The orchestra
started playing too soon after the audience had finished clapping. Andrew Sill launched into Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade For Strings,” and
I thought, “That’s it? The big moment? The beginning of the ballet I’ve been
anticipating all year?”
That opening phrase was loaded. I'd listened to the CD of "Serenade" (pronounced like tapenade) countless times after my closest friend gave it to me the year I was in ninth grade. I still had the pointe shoes she wore in her "Serenade" performance at the boarding school that had separated her from me in those days when I loved dance and her more than anything. I'd danced to "Serenade" in my bedroom but had not watched the
ballet. With all this anticipation, I could have easily written a sappy piece
about finally seeing New York City Ballet perform the first piece
that Balanchine, City Ballet’s late, great choreographer made in America. The
essay would describe how my expectations were either realized or disappointed. I could have written that essay without ever seeing the ballet.
Here's what really happened.
After the first
phrase, the orchestra stopped and the conductor started to talk. This wasn’t
the beginning of the ballet after all but a lesson about the music. Balanchine
changed the order of the last two movements of Tchaikovsky’s score, Maestro Sill
told the audience, in order to end with the “Elegy” that I’ve written
about before. The “Elegy” ends with harmonics, high-pitched whistling sounds created
when string players barely touch their fingers to the strings above the wooden
fingerboard, instead of pressing them down. Sill said that he thinks of the
harmonics rising Heavenward, the kind of religious sentiment I avoid, but then
he dedicated the performance to the late Hugo
Fiorato, a former conductor of New York City Ballet’s orchestra and his
first conducting teacher who died April 23, 2012. If anybody were going to
dedicate a performance to me, that “Elegy” is the one I would choose. Or “Pavane
For A Dead Princess,” though I would feel uncomfortable about the implications
there.
With that
dedication, “Serenade” began in earnest. A Stonehenge of dancers, standing straight, one arm held out high. A
field of females in their hard-toed shoes, long blue
sleeveless dresses, waiting until Balanchine tells them to move. Their bare
thin arms make quick, concave motions, somehow Grecian. They are his muses; he is their sun,
immortal in his choreography and his legacy.
"Serenade" is many domino chains of precise movement, one dancer moving after the next, with just enough repetition for familiarity but not enough for boredom. By the end of the first movement, one female is singled out. She waltzes with her partner in the second movement.
During the next, folk-like movement, pointe shoes becomes clogs, and the dancers
intentionally make them noisy (dancers try NOT to clomp), beating the toe of a
pointed foot against the stage in a pose called “B+”. This is stylized clomping,
not quite at home in ballet nor in a country dance.
At the end of
the this movement, I realized that in the “Serenade” poster I’d seen, the
female dancers had long, flowing hair. These dancers all had buns. Yes, at the
end of the movement, the lead dancer falls to the floor and lets her hair down,
as do two other women. I have mixed feelings about women’s hair being part of
the choreography, about the male choreographer deciding the women should let
down their hair. I don’t know why I feel this way now.
Why do I feel
uncomfortable appreciating the visual beauty of ballerinas? I love ballet and
respect Balanchine. It’s not wrong for a choreographer to appreciate dancers’
beauty. And in life, it’s not wrong for men to appreciate the beauty of women
in ways that go beyond art. Or for women to do so. Anyway, dancers are
concerned with their own reflections in the classroom mirror, audience aside. I
am that way when I take ballet class, either correcting myself in the mirror or
avoiding it, never indifferent to it. I don’t perform.
Yes, the women
make a living by being beautiful, physically, artistically. A ballerina had to
be beautiful to Balanchine in order to succeed in his ballet company, and the
company had to be beautiful to the audience in order to stay in business.
So I’m not
criticizing Balanchine any more than I would criticize Petipa or myself or any
other audience member for loving to watch ballet. But my discomfort remains.
For most of this
piece, there is only one man and many women. At the very end of the "Elegy," two other men
come out, in order to pick up the fallen dancer by her pointed feet, and she stands above their shoulders like an elegant, sublime cheerleader. They carry her away
as the women rise onto their toes, arms outstretched, yes, to the Heavens.
