Balanchine and Maria Tallchief, in her costume for Le Baiser de la Fée. Photo: Irving Penn via

This winter’s Art Series installation at the David H. Koch Theater, an annual event commissioned by the New York City Ballet, filled the promenade with an eerie corps de ballet. Spaced in five rows of three, fifteen “dancers” appeared to be flash-frozen in rectangular blocks of ice. These monoliths, futuristic in feeling and weighing 3,000 pounds each, were the work of the Brooklyn artist Dustin Yellin, who calls them “Psychogeographies.” While some of...