Fall 2012 Ballet Review

From the Fall 2012

issue of Ballet Review

Serenade: From Giselle to

Georgia by Tim Scholl

Cover Photograph by Costas: Karl Paquette in Giselle atLincoln Center Festival 2012.

Ballet Review 40.3Fall 2012Editor and Designer:Marvin Hoshino

Managing Editor:Roberta Hellman

Senior Editor:Don Daniels

Associate Editor:Joel Lobenthal

Associate Editor:Larry Kaplan

Copy Editor:Barbara Palfy

Photographers:Tom BrazilCostas

Associates:Peter AnastosRobert Gres kovicGeorge JacksonElizabeth KendallPaul ParishNancy ReynoldsJames SuttonDavid VaughanEdward WillingerSarah C. Woodcock

4 Moscow – Clement Crisp5 Wolfsburg – Darrell Wilkins7 Chicago – Leigh Witchel9 Birmingham – David Mead

11 New York – Harris Green12 London – Leigh Witchel15 New York – Don Daniels17 Paris – Clement Crisp18 Toronto – Gary Smith19 St. Petersburg – Kevin Ng21 New York – Sandra Genter22 Budapest & Vienna – Leigh Witchel

Tim Scholl26 Serenade: From Giselle to Georgia

Joel Lobenthal36 L’École de la Danse

Rebecca Hadley48 A Conversation with David Vaughan

Jay Rogoff56 Two Weeks in Another Town

Carla DeFord65 A Conversation with Maina Gielgud

Janet Mansfield Soares68 An Ocean Apart

Ian Spencer Bell76 Running Upstairs

Jeffrey Gantz78 Pathway to Success

Joel Lobenthal84 A Conversation with Karl Paquette

91 London Reporter – Clement Crisp94 First Position – Jeffrey Gantz94 Music on Disc – George Dorris

56

26

78

68

Cover Photograph by Costas: Karl Paquette in Giselleat Lincoln Center Festival 2012.

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Serenade. (Photo: Paul Kolnik, New York City Ballet)

George Balanchine’s earliest surviving works,including Apollo and Prodigal Son, created forthe Diaghilev ballet in 1928 and 1929, respec-tively, and Serenade, the first work created inNorth America (in 1934), look very differentfrom the works Balanchine created in subse-quent decades. It’s no surprise to see stages ofdevelopment in the work of a prolific creativeartist, and especially one who would authorsome four hundred ballets.

Yet the mythology of Balanchine’s geniushas generally placed these early works in arather undifferentiated drawer of early mas-terpieces, without bothering to speculate onthe qualities that identify them as belongingto one period or style or another, or how theymight differ from works created not long af-ter them.

Leaving aside the question of costumes anddecor – de rigueur in the Diaghilev ballet, buttoo costly to play a prominent role in muchlater Balanchine choreography – the threeworks I’ve mentioned are far more episodicthan later ones. They have more stops andstarts than one sees in the more seamless lat-er choreography.

They are also more pictorial and contain an abundance of visual information: danc-ers grouped in poses on the stage (Apollo) andvisual metaphors that function iconically inthe works (Apollo, Prodigal Son). Many of thesecould be interpreted as intertextual refer-ences, but they also reveal much about Balan-chine’s transition from a more narrative styleof choreography for Diaghilev and others inEurope to the pure dance or abstract worksmost associated with Balanchine’s NorthAmerican repertory.

In this context, Serenade functions as a kindof hinge between Balanchine’s Diaghilev andAmerican repertories. He created the work for

his first group of North American students in1934. The work debuted outdoors, and had pre-mieres in Hartford in December and New YorkCity in March of the following year. The workremains a repertory staple of Balanchine’scompany, New York City Ballet, and its gene-sis has been mythologized as a founding mo-ment in the history of ballet in the UnitedStates.

Balanchine was careful to describe thechoices he made in choreographing Serenadeas born of necessity, from the numbers ofdancers in each of the sections to the solo-ist’s falls that punctuate the work. By the 1950s, Balanchine, and those who spoke forhim, began to characterize this ballet as a quintessentially modernist work in which thechoreographer made use of movement thatfunctioned as “found” choreography, much as twentieth-century visual artists and com-posers incorporated ordinary objects and natural sounds in their artworks.

“It seemed to me that the best way to makestudents aware of stage technique was to givethem something new to dance, something theyhad never seen before. I chose Tchaikovsky’sSerenade to work with. The class contained, thefirst night, seventeen girls and no boys. . . .

