Serenade: from Giselle to Georgia by Tim Scholl

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 at Lincoln Center Festival 2012. 4 Moscow – Clement Crisp 5 Wolfsburg – Darrell Wilkins 7 Chicago – Leigh Witchel 9 Birmingham – David Mead 11 New York – Harris Green 12 London – Leigh Witchel 15 New York – Don Daniels 17 Paris – Clement Crisp 18 Toronto – Gary Smith 19 St. Petersburg – Kevin Ng 78 21 New York – Sandra Genter 22 Budapest & Vienna – Leigh Witchel

Tim Scholl 26 Serenade: From Giselle to Georgia

Joel Lobenthal 36 L’École de la Danse

Rebecca Hadley 48 A Conversation with David Va ughan 26 Ballet Review 40.3 Fall 2012 Jay Rogoff 56 Two Weeks in Another Town Editor and Designer: Marvin Hoshino Carla DeFord Managing Editor: 65 A Conversation with Maina Gielgud Roberta Hellman Senior Editor: Janet Mansfield Soares Don Daniels 68 An Ocean Apart Associate Editor: Joel Lobenthal Ian Spencer Bell 56 Associate Editor: 76 Running Upstairs Larry Kaplan Jeffrey Gantz Copy Editor: 78 Pathway to Success Barbara Palfy Photographers: Joel Lobenthal Tom Brazil 84 A Conversation with Karl Paquette Costas Associates: 91 London Reporter – Clement Crisp Peter Anastos Robert Gres kovic 94 First Position – Jeffrey Gantz George Jackson 94 Music on Disc – George Dorris Elizabeth Kendall 68 Paul Parish Nancy Reynolds James Sutton David Vaughan Edward Willinger Cover Photograph by Costas: Karl Paquette in Giselle Sarah C. Woodcock at Lincoln Center Festival 2012. Serenade. (Photo: Paul Kolnik, New York City Ballet)

26 ballet review Serenade: From Giselle his first group of North American students in 1934. The work debuted outdoors, and had pre- to Georgia mieres in Hartford in December and New York City in March of the following year. The work remains a repertory staple of Balanchine’s Tim Scholl company, New York City Ballet, and its gene- sis has been mythologized as a founding mo- George Balanchine’s earliest surviving works, ment in the history of ballet in the United including Apollo and Prodigal Son, created for States. the Diaghilev ballet in 1928 and 1929, respec- Balanchine was careful to describe the tively, and Serenade, the first work created in choices he made in choreographing Serenade North America (in 1934), look very different as born of necessity, from the numbers of from the works Balanchine created in subse- dancers in each of the sections to the solo- quent decades. It’s no surprise to see stages of ist’s falls that punctuate the work. By the development in the work of a prolific creative 1950s, Balanchine, and those who spoke for artist, and especially one who would author him, began to characterize this ballet as a some four hundred ballets. quintessentially modernist work in which the Yet the mythology of Balanchine’s genius choreographer made use of movement that has generally placed these early works in a functioned as “found” choreography, much rather undifferentiated drawer of early mas- as twentieth-century visual artists and com- terpieces, without bothering to speculate on posers incorporated ordinary objects and the qualities that identify them as belonging natural sounds in their artworks. to one period or style or another, or how they “It seemed to me that the best way to make might differ from works created not long af- students aware of stage technique was to give ter them. them something new to dance, something they Leaving aside the question of costumes and had never seen before. I chose Tchaikovsky’s decor – de rigueur in the Diaghilev ballet, but Serenade to work with. The class contained, the too costly to play a prominent role in much first night, seventeen girls and no boys. . . . later Balanchine choreography – the three “That was how Serenade began. The next works I’ve mentioned are far more episodic class contained only nine girls; the third, six. than later ones. They have more stops and I choreographed to the music with the pupils starts than one sees in the more seamless lat- I happened to have at a particular time. . . . er choreography. One day, when all the girls rushed off the floor They are also more pictorial and contain area we were using as a stage, one of the girls an abundance of visual information: danc- fell and began to cry. . . . I kept this bit in the ers grouped in poses on the stage (Apollo) and dance. Another day, one of the girls was late visual metaphors that function iconically in for class, so I left that in too. . . . the works (Apollo, Prodigal Son). Many of these “Later . . . I elaborated on the small acci- could be interpreted as intertextual refer- dental bits I had included in class and made ences, but they also reveal much about Balan- the whole more dramatic, more theatrical, chine’s transition from a more narrative style synchronizing it to the music with addition- of choreography for Diaghilev and others in al movement, but always using the little Europe to the pure dance or abstract works things that ordinarily might be overlooked.” most associated with Balanchine’s North (George Balanchine and Francis Mason, Balan - American repertory. chine’s Complete Stories of the Great Ballets , 1977, In this context, Serenade functions as a kind pp. 531-32). of hinge between Balanchine’s Diaghilev and This excerpt tells us how the choreographer American repertories. He created the work for arrived at the number of dancers in some of

