In Kylie Manning’s paintings, figures swirl and emerge from sweeping landscapes. The wall-filling pieces can elicit a physical response, similar to looking over the railing of a bridge over a river. On a recent visit to the artist’s studio in Ridgewood, Queens, fortitude came in the form of tea and snacks: Manning, 39, dressed in a paint-splattered green jumpsuit with black Crocs, had dulce de leche fudge from the bodega along the street, along with chocolate she brought home from Geneva, where she had just installed her latest solo show at Pace Gallery’s Swiss outpost.
In “Archipelago” (2023), one of the works on display in Switzerland, two faces are immediately apparent amidst whites and rust, as if rising from snowy dirt. But the rest feels less clear: is there a third figure, head in hands, between the first two? Is there a fourth who embraces another’s belly? Manning’s figures are not gendered, and she wants viewers to interpret the subjects and settings on their own terms. “It’s about spending time with them, letting them unravel for you like a song,” she says. Usually a viewer only spends a few minutes looking at a painting. So Manning is excited that starting May 4, audiences at Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater will be able to gaze at her works for about half an hour — as part of choreographer Christopher Wheeldon’s new piece for New York City Ballet’s Spring Gala.
Last fall, 50-year-old Wheeldon went to see Manning’s paintings at Pace’s gallery in Los Angeles and was impressed “by their sense of scale and movement and turbulent use of color and form,” he says. “When you stand in front of the paintings, the figures start to take shape in a very choreographic way.” The pair share a friend who grew up with Manning in Juneau, Alaska, though she spent part of her childhood in San Blas and Sayulita, Mexico. While earning her MFA from the New York Academy of Art, she held a captain’s license to operate 500-ton commercial fishing boats on international waters and spent summers catching salmon on the Pacific coast; her abiding appreciation for distant horizons and crashing waves comes through in her compositions.
Back in New York, Wheeldon visited Manning’s studio and they talked about Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” (1966), a shared obsession. Wheeldon, who was City Ballet’s resident choreographer for seven years and now also choreographs and directs Broadway shows, used the song for his 2020 piece “The Two of Us”; Manning’s Los Angeles show took its title from the track. “For a classical ballet choreographer and a painter to focus on the same song felt odd and strange,” says Manning. Wheeldon soon suggested they work together, emphasizing that he wasn’t just looking for backgrounds, but instead wanted to “form a dance in her world.” He sent Manning a piece of music he had been thinking about, Austrian-American composer Arnold Schönberg’s 1899 “Verklärte Nacht” (“Transfigured Night”), which became her soundtrack as she painted the two works that would eventually inspire Wheeldon’s latest. dance.
“Verklärte Nacht” is based on Richard Dehmel’s 1896 poem of the same name, in which a woman confesses to a man while walking under the moon that she is pregnant, but not with his baby. The man, seemingly influenced by the beauty of nature around them, finally says he will accept the baby as his own. Some of the writing now sounds dated, but the themes nevertheless resonated with Manning, who is currently pregnant. “To be very afraid of the stigma of the art world [around pregnancy] and reading a poem that dealt with the complications and fear of telling people you are pregnant [felt] insane,” she says — another sign she was pursuing the right project.
Unusually for Manning, the works she created for the ballet are figureless landscapes – the dancers will take the place of brushstrokes that add up to bodies. A new painting, “You Into Me, Me Into You,” glows with airy streaks of turquoise, pink, and orange, while the other, “Pareidolia,” is awash in dark forest green and purplish blue, “hoping to give the viewer a specific reminder of when they were in such a sunrise or sunset,” says Manning.
Choreographers have long collaborated with visual artists: Pablo Picasso designed the Andalusian sets and costumes for “Le Tricorne” by the Russian choreographer Léonide Massine, which premiered in London in 1919 (the curtain he designed can be seen in the New- York Historical Society), while Robert Mapplethorpe created a set with a burning fire for choreographer Lucinda Childs’s 1986 Portraits in Reflection. Isamu Noguchi collaborated on more than 20 dances with the choreographer Martha Graham; in “Cave of the Heart”, first performed in New York in 1947, Graham, in the role of the sorceress, at one point slips into a “spider dress” made by Noguchi, in which copper wires bend over her shoulders and out her body.
While Manning didn’t refer to Noguchi directly, she intends the dancers to appear in her work in a similar way — she also designed their costumes, androgynous crimson stretch-net unitards for both men and women. “Red is so strong it might be violent,” says Manning. “It’s not necessarily about blood or anything like that, just that it has a great power that I wanted to give to the dancers.”
To fill the Lincoln Center stage, Manning’s two paintings had to be about seven times larger than is usual for her work. To create texture and brightness, she normally applies rabbit skin glue to Belgian linen canvases before layering colors on them. For these super-sized versions, which are 40 feet long and 60 feet wide, the artist worked with the ballet’s scenic background painters, led by Susan Jackson, to evoke her aesthetic using acrylic paint and dye – “some things were laid out and poured, some things were thrown, some things were rolled over”—on fabrics of varying opacity (white shark teeth gauze, natural muslin) that could then be hung together and lit from the front and back to enhance the intensity of the colors throughout change the performance. Manning says the intention was not to imitate her painting, but to “get the speed, the movement and the musicality of it.” As the dancers take their places, they join a stream that ripples and twists, revealing itself again along the way.