“That was how Serenade began. The nextclass contained only nine girls; the third, six.I choreographed to the music with the pupilsI happened to have at a particular time. . . .One day, when all the girls rushed off the floorarea we were using as a stage, one of the girlsfell and began to cry. . . . I kept this bit in thedance. Another day, one of the girls was latefor class, so I left that in too. . . .

“Later . . . I elaborated on the small acci-dental bits I had included in class and madethe whole more dramatic, more theatrical,synchronizing it to the music with addition-al movement, but always using the little things that ordinarily might be overlooked.”(George Balanchine and Francis Mason, Balan -chine’s Complete Stories of the Great Ballets, 1977,pp. 531-32).

This excerpt tells us how the choreographerarrived at the number of dancers in some of

©2012 Tim Scholl 27

Serenade: From Giselleto Georgia

Tim Scholl

the ballet’s sections and how the falls becamepart of the ballet’s choreography. But the cho-reographer doesn’t reveal how he made theballet more dramatic or theatrical, or wheremotivation for many of the ballet’s distinctivemovements, groupings, or patterns originat-ed.

One source for Serenade’s choreography –and especially its atmosphere – would be ob-vious to most balletgoers. The second act ofthe ballet Giselle takes place in a moonlit set-

ting with a corps of female dancers in longpale dresses. A few men enter the stage, as in-truders, but the act’s most important choreo-graphic set piece – the grand pas des Wilis – isa dance for the female ensemble.

There is a clear choreographic allusion to Giselle when the first fall occurs in Serenade.A soloist in the first movement of the Balan-chine ballet seems to swoon and falls to theground, and the ensemble gathers around her in a semicircle. A similar grouping re-

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New York City Ballet at Covent Garden in 1950. (Photo: Roger Wood)

peats near the beginning and end of the grand pas of the Wilis in Giselle, when the corpsde ballet forms a similar half circle on theground.

The fall of the ballerina furnished a narra-tive climax in nineteenth-century ballets,much like mad scenes lent nineteenth-centu-ry operas their most melodramatic moments.And despite Balanchine’s claims in The Com-plete Stories that Serenade has no “concealed story” (p. 532), the soloist’s fall and the group

of women around her clearly recall both theevents and the choreography of Giselle, as wellas the falls of numerous other ballet heroines,from Giselle’s predecessor, the Sylphide, to theChosen Maiden in Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring.When a choreographer borrows and recom-bines bits of choreography from other bal-lets, as Balanchine does with his allusions toGiselle, new stories emerge, and devices likethe falls in Serenade take on structural as wellas narrative functions.

In the final moment of Serenade’s RussianDance (Tchaikovsky’s “Tema Russo”), a groupof dancers runs from the stage, but one fallsand is left behind. As the ballet’s final section(the Elegy) begins, a man and woman enterthe stage and approach the fallen dancer. Thewoman follows the man, but shades his eyes– a highly symbolic gesture seen in many lat-er Balanchine works. When they reach the fall-en dancer, they reach down to her, and sheraises her arms to meet them.

Near the end of the ballet, this dancer fallsonce again. After she completes a series ofturns her partner catches her and puts hergently down on the stage. The second womanreturns, completing a stage picture very sim-ilar to the one they formed at the beginningof the Elegy. The musicologist Solomon Volkovhas compared this second pose to the sculp-tural grouping on Tchai kov sky’s tomb in St.Petersburg, where an angel with outspreadwings grips the cross behind the bust of thecomposer.

Yet this grouping also recalls a moment inGiselle. Near the end of the ballet, when theWilis force Albrecht, Giselle’s beloved, to danceto his death, he collapses near the front of thestage. Giselle approaches him from behind tourge him to stand and continue dancing. Inmost productions, she presses his raised handto her breast. Balanchine reverses this pose inSerenade: now the woman lies onstage whilethe man holds her raised arm.

At the end of Giselle, early morning lightbreaks the Wilis’ spell and saves Albrecht from their curse; Giselle’s love has saved him.At the end of Serenade, the woman who has

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fallen is lifted by three male dancers and car-ried off into a shaft of light that shines fromthe rear of the stage. Like the poses discussedabove, the ending of Serenade rewrites and re-verses the ending of Giselle. The final stage picture in Serenade suggests death or transfig-uration, but of the heroine, in the absence ofa hero.

