While some of the company started the season last week learning sections of Ron Cunningham’s Dracula and several pas de deux from the George Balanchine repertory, most of the women you’ll see on stage on October 22, 23, 27, and 28 at the Community Center Theater began their contracts Monday, the first day of learning Balanchine’s Serenade. As one of the extra-company dancers in town for just this ballet, cast for twenty women and six men, I have been thinking about not only the significance of dancing the ballet, but also the long history of Serenade, choreographed in 1934.
The first original ballet Balanchine created in America, Serenade was made for students at the choreographer’s School of American Ballet, which he had opened with financial and administrative enabler Lincoln Kirstein in New York City earlier that year. Balanchine had left the Soviet Union via Europe and hoped to start an American professional ballet company distinguished by his impressions of the country, his aesthetic values, and his innovations within ballet technique, all of which would impact Western concert dance for the rest of the twentieth century and beyond. Having already made his name as a choreographer with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and other ballet companies as well as in musical revues and operettas in London and Paris, Balanchine built the foundation for his American legacy through his school. Serenade counts as a monumental dance from this formative era of American ballet.
Consider the context in which Balanchine was creating Serenade: The world was suffering in the middle of the Great Depression. Fascism was rising in Europe. Economic and political uncertainty haunted the consciousness of many Americans. How might audiences have responded to the serene and vivacious moments of Serenade? How might we see it differently, or connect with it similarly, today, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and this country’s sharp political divide?
Serenade is an abstract ballet. Though many have read into it romantic narratives and thematic love and loss, Balanchine created a body of work far removed from the singular meanings expressed in socialist realist propaganda ballets of the Soviet Union he left, or from any prescribed political agenda. Balanchine’s ballets are characterized by crystalline form and finely detailed musicality. When watching the ballet as an audience member, I sometimes let the music wash over me as my eyes rest upon sweeping patterns across the stage, blurred by flourishes of tulle from the women’s romantic-styled long skirts; other times, I read my own meaning into the gentle suggestions of interpersonal drama, symbolic images, and alternately hopeful and dark worldviews, letting my imagination color the structures Balanchine built with only music, dancing, and simple costumes.
John Clifford, repetiteur with The George Balanchine Trust, not only teaches us the choreography of Serenade, but also relays anecdotes and ideas Balanchine communicated to the dancers of the New York City Ballet during the time Clifford was a leading dancer and a choreographer there, from 1966 through 1974, and then, after forming his own company in Los Angeles, as a guest artist until 1980.
On Monday, we started at the beginning of the ballet: Opening chords of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade in C for string orchestra, Op. 48 descend before a closed curtain. Powerful music is coupled with the utmost simplicity choreographically—a choice as descriptive of Balanchine’s musicality as any of his complex designs. Clifford told us that Balanchine used seventeen women for the opening, and other numbers for the various sections, because in his early days working in the United States, dancers rehearsed in the evenings, unpaid, and he could never be sure how many would show up on any given day. Balanchine spaced the women on stage like orange groves he’d seen in California. On his drive up to Sacramento last week from his home in Los Angeles, Clifford was reminded of this formation when passing fledgling trees: Light passes through the horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines. Clifford told us that Balanchine had said that had he had the more easily divisible number of sixteen, he would have placed the dancers in equal lines, a common classical ballet formation.
Balanchine left us an inheritance of his ballets, his artistic style, and his innovations in ballet technique. He also taught through the example of his own ingenuity, working with the materials he had. Whether adapting to a changing number of dancers in the rehearsal room, accommodating a limited budget for costumes, or creating for an audience that did not have its own ballet tradition, Balanchine worked within his means and still created ballets that have stayed relevant for more than seventy-five years. The opening of Serenade could remind us to make the most of what we have, however seemingly limited, and to take time to listen, be still, and stand together.
--Emily Hite
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