Serenade Talks

How do you look at dance?  How do you talk about it?

Our Dracula Bits & Bites blog invites audiences to read ahead on the ballets they’ll see in the next couple of weeks and to follow along the Sacramento Ballet’s journey to prepare for those performances.  Perhaps you’ll think about your previous experiences watching dance, recalling what you liked or didn’t like, what you felt you connected with or what seemed foreign or unintelligible to you. Can you remember moments within a dance that conjured joy, sympathy, grief, anger, or confusion?  Did a choreographer’s point of view ever surprise you? Bore you? Has a music choice ever satisfied you, or irritated you?  Can you remember a visual image that brought forth tears, for better or for worse? Or that made you think deeply about a problem?  Maybe you interpreted your reactions in ways that helped you to understand a situation of your world differently. Or, more aware of life’s complexities, perhaps you left the theater with unanswered questions.

While typical dancer preparations include daily technique class and rehearsals plus in-studio showings and free events for the public, we also reflect on our artistic process of creating dances and on our crafting process of refining them. For ballets that already have been performed and whose choreographer no longer can oversee or wishes make changes to them (including George Balanchine, who died in 1983), our restoration method includes upholding the work’s integrity while discovering our own interpretations of the dances, thereby adding to their infinite stores of possible meanings. Balanchine’s Serenade receives particularly special treatment among the repertory at the Sacramento Ballet. 

Sacramento Ballet dancers in George Balanchine's Serenade. Photo by Alex Biber

Artistic Director Carinne Binda, who performed two of the three female lead roles and nearly every of 17 ensemble spots as a dancer with the Boston Ballet, has returned to Serenade many times in her life. (This season marks the fifth year the Sacramento Ballet has performed it, always under her guidance.) Like many dancers, she finds Serenade provides its cast with learning opportunities as it offers audiences Balanchine’s crystalline vision of Tchaikovsky’s musical score.  Carinne schedules occasional half-hour “Serenade talks” within our rehearsal days to congregate the company women and to discuss nuances of the ballet. 

Artistic Director Carinne Binda. Photo by Alex Biber

Dancers have vocalized diverse, imaginative readings of the choreography. (More to come on those in future posts.) But a common thread ran through our most recent conversation.  In sharing her point of view from inside the ballet, each woman referenced the spirit of teamwork both required to execute Serenade and naturally elicited by dancing it.  Throughout the ballet, each dancer must put forth her individual best effort.  Several women described a feeling of interdependence both among the corps and as the corps and soloists relate, knowing that everyone is counting on you to do your part as you are counting on them to do theirs. One moment in the opening movement of the ballet involves groupings of four or five women performing different sequences of steps in lines at different angles and in multiple places on stage. Then, suddenly, all the subgroups sweep together to form a single diagonal line.  The dancers move together briefly, then rush offstage one by one like a wave rolling in to shore.  All dancers must be keenly aware of how her part fits into her group’s, and how each group fits into the architecture of the stage, in order for the audience to see clearly the intent of the choreography and be able to conjure their own ideas from the pattern.

Dancer Chloe Horne imagines this part of the ballet as a water park in which each group swirls, twists, and flows as if each its own ride.  I imagine each group comprises a species within a tropical ecosystem.  Why tropical? Because, even though we are all dressed simply and identically, each group’s dynamic looks as distinct and colorful as plant, animal, and insect varieties in a rainforest.

I hope you’ll return to this blog following a performance and post a response with your own reading.

--Emily Hite