A Kaleidoscopic Human Mandala

JUSTIN PECK: I spent a good portion of 2014 working on Heatscape. It was one of the first major commissions that I took on outside of New York City Ballet, and it was the second work I created for Miami, after the pas de deux Chutes and Ladders in 2013, so I had sort of gotten to know the company. I also knew a lot of the dancers from my training days at the School of American Ballet, so I was reuniting with some of my colleagues who had joined Miami when we graduated. It felt like a very personal journey. I always say that I don't make ballets for companies; I make them for dancers, for the artists that I'm working with. And it felt very in depth working with them. 

PATRICIA DELGADO: Revisiting Heatscape now with NYCB, a company that knows Justin's work so well, has been the most joyous, and nostalgic, experience, because it takes me back to a really inspiring and energized time. It was like something happened energetically in the company as a whole, in our relationship to the city of Miami. It was really charged. This ballet felt important and special to the community that we were in, and the company was so honored to get to work with Justin; at the same time, he was a peer of ours. So there was a lot of fun and a lot of push in the room, and a lot of creative willingness on both sides. And I felt like we knew from the very beginning that it was going to be really important to everyone, what we were making, which sometimes you don't know until you do it. 

PECK: I remember wanting to work with this Martinů piano concerto because it’s great for dance—it has a lot of dynamics to it and feels like it was written at a time in Martinů’s life when he was young and exploring a lot of different influences. 

MICHAEL SEAN BREEDEN: I absolutely love the score, because of the myriad moods and ideas it explores. Justin has said this before, but there are these sort of baroque, choral-esque moments, and then a couple minutes later you're hearing something that feels like a precursor to Philip Glass. The second movement is especially mercurial. 

DELGADO: This music is the perfect vessel for staying connected to classicism and the roots of classical ballet, and, at the same time, pushing it forward, and having it feel really human and almost futuristic. It’s a powerful piece of music that's complicated and layered and sophisticated, and at the same time relatable to audiences and dancers alike. 

PECK: I remember wanting to build a world onstage that was inspired by my experiences of being in Miami with these artists, and my curiosity while getting to know the city, too. I was also inspired in part by a neighborhood—it’s still there, but 2014-15 was a very specific time for the neighborhood. It's called Wynwood, and right around 2013-14, it became a street art mecca [called Wynwood Walls], where there were all these huge-scale murals everywhere, and it was a destination for a lot of the great street artists. Part of the vision for the work was to commission one of the pioneers of that movement to create a backdrop for the ballet. I’d followed Shepard Fairey’s work for a long time, so I tracked him down and asked him if he would be willing to do this.

SHEPARD FAIREY: My first mural at the Wynwood Walls was wheat-pasted in 2009, and I had no idea how much of a cultural force the Walls specifically, and the Wynwood neighborhood generally, would become. I'm incredibly grateful to be included alongside some of the best street artists in the world in this vibrant Miami community. The vibrancy is infectious, so it's easy to understand why that spirit would be an inspiring force for the ballet. Justin did some choreography in front of the mural I painted at the Walls in 2012, which featured warm, summery colors like red, gold, and cream. Building from that connection and energy, the artwork I created for Heatscape was a logical collaborative evolution with Justin. I wasn't initially familiar with his work, but I had an instant kinship with the artistic approach he had for the project. 

PECK: Shepard is curious and never fully stays in his own lane in terms of the kind of work he does; I always like working with artists like that. So, we went into the process of designing this backdrop. We had to start pretty early, in relation to the ballet; for me, it was more about explaining my vision for the ballet and talking about the structure and the flow of it, and then talking to him about his work, and pulling out certain symbols and motifs that seem to repeat a lot in his murals and help to define his voice. And some of that folded into the backdrop. 

FAIREY: Miami is a hot and humid place, and with the name Heatscape, it made sense to me to use warm colors and include an abstract sun and rays. The center of the sun is a mandala, a symbol of unity and harmony, which relates to the synchronization of dancers working in unity on a stage. 

