Set to an orchestration of Sufjan Stevens’ 2001 electronica album Enjoy Your Rabbit, Justin Peck’s acclaimed Year of the Rabbit presents an ever-changing kaleidoscope of visually arresting shapes, weaving six featured dances into the corps de ballet.

NYCB Resident Choreographer and Artistic Advisor Justin Peck’s second work for New York City Ballet, Year of the Rabbit, is a collaboration with American singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens. The ballet is set to Stevens’ Enjoy Your Rabbit, an electronica album and song cycle based on the Chinese zodiac, and the orchestration of the score by Michael Atkinson was created specifically for the ballet. Year of the Rabbit is an elaboration of Peck’s Tales of a Chinese Zodiac, which was created in 2010 for the New York Choreographic Institute.

Featuring sumptuous painted landscapes by Santiago Calatrava, Estancia tells the story of a city boy who learns to wrangle horses, and ultimately the heart of a country girl, on the Argentine pampas.

Created for NYCB in 2010, Christopher Wheeldon’s Estancia is set to music by Alberto Ginastera. The music was originally commissioned by Lincoln Kirstein in 1941 after he saw Ginastera’s ballet Panambí while in Buenos Aires with his American Ballet Caravan. But the company disbanded that year, before Kirstein was able to have George Balanchine choreograph the ballet. After almost 70 years, Estancia came to NYCB, choreographed by Wheeldon and with set designs by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava; costumes by Honduran-born, New York-based fashion designer Carlos Campos; and lighting by Mark Stanley.

Gianna Reisen, NYCB’s youngest commissioned choreographer to date, makes a splash with her first work for the Company, bringing refreshing vivacity to the stage through fleet-footed choreography set to a violin and piano interpretation of Lukas Foss’ Three American Pieces.

Gianna Reisen’s Composer’s Holiday is set to Lukas Foss’ Three American Pieces for Violin and Piano. (Reisen’s ballet takes its title from the eponymous third piece of Foss’ score for two solo musicians.) The ballet for 12 dancers features costumes by American designer Virgil Abloh and lighting by Mark Stanley. A 2017 graduate of the School of American Ballet and currently a member of L.A. Dance Project, Reisen participated in choreography workshops at SAB and at the New York Choreographic Institute before she was commissioned by the Company in what would be her first ballet for a professional company. Reisen is the youngest choreographer to make a ballet for NYCB. Her second work for NYCB, Judah, premiered in 2018.

This breathtaking and poetic dance for a couple explores the haunting, tenuous melodies set to a remix of Dinah Washington’s soulful rendition of “This Bitter Earth” and Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight.”

This Bitter Earth is a pas de deux from Christopher Wheeldon’s Five Movements, Three Repeats. The full work was originally created for Fang-Yi Sheu & Artists, a group led by former Martha Graham Dance Company star Fang-Yi Sheu that included NYCB dancers Wendy Whelan, Tyler Angle, and Craig Hall. Set to a remix of Dinah Washington’s performance of Clyde Otis’ This Bitter Earth, and Max Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight, the ballet had its Company premiere at NYCB’s 2012 Fall Gala.