©2012 Tim Scholl 27 New York City Ballet at Covent Garden in 1950. (Photo: Roger Wood) the ballet’s sections and how the falls became ting with a corps of female dancers in long part of the ballet’s choreography. But the cho- pale dresses. A few men enter the stage, as in- reographer doesn’t reveal how he made the truders, but the act’s most important choreo- ballet more dramatic or theatrical, or where graphic set piece – the grand pas des Wilis – is motivation for many of the ballet’s distinctive a dance for the female ensemble. movements, groupings, or patterns originat- There is a clear choreographic allusion ed. to Giselle when the first fall occurs in Serenade. One source for Serenade’s choreography – A soloist in the first movement of the Balan- and especially its atmosphere – would be ob- chine ballet seems to swoon and falls to the vious to most balletgoers. The second act of ground, and the ensemble gathers around the ballet Giselle takes place in a moonlit set- her in a semicircle. A similar grouping re-

28 ballet review of women around her clearly recall both the events and the choreography of Giselle, as well as the falls of numerous other ballet heroines, from Giselle’s predecessor, the Sylphide, to the Chosen 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 to Giselle, new stories emerge, and devices like the falls in Serenade take on structural as well as narrative functions. In the final moment of Serenade’s Russian Dance (Tchaikovsky’s “Tema Russo”), a group of dancers runs from the stage, but one falls and is left behind. As the ballet’s final section (the Elegy) begins, a man and woman enter the stage and approach the fallen dancer. The woman 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 she raises her arms to meet them. Near the end of the ballet, this dancer falls once again. After she completes a series of turns her partner catches her and puts her gently down on the stage. The second woman returns, completing a stage picture very sim- ilar to the one they formed at the beginning of the Elegy.The musicologist Solomon Volkov has compared this second pose to the sculp- tural grouping on Tchai kov sky’s tomb in St. Petersburg, where an angel with outspread wings grips the cross behind the bust of the composer. Yet this grouping also recalls a moment in Giselle. Near the end of the ballet, when the Wilis force Albrecht, Giselle’s beloved, to dance peats near the beginning and end of the to his death, he collapses near the front of the grand pas of the Wilis in Giselle, when the corps stage. Giselle approaches him from behind to de ballet forms a similar half circle on the urge him to stand and continue dancing. In ground. most productions, she presses his raised hand The fall of the ballerina furnished a narra- to her breast. Balanchine reverses this pose in tive climax in nineteenth-century ballets, Serenade: now the woman lies onstage while much like mad scenes lent nineteenth-centu- the man holds her raised arm. ry operas their most melodramatic moments. At the end of Giselle, early morning light And despite Balanchine’s claims in The Com- breaks the Wilis’ spell and saves Albrecht plete Stories that Serenade has no “concealed from their curse; Giselle’s love has saved him. story ” (p. 532), the soloist’s fall and the group At the end of Serenade, the woman who has fall 2012 29 fallen is lifted by three male dancers and car- sky’s finale to the penultimate place in the ried off into a shaft of light that shines from work provides the sense of flux that helps to the rear of the stage. Like the poses discussed define romantic irony as Anne K. Mellor does above, the ending of Serenade rewrites and re- in English Romantic Irony (1980). verses the ending of Giselle. The final stage A conversation with Karin von Aroldingen, picture in Serenade suggests death or transfig- the German-born NYCB ballerina who became uration, but of the heroine, in the absence of Balanchine’s confidante in the last decades a hero. of his life, revealed that Balanchine kept a These falls that interrupt Balanchine’s cho- Russian translation of the arch-romantic Ger- reography – at the end of the first movement, man author E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tales by his at the end of the third, and finally, in the bal- bedside table. That lifelong fascination with let’s closing section – furnish more than mere Hoffmann, and the sense, in Edwin Denby’s subtexts to another work; they also give the terms, of the floor moving beneath one’s feet ballet structure and closure. They arrest the in some of Balanchine’s most fervidly roman- work’s flow, providing transitions to the slow- tic works, suggests that reading Serenade as er tempi and the more intimate choreography romantic irony might not be far off, but the that follows each fall. Even if we allow Balan- more intri guing feature of Balanchine’s works chine’s conceit – that these falls represent is the multivalence of their symbols, the many mere accidents, “found” objects incorporated layers of meaningful connections they offer into the work of art with no reference what- the viewer. ever to another, iconic ballet – as plot devices There is another dance featuring a fall that they represent an ingenious combination of surely inspired some of the choreographic spontaneity and order. They are formal de- devices Balanchine used in Serenade. This is a vices masked as chance elements. dance for men, and a traditional dance, not a It is possible to read these moments in Ser- ballet. It derives from the folk repertory of enade as a delightfully anachronistic example Balanchine’s ancestral home, the Republic of of romantic irony in the ballet, to borrow a Georgia. The dance is called khorumi, and term from literary studies, where romantic seems a likely source for some of the formal irony denotes authorial self-consciousness, devices, groupings, and steps that Balanchine an open acknowledgment of the author’s used in Serenade. role and a gentle mocking of the art form’s The dance has a long history of staged per- conventions. Balanchine’s choreographic in- formances, its earliest recorded theatrical trusions are not dissimilar from those of presentation was in 1882 in Kuta’isi, the home Tristam Shandy’s narrator in their direct ad- of Balanchine’s father. In 1935, the year of dress to the reader. And although Balanchine Serenade’s New York premiere, the dance was likely never stepped out onstage during a featured in a festival of folk dance in Lon- performance of Serenade, he imposes himself don, and incorporated into Vakhtang Chabu - onto our viewings and readings of the work ki a ni’s choreography for Heart of the Hills, the through a series of statements about the work first Georgian ballet on national themes, set – an unusual practice for a choreographer to music composed by Balanchine’s brother, who professed to loathe talking about his Andrei Balanchivadze. crea tions. The dance derives from Ajara, the south- The choreographer’s rearrangement of western region of Georgia, and depicts the Tchai kovsky’s score is a more obvious inter- preparations for a battle, the battle itself, and vention that constitutes an unusual practice the victory celebration. The setting is night- for a modernist choreographer and son of a time, and a group of warriors enters in a composer who regularly affirmed his faith- straight line. They move stealthily, and stop fulness to the score. The transfer of Tchaikov - to look and listen for the enemy as they move

