Square Dance was originally done in 1957 and changed considerably in 1976. In the original version the musicians were on stage in shirt sleeves, playing Corelli and Vivaldi while a caller, Elisha C. Keeler, called out the steps: "Gents go out, come right back, make your feet go wickety-wack." I was fortunate enough to see this version done by the Joffrey in 1976, using the original caller. The original was quite wonderful in its way, but Balanchine always tended to pare things down to their essentials, and the current version has the orchestra in the pit and no caller. As Arlene Croce wrote in The New Yorker (Nov. 15, 1976); The ballet contains twin sets of superimpositions: traditional country dancing, American style, superimposed on classical ballet steps and set to seventeenth-century string music that, in its turn, superimposed the elegance of a courtly style on ancient folk dances. I find it one of Balanchine's most beautiful ballets, with its moods of light and dark that reflect both the seventeenth century and current America. There is delight from the moment Abi Stafford comes in, posed for a moment in B+ position (a starting position that Balanchine invented, with the foot in back pointed) to her ever-shifting steps, as a tour jete turns into an assemble. There is also a part now for the male lead dancing alone on stage, as though he wandered off from the group to think about things. This part, done to the Corelli Sarabande and danced beautifully on Saturday by Taylor Stanley, is in a somewhat different style from the exuberant other parts of the ballet, the solo dependent mostly on movements of the torso. As I have said before about Balanchine, this ballet shows how groups, couples and individuals can all flourish in their own way: there are even separate sections for just women and just the men. Square Dance has some of Balanchine's loveliest choreography for men and was one of the ballets that inspired me to start taking ballet classes.
Also on the program was Le Tombeau de Couperin, originally done for the Ravel festival in 1975, based on eighteenth-century court dances. This unusual ballet uses two sets of four couples each, no lead dancers, and has some similarities to Square Dance. But the mood of this Ravel piece is very somber, constantly going through ritual changes, and retains a very complex and courtly air. This was followed by The Steadfast Tin Soldier, a minor piece by Balanchine to Bizet music that does not follow very closely the Hans Christian Andersen story about the love between a tin soldier and a doll (in Andersen's story they are both burned up in the fireplace, in the ballet it's just the doll). The only time I've seen effective pathos and humor in this ballet was when Baryshnikov and Patricia McBride danced it in 1979.
Christopher Wheeldon's This Bitter Earth was an intense pas de deux for the retiring Wendy Whelan, who danced with Tyler Angle. Wheeldon once had promise that he has never quite lived up to and Whelan has never been a favorite of mine, though it's not her fault she joined the company after Balanchine's death, so none of his ballets could be changed to accommodate her angular qualities. I enjoyed her in the Stravinsky ballets and she was a favorite of later choreographers, whose ballets did not often live up to her talents.
The final piece on Saturday's program was The Concert, a truly nasty piece of work choreographed by Jerome Robbins in 1956. Some find this misogynistic, misanthropic ballet, choreographed to Chopin, amusing. Even if one cared for anarchic humor, which I don't, this piece about the manipulation of women and the offensiveness of men is too nasty to be funny. Fueled by Robbins's own confused sexual identity, its idea of humor is men and women getting stabbed, men being henpecked and women obsessed with their vanity. I have always preferred the beautifully structured comedies of Lubitsch to the anarchy of the Marx brothers.
One additional benefit of going to the ballet is that I find, when I go to ballet class, as I did yesterday, I have absorbed much of what I have seen: I'm more turned out, my tendus are more precise, my port de bras better placed. I can even imagine that I am part of the male corps in Square Dance.
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