Serenade

I've never watched Balanchine's "Serenade."  An old friend of mine, then my one and only best friend, danced this ballet at St. Paul's School, a boarding school in New Hampshire with a stellar dance program.  Annie gave me a CD of the music (Tchaikovsky's "Serenade For Strings In C") and the pointe shoes she wore in her big performance, and I've listened to it countless times.  I haven't danced the ballet, but I've danced to the music, countless times.  I wonder how my choreography--full of attitude turns and sudden balances at the ends of fast passages--compares with the real thing.

Though I haven't watched the ballet, I've seen the blue dresses and the women with their hair down in photos.  They look like dancers in their natural state, one so ethereal to people who don't dance or those like me, who dance at an amateur level.  If only wearing pointe shoes were my natural state. 

The slow movement of "Serenade" expresses the reverence I feel for ballet.  It's slow, quiet, lonely, an elegy by its title.  When the music is on, I feel more serious about whatever I'm doing, in this case, writing.  Imagine your ballet teacher knocked on your door right now.  How would you act?  Aside from freaking out and being nervous, you might try to be polite and considerate and do things right.  This music makes me feel reverent even when I am alone. 

I'm sure many of the dancers I know have danced in "Serenade."  I can name three, and there must be more.  I recently took class with one of them, Elizabeth Walker, of the Los Angeles Ballet, when she taking a break from professional ballet to study at Harvard and took the open classes at José Mateo Ballet Theatre.  I didn't realize this "good" (actually amazing) dancer was a professional, and then I saw a photo advertising Los Angeles Ballet's 2010 production of "Serenade," with her in a beautiful arabesque.

(I'm starting to realize that most people who dance like professionals are professionals.  Why not?)

Knowing that Liz danced this ballet makes me think about her differently.  However she behaves in your average social situation, just a friendly, regular person, I know that she is, in fact, part of the other, ethereal realm, or has been there.

Of course I would like to visit that realm through dance, not just through my imagination.  But I won't make light of the ambition with "Serenade" in my head.  No clunking of dropped extensions.  No haphazard arms.  Can't be anything but earnest when you let Tchaikovsky and Balanchine in your bedroom door.