30 ballet review Heidi Vosseler and Charles Laskey of the American Ballet in 1935. (Photo: Vandamm) across the stage. Their leader spies the enemy Like Serenade, the khorumi is an ensemble and whispers to his men. They continue to the work. Individuals emerge from the group for enemy camp as another group of men spies short solos, but the work relies on precision on the enemy. At the command of the leader, dancing by the entire group to achieve its the battle begins. Indecisive at first, the foes effects. The two dances share a number of are eventually vanquished, and the warriors compositional elements, including weaving celebrate their victory. patterns, round dances, highlighted entrances The dance is in 5/4 or 5/8, and is tradition- and exits, and groupings that emphasize ally counted by the syllables “chabuk-chak- shifts in spatial contrasts. chabuk.” The name of the dance is derived Versions of the khorumi proliferate on You - from the Greek, thus “khor,” as in the Rus sian Tube, danced by professional folk-dance en- khorovod or indeed the word choreography. sembles of long standing, such as the Geor- fall 2012 31 gian National Ballet, and various local and ex- 3:45, 4:45, and most spectacularly at 5:20. At patriate groups, professional and amateur. the end of this last circle dance, three soloists The Georgian National Ballet’s version of the meet center stage. In choreography that re- dance (in its pre-2012 iteration) was clearly calls a moment from Serenade’s final move- arranged for a proscenium stage and most ment, the three join, whirl in circles, until readily reveals the correspondences to Bal- centrifugal force appears to break them apart anchine’s Serenade. I will refer to several oth- (YouTube: 5:45). er versions as well. Although most available One last connection between these two versions of this traditional dance correspond dances concerns a bit of “optional” choreog- in their constructions, slight variations can raphy that is generally included near the end be seen. of the khorumi, as the battle concludes. The One passage of the khorumi features a leader of the dance mimes injury and falls group of six dancers, holding hands, as they back, supported by the second dancer. This el- stealthily weave in and out of a moving group. ement is not included in the current filmed In Serenade, five women perform a more version of the khorumi by the Georgian Na- lyrical version of this “weaving” choreogra- tional Ballet, but a promotional brochure in- phy. But in both the Georgian dance and in cludes a photo of it from an earlier staging, Serenade, these sequences move in circles, and film of a much-abbreviated version of ending in straight-line formations. (YouTube the khorumi from the 1940s shows this now ‘3.Khorumi (Military dance)’: http://youtube/ optional ending (YouTube: http://youtube/Ex CEijCIw2QaU 1:47) X-pC4aMA8 2:30). Both dances feature group entrances and Obviously, the placement of this element, exits prominently. In the khorumi, they are near the dance’s end, resonates with the falls performed with extreme precision, and like in Serenade, especially the last one near the the weaving choreography, garner applause ballet’s end. Yet another version of the kho- from the audience (YouTube: 3:15 and the fi- ru mi, by a group called the Rustavi Ensemble, nal exit at 6:45). Balanchine’s choreography features an exit even more evocative of the for Serenade emphasizes straight-line forma- one Balanchine devised for the finale of Sere- tion, including the breathtaking exit in the nade (a number of other groups perform this first section, when the dancers briefly form a ending). line, then break away from the diagonal in a In the Rustavi version, a drummer and a spectacular departure from the stage. warrior follow the exiting line of dancers, This kind of line is made more impressive both borne aloft. The drummer stands upright early in the khorumi by gathering the dancers on the shoulders of a dancer; the warrior’s in a knot upstage to prepare for the battle be- posture indicates a fallen soldier from the fore unwinding the long line from it (YouTube: battle. Both these figures resonate with the 4:20). The choreography of Serenade exploits trans cendent finale of Serenade, where the this same spatial contrast: danc ers gather in fallen girl exits the stage standing on the a small group at the rear of the stage early in shoulders of her bearers, into the light. the work, then peel off from it in a similar Could Balanchine, a St. Petersburg youth way. The dancers in Serenade retreat to the for the most part, have known this dance? And corner a second time as well, although the where could he have seen it? Despite the chore- contrast in spatial volumes (and the similar- ographer’s enormous pride in his Georgian ity to the arrangement in khorumi) is less roots, his connection to his ancestral home- apparent this time. land was tangential at best. He wrote letters Both dances feature another familiar folk to his family in Russian, not in Georgian, and dance form, the round dance, or khorovod. it seems unlikely that he spoke Georgian into These occur repeatedly in the khorumi, at adult hood. Balanchine pro bably saw the kho-