These falls that interrupt Balanchine’s cho-reography – at the end of the first movement,at the end of the third, and finally, in the bal-let’s closing section – furnish more than meresubtexts to another work; they also give theballet structure and closure. They arrest thework’s flow, providing transitions to the slow-er tempi and the more intimate choreographythat follows each fall. Even if we allow Balan-chine’s conceit – that these falls representmere accidents, “found” objects incorporatedinto the work of art with no reference what-ever to another, iconic ballet – as plot devicesthey represent an ingenious combination ofspontaneity and order. They are formal de-vices masked as chance elements.

It is possible to read these moments in Ser-enade as a delightfully anachronistic exampleof romantic irony in the ballet, to borrow aterm from literary studies, where romanticirony denotes authorial self-consciousness, an open acknowledgment of the author’s role and a gentle mocking of the art form’sconventions. Balanchine’s choreographic in-trusions are not dissimilar from those of Tristam Shandy’s narrator in their direct ad-dress to the reader. And although Balanchinelikely never stepped out onstage during a performance of Serenade, he imposes himselfonto our viewings and readings of the workthrough a series of statements about the work– an unusual practice for a choreographer who professed to loathe talking about his crea tions.

The choreographer’s rearrangement ofTchai kov sky’s score is a more obvious inter-vention that constitutes an unusual practicefor a modernist choreographer and son of acomposer who regularly affirmed his faith-fulness to the score. The transfer of Tchaikov -

sky’s finale to the penultimate place in thework provides the sense of flux that helps todefine romantic irony as Anne K. Mellor doesin English Romantic Irony (1980).

A conversation with Karin von Aroldingen,the German-born NYCB ballerina who becameBalanchine’s confidante in the last decades of his life, revealed that Balanchine kept a Russian translation of the arch-romantic Ger-man author E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tales by hisbedside table. That lifelong fascination withHoffmann, and the sense, in Edwin Denby’sterms, of the floor moving beneath one’s feetin some of Balanchine’s most fervidly roman-tic works, suggests that reading Serenade as romantic irony might not be far off, but themore intri guing feature of Balanchine’s worksis the multivalence of their symbols, the manylayers of meaningful connections they offerthe viewer.

There is another dance featuring a fall thatsurely inspired some of the choreographic devices Balanchine used in Serenade. This is adance for men, and a traditional dance, not aballet. It derives from the folk repertory ofBalanchine’s ancestral home, the Republic ofGeorgia. The dance is called khorumi, andseems a likely source for some of the formaldevices, groupings, and steps that Balanchineused in Serenade.

The dance has a long history of staged per-formances, its earliest recorded theatricalpresentation was in 1882 in Kuta’isi, the homeof Balanchine’s father. In 1935, the year of Serenade’s New York premiere, the dance wasfeatured in a festival of folk dance in Lon-don, and incorporated into Vakhtang Chabu -ki a ni’s choreography for Heart of the Hills, the first Georgian ballet on national themes, setto music composed by Balanchine’s brother,Andrei Balanchivadze.

The dance derives from Ajara, the south-western region of Georgia, and depicts thepreparations for a battle, the battle itself, andthe victory celebration. The setting is night-time, and a group of warriors enters in astraight line. They move stealthily, and stopto look and listen for the enemy as they move

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across the stage. Their leader spies the enemyand whispers to his men. They continue to theenemy camp as another group of men spies on the enemy. At the command of the leader,the battle begins. Indecisive at first, the foesare eventually vanquished, and the warriorscelebrate their victory.

The dance is in 5/4 or 5/8, and is tradition-ally counted by the syllables “chabuk-chak-chabuk.” The name of the dance is derivedfrom the Greek, thus “khor,” as in the Rus siankhorovod or indeed the word choreography.

Like Serenade, the khorumi is an ensemblework. Individuals emerge from the group forshort solos, but the work relies on precisiondancing by the entire group to achieve its effects. The two dances share a number of compositional elements, including weavingpatterns, round dances, highlighted entrancesand exits, and groupings that emphasize shifts in spatial contrasts.

Versions of the khorumi proliferate on You -Tube, danced by professional folk-dance en-sembles of long standing, such as the Geor-

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Heidi Vosseler and Charles Laskey of the American Ballet in 1935. (Photo: Vandamm)

gian National Ballet, and various local and ex-patriate groups, professional and amateur.The Georgian National Ballet’s version of thedance (in its pre-2012 iteration) was clearlyarranged for a proscenium stage and mostreadily reveals the correspondences to Bal-anchine’s Serenade. I will refer to several oth-er versions as well. Although most availableversions of this traditional dance correspondin their constructions, slight variations canbe seen.

