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Justin Peck\u2019s newest work for New York City Ballet, his 25th, is called \u201cMystic Familiar,<\/a>\u201d a title that turns out to be telling. Those two words encapsulate the rise and fall of its aspirations and limitations. It\u2019s a dance that tries to be mystic, but mostly it\u2019s just familiar.<\/p>\n The title is borrowed from an album by the electronic composer Dan Deacon, whose commissioned score is based on the song \u201cBecome a Mountain.\u201d Music from an earlier Deacon recording drove Peck\u2019s 2017 hit \u201cThe Times Are Racing<\/a>,\u201d which featured costumes by the designer Humberto Leon and lighting by Brandon Stirling Baker. That team has reassembled for \u201cMystic Familiar\u201d \u2014 hoping, you imagine, to rekindle the spark of \u201cThe Times Are Racing.\u201d<\/p>\n This time, the team is joined by the artist Eamon Ore-Giron<\/a>, who contributes a symmetrical backdrop of bright rays in triangular groupings. And a signal difference is live music, with Deacon joining the City Ballet orchestra in the pit.<\/p>\n \u201cMystic Familiar,\u201d which had its premiere on Wednesday, is divided into five sections, each named after an element: air, earth, and so on. One section flows into the next, as the music changes character and the 14-member cast changes costumes. At the start, the dancers wear puffy, poofy white sleeves and drift across the stage like clouds. Then Taylor Stanley enters, wearing green and walking slowly in the opposite direction, and we know that \u201cAir\u201d has ceded to \u201cEarth.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n These first two sections, at least, are different from \u201cTimes Are Racing.\u201d Where that work was all youthful verve in sneakers, this one opens in a pastoral mood, with flute. Stanley\u2019s twisty, searching solo \u2014 marked with gestures of weighing options and gathering something to the self, a weak reflection of solos made for Stanley by Kyle Abraham \u2014 is accompanied by piano four-hands and marimbas, a sound with a mystical shimmer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But then the other dancers rush in wearing \u201celevated\u201d street wear; they clump around Stanley, and \u201cFire\u201d turns out to ignite in Peckland. The music takes on a Philip Glass-like pulse and harmonic progression, and the dancers take on a Peck-like physicality: hunched in the shoulders, alternately stretching their limbs in ardent aspiration and snapping back in a kind of balleticized hip-hop move. They take turns in the middle of a communal semicircle and lie across the front of the stage as Tiler Peck is lifted and floated by Gilbert Bolden III.<\/p>\n Through all this, Deacon is singing \u201cBecome a Mountain,\u201d his small voice electronically altered. On the album, the song sounds in parts like Glass played by a 1980s arcade game. Here, it sounds like pseudo-Glass played by a mediocre orchestra. The lyrics are a meditational mantra. \u201cClose your eyes and become a mountain,\u201d he sings. \u201cAll of time is right here, right now.\u201d<\/p>\n Deacon has explained that the song is about someone \u201ctrying to learn how to be self-compassionate.\u201d That\u2019s an all-too-familiar sentiment in Peck dances, so many of which seem to be about fragile young people struggling with maturity. Deacon\u2019s lyrics turn mystic oneness with the universe into self-help, and Peck\u2019s attraction to this feels like repetition compulsion.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The remainder of \u201cMystic Familiar\u201d shows the choreographer\u2019s usual skill. \u201cWater\u201d is a twinning duet for Naomi Corti and Emily Kikta, who overlap in a rolling pattern as they advance downstage. That interesting idea dries up, and \u201cEther\u201d is a standard finale, with multiplicity contained by symmetry and the principals flying down the middle again and again as the same loop of music tries to repeat its way to rapture. They\u2019re hopping, palms up, as the curtain falls.<\/p>\n That was the end of an odd program. It started with Christopher Wheeldon\u2019s \u201cFrom You Within Me\u201d (2023), a handsome, painterly work that responds to the high drama of Schoenberg\u2019s \u201cVerkl\u00e4rte Nacht\u201d with too much restraint.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n And in the middle came George Balanchine\u2019s \u201cVariations Pour une Porte et un Soupir\u201d (1974), the most absurdly extreme treatment of one of his core themes: a man in fruitless pursuit of an unattainable woman. Here the man is a gnome (the selfless Daniel Ulbricht) who grovels and crawls on his knees and elbows at the feet of a Siren-like showgirl with a Louise Brooks bob and a stage-spanning black cape (Miriam Miller, in a solid but not quite commanding debut).<\/p>\n As the sound score alternates between a sighing noise and the creaking of a door, the door-woman eventually squats over the sigh-man like a spider and envelops him. For Balanchine, it was a rare return to the Weimar expressionism he was exposed to in his youth. But it\u2019s a cabaret sex joke extended way too long. Like Peck or any artist, Balanchine returned to the same subjects time and again, sometimes to the same pieces of music, working out some obsession. At his best, he pushed past the personal into transcendent, even mystical art. At City Ballet, that high goal is the standard. Nothing on this program meets it.<\/p>\n New York City Ballet<\/strong><\/p>\n Through Sunday at the David H. Koch Theater; nycballet.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n