17. Relativity: New York City Ballet reviewed by Cheryl S.
Everything depends on time and place and one’s all-too-subjective position within the lived continuum. You must know your place amid many options.
Sandy and I have finished rehearsing our Nekomata for the camera. Now we have to wait for the dancers (Albertine and Paco) to make themselves available for the video shoot. According to Louise Ebersdorf, our producer, the two “Frenchies” are on strike, awaiting her decision about future projects. On the one hand, I am, of course, on the side of the dancers. We have to stand up for one another. But as their choreographer, I want our video-dance finished and out there on the internet as soon as possible. As does Sandy, my videographer-assistant. A perfect example of how paradoxical reality can be! Which hat do I wear for each situation?
Louise has paid me a most generous fee for the choreography of the dance and put me on retainer until the video is shot and edited. And she’s given an interim job to my Sandy: he has been paid for voice-recording a novel by Ronald Firbank, which Louise is going to send to China as a “cultural offering”. (It is true that Sandy has wonderful vocal delivery.) In return, Louise’s Chinese contact is sending her a complete recording of The Story of the Stone, in Chinese.
In addition, Louise plans to use Sandy’s reading to entertain Albertine and Paco on site and hopefully improve their grasp of the English language. Sandy loves the novel’s prose (Firbank’s Valmouth) and regards this as something like an E.S.L. job while waiting for the green light for our video. He calls it “my Chinese podcast”. In one of our talks, Louise confided that she will also be using Sandy’s reading to instruct A&P, like the Chinese government is re-educating its Uighur population right this minute. Here in New York, the sound of Sandy’s voice will be piped into A&P’s “detention quarters” continuously during their strike, day and night, around the clock. That should do the job, Louise says. A&P will be tending her many cats and hearing correct English at the same time. My boss is so up-to-date, using today’s technologies to “reach out” to others.
I reached out to my French contact by calling Mme Beach in Paris, just to stay in touch, and when I told her that my current dancers were on strike, she said that Parisians know all about unions and that her ballet company, Le Swing, would never endure work stoppage because morale is so high and her dancers so dedicated to one another and to their art. Liane says she will bring this ethic to the U.S. when Le Swing opens its American counterpart here in New York. Very exciting.
Sandy and I have been making friends with Louise’s assistant, Pippa, and with Master Raro, Louise’s “handyman”, who is very charming and knows a lot about foreign culture – especially films. Sandy thinks Master (a former dancer) is built on a “heroic model”, and I’d like him to consider dancing in one of my future projects, that is, if he wishes to get back into class. (Master already looks very in-shape, IMO.) He approves my treatment of the cat-demon theme in our Nekomata, but Master didn’t go overboard to flatter us with compliments, and I was impressed with his very serious appraisal. Pippa also seems interested in my work and asks intelligent questions, especially about the art of putting dance on screen. She introduced me to her loving tomcat, Murr, who shares her spacious apartment on the 39th floor of the Ebersdorf Tower. (I suspect that it was Pippa who pointed out the Firbank novel to Louise. She is so well-read.) And Pippa is yet another expert on movies. Louise surrounds herself with a skilled and knowledgeable staff. I’m very impressed to be a part of such group expertise.
Louise supplied us with three tickets for a performance of New York City Ballet last week, so Sandy, Master, and I Uber-ed to Lincoln Center. We saw an inspiring performance of Balanchine’s Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet. I want to dwell on it here because all three of us were impressed by both the ballet and its dancers. (Often Sandy and I disagree on something, but not this time.) The ballet evokes the monarchy called the Habsburg, and its stage backdrop depicts a distant view of the Schönbrunn Palace, the principle residence of Emperor Franz Joseph during his long reign, so the audience is primarily transported to the Vienna of the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The costumes suggest the earlier period.
The music is Arnold Schoenberg’s 1937 orchestration of Brahms’ 1861 Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor (Opus 25), originally composed for piano and strings, but presented in the later orchestral version for the ballet. Balanchine obviously heard aspects of a Viennese Zeitgeist in the score. Within the draped ballroom that is the ballet’s décor, the Quartet covers large areas of time and space and what Sandy calls “sensibility”, although the term is slippery (Sandy warns), since it is usually applied to individuals, not whole epochs. Is there a better way to bracket such a subject? Maybe it takes a ballet – this ballet – to frame an imperial accomplishment. (Balanchine actually had made another such work, a ballet originally entitled Ballet Imperial; obviously, this choreographer was unafraid of large subjects.) Maybe Balanchine’s ballet creates its own category while serving as a practical vehicle for four ballerina leads.