One passage of the khorumi features a group of six dancers, holding hands, as theystealthily weave in and out of a moving group.In Serenade, five women perform a more lyrical version of this “weaving” choreogra-phy. But in both the Georgian dance and in Serenade, these sequences move in circles, ending in straight-line formations. (YouTube‘3.Khorumi (Military dance)’: http://youtube/CEijCIw2QaU 1:47)

Both dances feature group entrances andexits prominently. In the khorumi, they areperformed with extreme precision, and likethe weaving choreography, garner applausefrom the audience (YouTube: 3:15 and the fi-nal exit at 6:45). Balanchine’s choreographyfor Serenade emphasizes straight-line forma-tion, including the breathtaking exit in thefirst section, when the dancers briefly form aline, then break away from the diagonal in aspectacular departure from the stage.

This kind of line is made more impressiveearly in the khorumi by gathering the dancersin a knot upstage to prepare for the battle be-fore unwinding the long line from it (YouTube:4:20). The choreography of Serenade exploitsthis same spatial contrast: danc ers gather ina small group at the rear of the stage early inthe work, then peel off from it in a similarway. The dancers in Serenade retreat to the corner a second time as well, although the contrast in spatial volumes (and the similar-ity to the arrangement in khorumi) is less apparent this time.

Both dances feature another familiar folkdance form, the round dance, or khorovod.These occur repeatedly in the khorumi, at

3:45, 4:45, and most spectacularly at 5:20. Atthe end of this last circle dance, three soloistsmeet center stage. In choreography that re-calls a moment from Serenade’s final move-ment, the three join, whirl in circles, untilcentrifugal force appears to break them apart(YouTube: 5:45).

One last connection between these twodances concerns a bit of “optional” choreog-raphy that is generally included near the endof the khorumi, as the battle concludes. Theleader of the dance mimes injury and fallsback, supported by the second dancer. This el-ement is not included in the current filmedversion of the khorumi by the Georgian Na-tional Ballet, but a promotional brochure in-cludes a photo of it from an earlier staging,and film of a much-abbreviated version of the khorumi from the 1940s shows this nowoptional ending (YouTube: http://youtube/ExX-pC4aMA8 2:30).

Obviously, the placement of this element,near the dance’s end, resonates with the fallsin Serenade, especially the last one near theballet’s end. Yet another version of the kho-ru mi, by a group called the Rustavi Ensemble,features an exit even more evocative of theone Balanchine devised for the finale of Sere-nade (a number of other groups perform thisending).

In the Rustavi version, a drummer and awarrior follow the exiting line of dancers, both borne aloft. The drummer stands uprighton the shoulders of a dancer; the warrior’sposture indicates a fallen soldier from the battle. Both these figures resonate with thetrans cendent finale of Serenade, where the fallen girl exits the stage standing on theshoulders of her bearers, into the light.

Could Balanchine, a St. Petersburg youthfor the most part, have known this dance? Andwhere could he have seen it? Despite the chore-ographer’s enormous pride in his Georgianroots, his connection to his ancestral home-land was tangential at best. He wrote lettersto his family in Russian, not in Georgian, andit seems unlikely that he spoke Georgian intoadult hood. Balanchine pro bably saw the kho-

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rumi and oth er Cau casian dances in Russiarather than in Geor gia.

Yet as always with Balanchine, we shouldprobe the musical connections first. Balan-chine’s father, Meliton Balan chivadze, who

studied composition with Rimsky-Korsakov,was called “the Georgian Glinka” for his pio-neering efforts in composing Geor gian art mu-sic. Like many composers of his generation,Meliton collected folk music around Georgia

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Drawing by Balanchine of his performance on the opening night of his Ma zur ka from “A Life for the Tsar.”(Courtesy of the Balanchine Trust. BalaNCHiNe is a Trademark of The George Balanchine Trust.)

and organized choirs to perform traditionalGeorgian music when he lived in St. Peters- burg.

More to the point, Georgian music and Geor- gian dance – like the music and dance of mostethnic traditions – are generally performedtogether. The Georgian National Ballet’s priv-ileging of dance over music furnishes the ex-ception to the general practice of folk ensem-bles in Georgia today: other Tbilisi companiesregard the performance of music and dance asinextricably linked, and feature musiciansand danc ers more equally.

