Review: A Fall Gala Where Women Led the Way

New York City Ballet dressed up its fall fashion gala with a program of female choreographers. This was history, even if the results were mixed.

The prospect of female choreographers sharing a New York City Ballet program has always been just that — a prospect divorced from reality. But on Wednesday night, dances by Gianna Reisen, Caili Quan and Tiler Peck made up the company’s first all-female repertory program.

It was also the fashion gala, which felt a little shady as a frame for this neglected part of ballet history. But the all-female side of things wasn’t hammered too hard. Wendy Whelan, the company’s associate artistic director, referenced George Balanchine's famous quote “Ballet is woman” in a speech before the program, adding, “We are excited to highlight women as the creative visionaries.”

The visionary part was a stretch, but it was a repertory evening that seemed to fall into place the usual City Ballet way: through the music — a piano concerto, a cello concerto and piano selections by Philip Glass. As the night dragged on, however, the program lost its zing. Two sets of speeches would have been bad enough, but there was also a film. Even at a gala, shouldn’t the dancing come first?

Along with a reprisal of Peck’s “Concerto for Two Pianos” and a company premiere of Reisen’s “Signs” — each engrossing in dance invention and musicality — the program presented a new work by Quan, her first for City Ballet. In “Beneath the Tides,” set to Camille Saint-Saëns’s Cello Concerto No. 1 in A minor, Quan delivered a dance both choppy and oddly stagnant. This was a story ballet in search of a story.

Quan, a former member of the Philadelphia contemporary company BalletX, chose a concerto in which changes in tone seemingly come out of nowhere as the music shifts between bursts of emphatic joy and seething turbulence. Building momentum was hard.