The first movement is fascinating because the lead role is unique in the ballet repertory – she is all over the place, not at all the unifying, focal point of action that you usually get in a traditional ballet. Sandy and I think that Balanchine may be pointing to the late nineteenth-century scientific and philosophical movement toward “indeterminism”, especially in the description of the physical world, like the ideas of Ernst Mach that led to Einstein’s theory of relativity. The second movement is a depiction of romantic-erotic love. You inevitably think of Sigmund Freud’s research on the psychology of erotic obsession. The third movement is very military, so it may be dealing with Austria’s involvement in territorial border conflicts, like its campaigns in the Italian wars for independence. And the final movement of the ballet is a Gypsy celebration, as the denizens of a new century (the twentieth) lay siege to Schönbrunn Palace for the end of an Empire (read the First World War) or perhaps represent the arrival of modern barbarians (read “you and me”) at the gates of a great city. The interesting thing is that Balanchine treats these thematic ideas poetically, so that he leads his audience to a complicated vantage in regard to a cultural achievement’s effect on the individual. He allows paradox in his description of what has been referred to as the “Viennese rehearsal” for much of what we think of as modernity, in both its creative and destructive aspects. In the lead roles, you are allowed to imagine the place of the lone individual amid historical forces.
The first movement was made on Melissa Hayden, and the role can be hard to pin down because the lead ballerina interacts with her partner, a demi-ballerina, and a corps de ballet of twelve dancers who create a lively, dynamic, and unpredictable matrix for her entrées. She is only one element in Balanchine’s choreographic force-field until you realize that she may be defined, relatively speaking, by them. The ensemble’s dance is marked by sudden right-angle turns, pirouettes that regularly begin in one direction and end in another, and in dynamic aerial material for the men and women. Within this whirl-wind atom-smasher, the lead ballerina regularly reverses her movement or is reversed in her position by her partner. You can never guess when she will enter or where her dance will take her. She will begin a diagonal progress only to retreat upstage to start over. At least two of her entrées are very short – sudden dramatic appearance that turn out to be half-lives, so to speak.
So regularly surprising or abbreviated are the ballerina’s entrées that the demi-soloist becomes the default center of action. In contrast to the lead ballerina, she offers the audience something like the dignity and security of a conventional ballerina role, even when she joins four male corps dances in a sequence of grand jetés. She provides a more legible through-line. The paradox of the opening movement is in this mercurial, hidden-particle role of the lead ballerina, who is both there and not there, fluid and provocative, authoritative and evanescent, in contrast to the stabilizing presence of the secondary ballerina. Our heroine is like the hostess of her own party who disappears into its machinery in service to the needs of her guests. Within the musical score, there is a recurrent “sighing motif”. In the opening movement, it’s almost as though the music is lamenting some missing principle of perceptible control.
In the ballet’s second movement, the corps de ballet is reduced to three women, who provide a motor pulse behind the lead couple. The ballerina here is a brilliant female protagonist reveling in an intense emotional life. She is an adventuress of the passions. To possess her beloved, and be possessed by him, she would all but extinguish her sense of self. (Sandy says this may be a reference to the impersonality of classical dance itself, writ large here in Romantic script.) The role was “written” for Patricia McBride in a virtuoso display of allegro daring, both solo and in the partnering. Here, the sighing motif in the score, so suggestive of deep longing, becomes a sensual ache. What is interesting is that the psyche’s disposition toward privileged self-abandonment is not portrayed by the choreographer as necessarily neurotic. Balanchine sees his female’s career as yet one more possibility in life. There is no judgment rendered beyond the categorical specialization implied in the ballet’s larger plan, which describes types of physical and spiritual response that could be seen as pressured to intensity through historical circumstance or cultural bent. The triumph of an epoch makes its heavy demands on the individual, almost a surrender to “fate”. Somehow this is very Tolstoyan. (I have to reread Anna Karenina.)
The third movement is my favorite in the ballet. It deals with a young couple in wartime, a loving pair who must reconcile themselves to parting for the male’s military duties in service to the state. The ballerina herself shows a militant accent in her dance material. She shares in her soldier-lover’s predilection toward dutiful service. (Don’t lovers have a like duty to one another?) Created for Allegra Kent, the ballerina role demands a calm center and a steely resolve. This woman is willing finally to sponsor her beloved’s sacrifice to the glory of warfare, even if it means losing him in the process. Empires, it is implied, are constituted of such selfless private and group sentiment. Balanchine omits neither the claims for glory on the field of battle nor the crises of young love. The sighing motif in the score becomes a universal lament. After the ballerina appears to make her decision to allow her lover’s endangerment (I think we are allowed to glimpse the decisive moment in a climactic pas de deux), Balanchine brings on the female corps to depict the rose arbors that once witnessed the couple’s aborning love. Master says that it is like the end of Antonioni’s film L’Eclisse – a memory of a brief affair through its evoked former settings.
And the fourth movement, made for Suzanne Farrell, is a Gypsy encampment celebration. At this point we see that Balanchine can allow the arrival of modernity to occur without special underlining: the drop in social class is itself the comment. As a result, the festival can be seen as rendered in a broad, demi-caractère dance style that represents its own critique, and the challenge for the lead ballerina is to hint at classical dance qualities beyond the obvious. (Something “aristocratic” survives despite the rout.) Or you may see the ballet’s style as classical dance transposed to a higher level of impetus and “color”.
