The sisterhood of the corps in Serenade, which has expanded through the years as Balanchine has expanded the choreography, is in its anonymity one of the most moving images we have in ballet.
--Arlene Croce, The New Yorker, March 21 1977.
On Saturday Serenade was beautifully performed, as Peter Martins continues to maintain the Balanchine ballets Particularly elegant was soloist Zachary Catazaro as he walked slowly towards Sterling Hyltin while the rest of the corps walked pass him walking in the opposite direction. I particularly like the parts in this ballet and other Balanchine works where the male role is relatively uncomplicated and intense, perhaps because I can identify with these roles more than the more difficult and flashier ones that call for multiple pirouettes and tours en l'air. Serenade also shows how Balanchine can turn liabilities into assets, as it was his first ballet in America, 1934, and he had to work with the students he had: the first movement of the corps is to turn out into first position, signifying that ballet has arrived in the United States, while a late arrival and a fall are incorporated into the ballet. It also demonstrates Balanchine's mastery of music, as he changes the order of the movements of Tschaikovsky's Serenade for Strings in order to end the ballet on a melancholy note. Serenade is beautiful, elegant and continually elusive, as one attempts to find a "story" in its structure.
Balanchine can be as flashy as anyone, but his Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux also incorporates his idea of the equality of men and women and their trust and faith in each other, as Ashly Isaacs leaps fearlessly into Gozalo's Garcia's arms and the two dancers dance solos that also emphasize their individuality: daring leaps for the man, rapid point work for the woman.
Western Symphony is holding up well (it had its premiere on September 7, 1954) and I find that it makes one think of Sergio Leone's C'era una volta il west (Once Upon a Time in the West,1968), a film that depicts some of the myths of the America West as seen by a European. Both Leone's film and Balanchine's ballet not only make use of myths but are themselves mythopoeic, with Leone's emphasis on families and violence and Balanchine's on love and boisterousness. Leone's film emphasizes music (a lovely and intense score by Ennio Morricone) as much as Balanchine's ballet does (traditional tunes such as Red River Valley, orchestrated by Hershey Kay). It seems quite natural, watching Western Symphony, that dance hall girls are on point and cowboys can leap high into the air.
The one dud on the bill was Christpher Wheeldon's American Rhapsody, done to Gershwin music. As I said (to my wife Susan and children Gideon and Victoria, who were as always with me at the ballet), if they want to do Gershwin why not do Balanchine's Who Cares?, a gorgeous and moving ballet, rather than the drab and ugly piece by Wheeldon, whose work seems to have been coarsened by Broadway.
No comments:
Post a Comment