Five stars for the pyrotechnic Tiler Peck and Friends at Sadler’s Wells

Tiler Peck’s three-night stand at Sadler’s Wells last weekend offered London a rare glimpse of one of New York City Ballet’s brightest and most versatile stars. Expectations were high and she did not disappoint.

Turn It Out was a quadruple bill curated and part-choreographed by Peck herself and featuring 12 dancers, including tap choreographer Michelle Dorrance. The “and friends” format can sometimes feel like so much parsley round the salmon (as a critic once complained of Nureyev), but Peck’s associates were all first-rate and the star herself danced three of the four numbers in an almost superhuman display of stamina and technique.

Peck’s 2019 Thousandth Orange is set to the score of that name by Caroline Shaw. It was played by a piano quartet, who shared the bare stage with six dancers dressed in unitards of lemon, rose, pistachio and lavender — like a tasting menu of macaroons. The three couples paired off (and showed off) in a series of solos, duets and ensembles to the crash bang of the piano and larky pizzicato of the strings before crystallising into the group photo pose that began the dance.

Peck made her first appearance in Alonzo King’s jazzy Swift Arrow, partnered by the impressive young NYCB star Roman Mejia. Peck’s remarkable facility won her promotion to principal dancer at only 20. Now, at 32, her spatial and temporal awareness remain unnervingly acute, giving a fresh, contemporary edge to familiar steps and combinations, phrasing them in unexpected ways and delivering them at surprising velocity.

The first-half closer was Time Spell, a crowd-pleasing ballet-tap-and-modern marathon co-written by Peck, Dorrance and Jillian Meyers (of La La Land fame). Dorrance herself set the pace with a virtuoso display of tapping while, upstage left, Aaron Marcellus and Penelope Wendtlandt huffed, puffed and vocalised to Christopher Marc’s pre-recorded soundscape.

These rhythms supercharged the ballet dancers who unleashed warp-speed pirouettes, revoltades and feathery beaten steps with throwaway insouciance while Meyers “marked” their moves behind them, as if dancing in another key. Peck unravelled accelerating chains of turns that mapped the stage like a magical pair of compasses. At one point she joined Dorrance on the miked-up miniature tap floor, her pointe shoes beating out a furious, Kitri-style taconeo, a classical counterpoint to the demon hoofer by her side.

Time Spell’s adrenaline rush was impressive but slightly relentless. William Forsythe showed a better sense of pacing in the evening’s finale, The Barre Project, Blake Works II, which included a short filmed interlude of hands grasping the barre, giving dancers and audience a chance to catch their breath.

Created on film during lockdown in 2021, The Barre Project was first danced live in New York last spring. It ought to have been impossible to replicate, but Peck (in slippers), Mejia, Lex Ishimoto and Brooklyn Mack made it look easy. The pyrotechnic display of bravura enchainements was taken at a terrifying lick, with Forsythe magicking his dancers on and off with a thimblerigger’s sleight of hand. Were there really only four of them?

★★★★★

sadlerswells.com