck was similar: Peck was more of a consort than a poet. LeCrone waltzed alone to the low buzzing of the strings like a swarm of insects. She drifted like a sleepwalker, but her arms reached up for something unknown, not feeling straight outwards like radar. In the Scherzo Ana Sophia Scheller danced on a more than equal footing with Antonio Carmena.
Tiler Peck and Andrew Veyette weren’t a good match in “Theme and Variations.” He was barely comfortable in the role. Classical style has never been his home base; he bounces through jumps and his upper body goes along for the ride. He got through all the turns and tours, but drifting and losing his spot. You kept praying disaster would be averted. It was – this time.
“Theme” is a role for a turning ballerina and Peck is a gyroscope. She doesn’t appear to have to think about correct placement; she goes up on pointe and it’s there. The role also has what she seems to want out of being a ballerina: grandeur. She drew everything out. Double ronds de jambe weren’t a blur; she suspended them at the end. Yet there were flashes of the old whiz kid in her final allegro variation when she sped up and beamed a pearly white smile.
The new generation of ballerinas is in full flower: Peck, Mearns, Hyltin, but where are Somogyi’s peers? Janie Taylor retired early. Alexandra Ansanelli left, then retired early. So did Carla Körbes. Slightly before them, so did Miranda Weese. Somogyi made it past two decades at NYCB, but there’s a void at the center of the company, a cohort of women who should have become senior ballerinas but didn’t. The younger ones have rushed into the vacuum, but watching Somogyi leave, you didn’t just feel a bittersweet sadness at her departure. You felt the dull ache of a lost generation.
© 2015 by Leigh Witchel