Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes
Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes is a plotless, one-act ballet made by Justin Peck to the concert suite Copland extracted from his 1942 ballet score Rodeo. It was created for New York City Ballet very early in Peck's tenure as the company's resident choreographer, and it deliberately does not stage Agnes de Mille's original cowboy narrative, instead using the same music for an unrelated, abstract piece.
What is danced
The article does not describe specific steps, holds or technical vocabulary in any detail; its record of the choreography is almost entirely structural and anecdotal rather than descriptive. What it does establish is the ensemble design: the cast is one woman set against fifteen men, which Peck himself described as a deliberate inversion of the conventional romantic-ballet arrangement of a female corps around a single male lead. The piece is built in four sections corresponding to the four movements of Copland's 'Four Dance Episodes,' and the article singles out a male quintet in the second movement (danced at the premiere by Applebaum, Hall, Peiffer, Scordato and Stanley) as the section reviewers found most memorable, and notes an emergency cast change between the first and fourth movements on opening night.
Context
The ballet was made in 2015, when Peck — then a very recently appointed NYCB resident choreographer still dancing in the company himself — was establishing himself as a maker of plotless, score-driven works within the Balanchine/Robbins-descended NYCB repertory tradition. By setting the Copland concert suite rather than the original narrative ballet score, and by deliberately withholding Agnes de Mille's 1942 choreography from his own memory of it ('wanted to understand what she did' but not let it 'loom over' him), Peck positioned the work as a response to an established repertory piece rather than a restaging of it.
Staging history
The work premiered with New York City Ballet on February 4, 2015 at the David H. Koch Theater. The article records that San Francisco Ballet has also performed Peck's version, but gives no date or further detail on that staging.
How to watch it
Watch for the ensemble math rather than a story: one female dancer moving through a field of fifteen men is the organizing device Peck names explicitly, so his handling of ratio, spacing and partnering is the point. The second-movement male quintet is flagged by contemporary reviewers as the standout passage, so it is worth attending to how that group is built and released relative to the surrounding sections.
Structure
- First movementJustin Peck himself danced Andrew Veyette's role after Veyette was injured the night before the premiere.
- Second movementA male quintet (Applebaum, Hall, Peiffer, Scordato and Stanley) was singled out by the New York Times as the ballet's most striking passage.
- Fourth movementSean Suozzi replaced the injured Andrew Veyette in this movement at the premiere.
Structure read from an encyclopaedia article, not from a libretto or score we hold. Confirm against a programme before treating the numbering as authoritative.
Credits
- composer: Aaron Copland