We know that the mature Balanchine at-tended rehear sals and performances of the Su -khish vili troupe when it toured the UnitedStates, first with the Moisey ev company in1959, then independently the following year.The Georgian National Bal let’s souvenir pro-gram includes a photograph of Balanchinewith dancers from the troupe in those years.A de cade before the visits of the Georgian Na-

tional Ballet, Balanchine drew a caricature ofhimself costumed as a warrior-dancer.

Better evidence for Balanchine’s esteem offolk choreography may be found in the Sum-mer 2003 issue of Ballet Review. In “Balanchineas I Knew Him,” Ann Hutch inson Guest re-calls advice Balanchine once gave to a youngchoreographer: “For chor eographic devices,you can learn everything from watching thefolk dances of different coun tries; they havedone it all” (p. 66).

Confirmation of Balanchine’s knowledge ofthe kho rumi emerged in a casual conversationwith the choreographer’s nephew dur ing theMaryinsky Ballet’s Balanchine Festival in St.Petersburg in 2004. I spoke with him brieflyat the party, without revealing my own inter-est in Georgian folk dance, and asked if hethought his uncle might have known this tra-dition. “Of course,” he re plied, “when he ar-rived in Georgia the first thing he asked wasfor musicians to come and perform the kho-

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School of American Ballet students at Serenade’s preview on the evening of June 10, 1934.

rumi” (conversation with the author, June 2,2004, St. Petersburg).

It’s easy to imagine how choreographic devices from folk dance, developed over cen-turies to serve minimal techniques to maxi-mal effect, could provide useful training forbeginning dancers and provide them withsimple, but effective choreographic devices.Applause accompanies the simple weavings on the recording of the Sukishvili khorumi.The synchronized entrances and exits alsoelicit audience enthusiasm.

Obviously, there is considerable irony instaging a Georgian warriors’ dance for seven-teen American women in 1934, even thoughthe outdoor setting of Serenade’s preview per-formance recalls the fields where dances likethe khorumi were traditionally performed.Much as events in Serenade reverse the genderroles in Giselle, Serenade’s single-sex ensembleinverts the Georgian performance tradition,where dancing is mostly men’s work and theyare the bearers of virtuosity. (Male dancers in the Caucausus dance on a kind of “pointe”– on the knuckles of the feet wearing tight-fitting boots that support the foot much likepointe shoes.) More importantly, the vestigesof the Romantic-ballet tradition we typicallyidentify in Serenade – the nighttime settingand the dancers’ falls – refer to the Georgiankhorumi no less than to Romantic-era workssuch as Giselle.

What can these two quite diverse sourcestell us about Balanchine’s creative method, and about his early works in particular? Es-sentially, we see a choreographer asking – andlearning – how to tell a story at a time when

telling stories had become unfashionable inthe ballet. Balanchine cut his theatri cal teethon the ballets of Marius Petipa, with their com-plex mime dialogues that danc ers of Balan-chine’s generation categorically rejected asold-fashioned and contrived.

Balanchine made his first works in an eraof ballet reform and revolution in St. Peters-burg and Petrograd, and danced in FyodorLopukhov’s innovative Tanzsymphonia, to Bee -thoven’s Fourth Symphony. With Diaghilev inEurope, Balanchine worked with famous easelpaint ers, composers, and librettists. In NewYork and New England, he faced less luxuri-ous resources. With Serenade, Bal anchine con-tinued to work in episodes and pictures, con-tinuing a line evident in Apolloand Prodigal Son.They became modernist attempts to disruptthe surface – in paint erly terms, to break withthe fini, or “licked” surface of academic paint-ing – but also to invest the works with mean-ings imported from other works.

From the subtexts of Gi selle, or the balletblanc, to the stage pictures formed in the kho-rumi – which, frank ly, only Balanchine wouldhave known at the time he was creating andrefining the new ballet – Serenade borrowsfrom two dance monuments of two very dif-ferent dance cultures: a traditional work witha long history of stage performance, and per-haps the most frequently appropriated workof Western nineteenth-century theatricaldance. The borrowings from these two verydiverse sources gives insight into that “hinge”moment in Balanchine’s career as they alsoforeshadow the wide range of movementsources Balanchine would continue to mine.

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