The cast of the first movement (the Allegro con moto) of our performance was distinguished by debuts: Emilie Gerrity was the lead ballerina, partnered by Joseph Gordon, and with Lydia Wellington in the demi role. Wellington has the strength to match the male corps in its aerial passages. She is calm when she needs to hold the eyes of the audience. Gerrity is young, and I can imagine her becoming more dramatic in her handling of the material as she matures in the lead role. Each entry, no matter how short, can have a different tonality, as the hostess of Balanchine’s ball meets its tests. The ballerina must make her effect quickly and firmly. The more classical supports she has at her disposal, the clearer will be her afterimages. But Gerrity already has the speed the role requires, and she is highly alert to musical challenges. This is an allegro movement gauntlet, and Gerrity is already mistress of many of the pressured opportunities that Balanchine has arranged. Joseph Gordon makes a handsome and dependable partner.
As the femme amoureuse of the second movement (the Intermezzo), Lauren Lovette was musically alert to the score’s changes in tempi. She was able to render that deep arch of the back that her partner (Andrew Veyette) must engage in lifts that seem impossible until you see them accomplished over and over. (The repetition tells you all you need to know about the obsessiveness of the lovers.). And, most important, Lovette managed the suggestion of a requisite courage that her figure betrays in seeing the affair through, no matter how “mad”. (The three corps women become handmaidens observing and perhaps abetting the rendezvous of the lovers.). Andrew Veyette is a veteran adept of the partnering skills demanded here.
In the great third panel (the Andante) of the ballet, Megan Fairchild was especially strong in the lengthy pas de deux that comes toward the end of the movement. If I am correct, the ballerina arrives at a moment of choice (to endorse her lover’s departure for coming battle?) far upstage. She folds forward in a swan-like image and then arches back into arabesque against her partner. Fairchild was especially moving in the timing of this decision, and then bold in the precipitate “throw” of her figure into her lover’s arms downstage, a private submission that triggers the female corps’ formation of rose trellises. Master Raro says that you may thereby glimpse the Schönbrunn hothouse conservatories, Franz Ferdinand’s beloved rose gardens, or even a sly Balanchinian reference to Albrecht Dürer’s “The Feast of the Rose Garlands”, a painting famously owned by the Habsburgs.
A side-note: Isn’t there a parallel Decisive Moment in Balanchine’s Diamonds (an upstage fold-forward and back-swept arabesque toward the end of the great Adagio pas de deux) that also suggests a moment of choice-making in the “Czarina” role? Perhaps the Diamonds ballerina is deciding to accept her partner as a royal consort. If there is a relation between the two dance passages, perhaps Diamonds contains an example of Balanchine quoting himself. A year separates the two ballets. (Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet was premiered in 1966; Jewels in 1967.) By this point, the choreographer could be referential through deliberate self-quotation (as Hitchcock is self-referential in North by Northwest.) I have to watch the video of Diamonds again soon.
The final movement (the Gypsy Rondo) was danced by Sara Mearns and Amar Ramasar. Mearns is spectacular in the ease with which she handles a powerful attack and ready cushion in this role. The audience adores her. There were moments where I thought she was not using enough variety of attack, especially where shadings could count, but her invisible phrasal transitions argue for themselves. They are magical. Mearns may have been pushing the material in honor of her partner’s return to the company, so high spirits and abandon were the order of the day. The Gypsy Rondo is the one movement in the ballet in which the ballerina does not face an elemental quandary, in physics, love, or warfare. The Gypsy’s role is that of the untraditional Outlier. She merely takes on all that is In. Where does that leave us? Instead of a “sigh”, Sandy says the Brahms score allows us to hear a folkish slide toward Bartók.
Question: What caused Balanchine, in the social broil of the 1960s, to create a tribute to the Habsburg dynasty and to revive his Romanov Ballet Imperial (later retitled Tschaikovky Piano Concerto No. 2) in 1964? Could it have been an effort to remind his audience of the glory and cost of empire in the midst of anti-colonialism and the folk-art movement? The gesture was accompanied by revivals of Theme and Variations in 1960 and the creation of the Czarisr Diamonds (1967). The emphasis feels political and the intention a little didactic. Not that there is anything wrong with such an impulse. I asked my friends this question, and they said they would think about it.
Bonus report: Sandy and Master went together (without me) to see the American Ballet Theatre premiere of The Seasons across the Lincoln Center Plaza at the Met, choreographed by Alexi Ratmansky. They reported that it was more Gorsky than Petipa, more modern music hall than Romanov Maryinsky. Where does that leave A.B.T.? Master has asked me (sans my competitive Sandy) to see a screening of Luchino Visconti’s film Senso next week. He says that it relates to Balanchine’s third movement in Brahms -Schoenberg. (He also says it explains a lot about obsessiveness around the arts, especially in New York and around the ballet.) I can’t wait.
I’ve asked Pippa for a cappuccino date so I can ask her woman-to-woman about our Master. He keeps mentioning the I Ching as a guide to making decisions in a world that is paradoxical when it is not indeterminate. He says that Balanchine and Cunningham used the I Ching. I’ve made a note to look into this. Onward -- in the midst of everything!
C.S.
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