A year or so ago, Ms. Mearns, one of the most acclaimed ballerinas at New York City Ballet, asked Ms. Melnick, a dancer-choreographer long beloved in the experimental realms of downtown dance, to join her for a residency at Jacob’s Pillow. Ms. Mearns’s City Ballet colleagues Jared Angle and Gretchen Smith came along.
The idea was to experiment with process, not to make a piece. And yet a piece did result, “Working in Process/New Bodies,” which had its premiere on Sunday as part of the Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process series.
What’s most remarkable about it is how seemingly disparate modes coexist and merge without diminishment, how both sides profit from the exchange. In the past, Ms. Melnick has had trouble translating the idiosyncratic magic of her personal style, slippery and supersubtle, onto other bodies. But these new bodies from City Ballet (Ms. Melnick appears in the work only briefly) bring something different, something their own, and Ms. Melnick doesn’t ignore it.
For despite the ballet steps, “Working in Process” isn’t a ballet. Its vocabulary equally encompasses ordinary movement and Ms. Melnick’s signature gestures: the back of a hand pressed to the forehead, a hip raised and lowered with an action that could cock a shotgun. The aesthetic calls for a sensual inwardness without added sauce, opening up a line of beauty already present in the Balanchine aesthetic of City Ballet. The work reveals an overlap between the glamour and drama of Ms. Melnick and those of Ms. Mearns.
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