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NYTimes
New York Times
1 Feb 2025
Brian Seibert


NextImg:Review: In Justin Peck’s New Dance, Air, Earth and Self-Help

Justin Peck’s newest work for New York City Ballet, his 25th, is called “Mystic Familiar,” a title that turns out to be telling. Those two words encapsulate the rise and fall of its aspirations and limitations. It’s a dance that tries to be mystic, but mostly it’s just familiar.

The title is borrowed from an album by the electronic composer Dan Deacon, whose commissioned score is based on the song “Become a Mountain.” Music from an earlier Deacon recording drove Peck’s 2017 hit “The Times Are Racing,” which featured costumes by the designer Humberto Leon and lighting by Brandon Stirling Baker. That team has reassembled for “Mystic Familiar” — hoping, you imagine, to rekindle the spark of “The Times Are Racing.”

This time, the team is joined by the artist Eamon Ore-Giron, who contributes a symmetrical backdrop of bright rays in triangular groupings. And a signal difference is live music, with Deacon joining the City Ballet orchestra in the pit.

“Mystic Familiar,” which had its premiere on Wednesday, is divided into five sections, each named after an element: air, earth, and so on. One section flows into the next, as the music changes character and the 14-member cast changes costumes. At the start, the dancers wear puffy, poofy white sleeves and drift across the stage like clouds. Then Taylor Stanley enters, wearing green and walking slowly in the opposite direction, and we know that “Air” has ceded to “Earth.”

These first two sections, at least, are different from “Times Are Racing.” Where that work was all youthful verve in sneakers, this one opens in a pastoral mood, with flute. Stanley’s twisty, searching solo — marked with gestures of weighing options and gathering something to the self, a weak reflection of solos made for Stanley by Kyle Abraham — is accompanied by piano four-hands and marimbas, a sound with a mystical shimmer.

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Tiler Peck and Gilbert Bolden III in “Mystic Familiar.”Credit...Rachel Papo for The New York Times

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