She lifts her arms from about his neck, and it flies loose and high as she turns her face, her whole torso, away from him, twisting deeply out from her waist while her hips and legs stay beside him: her claim made, her body open wide to you, the audience, announcing her victory.
Her triumph is short-lived, Balanchine never stops anywhere: dancing's only permanence, only stability, is progression. But if any notion of coupledom or resolution appears imminent, he muddles the waters immediately. -- Toni Bentley, Serenade: A Balanchine Story (Pantheon Books, 2022)
Toni Bentley danced with the NYC Ballet from 1975 to 1984 -- a year after George Balanchine died -- when she retired after a hip injury. She danced Balanchine's Serenade to Tschaikovsky's Serenade for Strings in C many times and her book gives on a sense of what it is actually like to be in the cast, minute by minute and even second by second. She also includes a great deal of history, alternating with the detailed descriptions of the choreography, starting with the first performance in 1934 just after Lincoln Kirstein brought Balanchine to the United States and going forward, as well as going backward to the choreography of the great Marius Petipa in Russia and Balanchine's early days as a dancer and choreographer.
The only other book I know of that is dedicated to the details of one particular ballet is Robert Maiorno's and Valerie Brooks's Balanchine's Mozartiana: The Making of a Masterpiece (1985). Though Maiorno was a dancer for NYC Ballet he never danced in Mozartiana, though Balanchine allowed Maiorno and Brooks (a journalist) to observe his choreography. Bentley's book of course is very different, Serenade as a dance seen from inside it and including a great deal of detail not only about the ballet itself but about the dancers who danced it, the lighting, the costume changes over the years and everything else about this great ballet. And Balanchine is always there, "a single mortal man spinning generations of mortal women into visible immortality, swirling, swooning, running, running, running into unending time with him." I have seen Serenade many times but I am only just beginning to understand its mysterious beauties.
I also want to mention that Bentley provides an excellent and detailed bibliography and has chosen superb photographs; I particularly like the two of Maria Calegari in the same pose in Serenade, one from 1974 and one from 1984, where in the later one her arabesque is extending to infinity.
No comments:
Post a Comment