PECK: That informed a huge architectural concept in the third movement of the ballet, where we create this kind of living, breathing mandala using the dancers. It's a choreographic pattern that evolves over the course of five minutes, and at the very end, it just disappears. The mandala is another kind of metaphor for dance. A mandala is usually created over a long period of time, oftentimes with sand, and at the very end, it just sort of blows away. So it's all about generating the mandala, experiencing it, and you can never recreate it again. I think that's very much the experience of what it's like to watch a dance performance. 

There’s also a bird figure in the backdrop, and that came from a conversation we had about how the bird is a frequent symbolic figure in dance. It speaks to the ephemeral nature of the art form, the beauty of the art form, and certainly has been incorporated into a lot of the storytelling of ballet, whether in Swan Lake or Firebird—there are so many birds. 

FAIREY: The dove in particular is a motif I love for its beauty and because it symbolizes peace. The dancers move around the stage, gliding and jumping, which is reminiscent of low-flying birds. The pattern at the bottom was meant to echo the intricacies and rhythms of dance moves.

PECK: And there's even a solo by one of the dancers in the first movement, where it almost feels like it’s the bird’s solo.

DELGADO: I think of Shepard as an activist, and I feel like he creates this unique, specialized art that is very “him.” And at the same time, he's delivering a message. So, I feel like Heatscape is, in a mysterious or quiet way, an activist work. It's about community and it's about shared experience. 

FAIREY: A mural, similarly to a ballet, is an art form that transcends the streets or the stage, captivating the human soul. It moves you to feel and think in different ways, and I think that street art and dance can evoke something profound in the viewer.

Justin and I had a good rapport from the start and had matched creative energy, which you can see in the final result; art and dance both rely on the beauty of forms, so Justin and I connected, speaking the same language in different mediums. He's incredibly talented. It was a very seamless collaboration, and I'm happy that it's had this fascinating lifespan through the ballet.

PECK: Brandon Stirling Baker designed the lighting, and Reid and Harriet designed the costumes. They're such a core team, and I work with them frequently. With Heatscape, it was really about balancing the space, honoring the backdrop, not overwhelming it, not adding anything that's in competition with it. For Brandon, that meant finding ways to use light to create even more variation in the backdrop, so that it can almost feel like night and day and provide different moods. So he was collaborating with Shepard and me as well, in terms of what materials to use to make the backdrop—how light passes through it from behind, and how we can make it feel more dimensional using light. And you really feel that when you see what Brandon was able to do. 

Reid and Harriet were really smart in that they created this palette of costumes in white so that the dancers pop forward and out of the backdrop. It's as though they are adding their own dimension to the space through what they're wearing; feeling that dimension was the intention behind the design work that Reid and Harriet and Brandon brought to the ballet.

DELGADO: The way I describe it, and as Justin described it to us, is: The first thing we do in the very beginning of the ballet, we're all marbles at the top of the stage, right next to the backdrop; it’s as if someone were to tilt the stage on its axis and all the marbles were to come tumbling forward, so we run really, really fast towards the audience. I think it's like, “Are you listening? We have something to say. It's really important.” You're looking straight at them, like you're saying, “Come on this journey with us, because we have a lot to say.” 

In the third movement, we all enter and create that sort of human mandala. It's kaleidoscopic, and every single dancer is contributing their utmost, with 100% commitment to one another and to the vision of the ballet and the music. It’s quite spiritual, and the perfect way to end this jam-packed, full-of-emotion ballet that hones in on the power of creating the vibrational circle of the mandala. It's very human and very celebratory. Then the dancers basically go back to how it all began, yet they’re completely changed from the experience. It's a really powerful piece, and I think it's really fun and fulfilling to dance. And at the same time, in the audience, you go on this journey with the dancers, and you can really experience that joy as well.