The ending felt beautiful
and right to me.
The second
piece, “Kammermusik No. 2,” reverses the gender ratio: it’s almost all men. Hindemith’s
music took more of my attention than the dance. It made me think of so many
other composers at once, but I can’t think of who they are. It sounds like a
musical revolution, competing styles fighting for prominence.
The third piece,
“Tchaikovsky Pas De Deux,” is Balanchine’s choreography for a bit of the “Swan
Lake” score that, according to the program notes, was composed later than the
rest, didn’t make it into the ballet, then got overlooked. The best part of
this section was not the lost pas de deux but the male and female solos that
followed, encores taken from “Swan Lake” proper. Tiler Peck did the fouetté
turns for which “Swan Lake” is so famous; her partner, Joaquin de Luz, did the
male equivalent of fouettés, turns in second (with one leg out to the side) —
and a few little jumps, too. The crowd screamed wholeheartedly. You don’t need
to know what a fouetté is to see that this was amazing. After the performance, the
dancers bowed and curtsied in the usual courtly way, which seemed ridiculous in
response to the hooting in the crowd. Modesty.
Intermission: The Plastic Flute
Intermission was
a story not of modesty but of self-importance. I stood in line to buy a plastic
flute of champagne from a bartender standing in front of a bowl of shimmering
strawberries. A woman carrying her own flute cut to the front of the line and
asked the bartender for a strawberry.
“All
these people behind you are waiting for strawberries; I’m sorry,” the bartender
said.
“Why
aren’t there strawberries over there [where she’d gotten her champagne]?” the
woman pestered.
“’Cause
I’m the only one who has ‘em,” he answered, in a circular way. “That makes me
special doesn’t it. I’m the strawberry man.”
The woman huffed
off.
“Would
you like a strawberry?” he asked me, when it was my turn.
“Oh
yes, I must,” I replied. I was wearing a full backpack, turtleneck dress and
jeans.
I drank my
champagne out on the balcony, in the cool but not rainy night.
After an
intermission, the choreography turned to another bird ballet: “Firebird.” This
was the beautiful scenery of Russian painter, Marc Chagall, come to life. Or is
the painting real life made inanimate? No, this is real life filtered and
embellished through Chagall’s mind and his paintbrush, then brought back to
life again in ballet, a form that is to the way people really move what
Chagall’s paintings are to the way things really look.
The prince wears
strawberry-red velvet pants. The ladies of the royal court wear long white,
embroidered dresses, some with blue velvet tunics, long hairpieces dangling
behind them. The toes of the men’s shoes point up at the ends in a comic,
Russian way, something that I suppose is no more ridiculous than the heels of
women’s shoes pointing down. These dancers are fairy tale characters in their
own world. I forget that this is Balanchine. Instead, it’s a royal court and a magical
bird dancing the way they normally do.
The Firebird
dances in a spotlight that follows her around the stage, and in that spotlight,
she casts a shadow on the stage. Her arms and legs flit around the round shadow
of her tutu.
Firebird was one
of two unimaginably beautiful experiences I’ve had this week. The first was the
peonies and azaleas at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. So I’ve been similarly
bowled over by nature and by a fantastical story performed in dreamy, trippy
costumes designed after Chagall. Is nature actually fantastic? Maybe Chagall’s
“wild imagination” is capturing reality. Perhaps what we consider our real
lives — going to offices, walking down sidewalks — are not practical realities
dictated by fate but actually inferior products of human imagination.
I was neither
fully satisfied nor disappointed with “Serenade,” but my night at the ballet
surpassed my expectations. It seems too much to see the reverence of
“Serenade,” the technical magic of “Swan Lake” and the majesty of Stravinsky,
Chagall, Balanchine, not to mention the dancers themselves, in “Firebird” all
in one evening. It’s like having four desserts in a row.
Actually, not
too much. I could get used to this.
So, what’s for
after dinner?