BREEDEN: Heatscape feels like a perfect example of the push-pull balance of tradition and innovation in Justin's work. It uses classical vernacular exquisitely while imbuing it with 21st-century attack and style. You have a traditional hierarchical setup in one sense, with different sets of principals for each movement of the piano concerto, but that is subverted by having the principals reintegrate into the corps de ballet outside of their respective featured movements. It's an exploration of community—a common theme in Justin's work—that seems to both capture the moment it was created in while also feeling timeless.

DELGADO: I think this ballet was the first time I felt like I was part of a creation in which I could really be myself. Justin pushed me as a dancer, and at the same time, he wasn't asking me to be anything other than me. I felt like I could find joy and freedom onstage, that I didn't have to try to be anything other than what I was in the moment. I was able to take that into other ballets, some that I had danced for many years, like Who Cares, or even Symphony in Three Movements—all these other abstract yet emotional ballets, just from having the experience of being myself in this piece and being a part of the community I was a part of, and that shared experience. Heatscape taught me that lesson. 

BREEDEN: Justin and I lived next to each other in the dorms at SAB for two years, so by the time I retired [from performing with Miami City Ballet] we had been friends for 15 years. He knew how much I loved the art form and wanted to give back. My first staging experience in 2018 was a revelation. I didn't know that anything could be as wonderful as dancing, but helping give flight to the dancers in the room through Justin's ballets felt so much bigger. I've now been lucky enough to be involved in over 20 stagings for Justin. I've previously staged the first movement of Heatscape by itself, which works as a sort of a standalone ballet in 10 jam-packed minutes. 

DELGADO: I never thought I'd get to stage Heatscape while we were making it—I didn't know that was a thing. And I staged it right after I stopped dancing full time with Miami City Ballet, in Dresden, Germany. I remember learning all the variations, and wanting the dancers to really understand Justin's movement and the fluidity and the extremes and the push and the crispness and the speed—all of that was really important to me. 

Revisiting the ballet 10 years later, I have a different view. I’ve studied the work, and the structure and layers of the music, and how Justin was able to geometrically and structurally, almost like an architect or a mathematician, create what he did in relation to the music. I feel like it's still teaching me about the craft of making a dance, or, what makes a dance work? What makes it resonate with an audience? And I think that it's a ballet that even in 10 more years, when I go back to it, I'm just going to discover more nuances, more layers. So it's almost been like a study for me—how to translate the work on other dancers, and how to continue to empower them to be themselves and to be human in it, and to be specific within Justin’s movement.

PECK: I love this ballet. It's, honestly, one of the few ballets that I am always excited to see performed by different dancers and companies. And it's been performed quite a bit, especially in Europe, and it's one of the few that I'm really proud of. I'm excited to bring it here. I think the dancers at New York City Ballet will bring their own sense of electricity to it. 

BREEDEN: The NYCB dancers are obviously world class onstage, but what audiences don't see are the numerous qualities they possess in the studios that get them to that point: their fierce intelligence, laser-sharp focus, and commitment to the process. They're so fast that you essentially bypass the process of getting the steps in the body, allowing us to breeze our way into the more rewarding process of shaping their interpretations and finding their own voices in the work.

I am thrilled that Heatscape has gone on to have such a life. It's the kind of thing you don't think of in the moment when you're involved in a new creation, but it is so satisfying to see new artists wear the steps you loved as a dancer. I think that as much as you may love a ballet as a dancer and think you appreciate its genius, there are so many layers you don't get to bear witness to until you stage it. Every staging I do for Justin I walk away even more astounded with the ballet’s depth and brilliance. 

DELGADO: These dancers know Justin so well, and have done so much of his work. It's not just about restaging. It hasn't been about teaching them the steps. It's like, “What is the essence of Heatscape, and what can NYCB bring to it?” I feel like it's a testament to how powerful the ballet is, and that it stands the test of time. It feels like the soul is alive even in the process of staging it. I think the dancers have really taken to it and really love it. And I think the audience will too.

_{Rehearsal photos by Ella Spruill © New York City Ballet}