32 ballet review 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.) rumi and oth er Cau casian dances in Russia studied composition with Rimsky-Korsakov, rather than in Geor gia. was called “the Georgian Glinka” for his pio- Yet as always with Balanchine, we should neering efforts in composing Geor gian art mu- probe the musical connections first. Balan- sic. Like many composers of his generation, chine’s father, Meliton Balan chivadze, who Meliton collected folk music around Georgia fall 2012 33 School of American Ballet students at Serenade’s preview on the evening of June 10, 1934. and organized choirs to perform traditional tional Ballet, Balanchine drew a caricature of Georgian music when he lived in St. Peters- himself costumed as a warrior-dancer. burg. Better evidence for Balanchine’s esteem of More to the point, Georgian music and Geor- folk choreography may be found in the Sum- gian dance – like the music and dance of most mer 2003 issue of Ballet Review. In “Balanchine ethnic traditions – are generally performed as I Knew Him,” Ann Hutch inson Guest re- together. The Georgian National Ballet’s priv- calls advice Balanchine once gave to a young ileging of dance over music furnishes the ex- choreographer: “For chor eographic devices, ception to the general practice of folk ensem- you can learn everything from watching the bles in Georgia today: other Tbilisi companies folk dances of different coun tries; they have regard the performance of music and dance as done it all” (p. 66). inextricably linked, and feature musicians Confirmation of Balanchine’s knowledge of and danc ers more equally. the kho rumi emerged in a casual conversation We know that the mature Balanchine at- with the choreographer’s nephew dur ing the tended rehearsals and performances of the Su - Maryinsky Ballet’s Balanchine Festival in St. khish vili troupe when it toured the United Petersburg in 2004. I spoke with him briefly States, first with the Moisey ev company in at the party, without reve aling my own inter- 1959, then independently the following year. est in Georgian folk dance, and asked if he The Georgian National Bal let’s souvenir pro- thought his uncle might have known this tra- gram includes a photogr aph of Balanchine dition. “Of course,” he re plied, “when he ar- with dancers from the troupe in those years. rived in Georgia the first thing he asked was A de cade before the visits of the Georgian Na- for musicians to come and perform the kho-

34 ballet review rumi” (conversation with the author, June 2, telling stories had become unfashionable in 2004, St. Petersburg). the ballet. Balanchine cut his theatrical teeth It’s easy to imagine how choreographic on the ballets of Marius Petipa, with their com- devices from folk dance, developed over cen- plex mime dialogues that danc ers of Balan- turies to serve minimal techniques to maxi- chine’s generation categorically rejected as mal effect, could provide useful training for old-fashioned and contrived. beginning dancers and provide them with Balanchine made his first works in an era simple, but effective choreographic devices. of ballet reform and revolution in St. Peters- Applause accompanies the simple weavings burg and Petrograd, and danced in Fyodor on the recording of the Sukishvili khorumi. Lopukhov’s innovative Tanzsymphonia, to Bee - The synchronized entrances and exits also thoven’s Fourth Symphony. With Diaghilev in elicit audience enthusiasm. Europe, Balanchine worked with famous easel Obviously, there is considerable irony in paint ers, composers, and librettists. In New staging a Georgian warriors’ dance for seven- York and New England, he faced less luxuri- teen American women in 1934, even though ous resources. With Serenade, Bal anchine con- the outdoor setting of Serenade’s preview per- tinued to work in episodes and pictures, con- formance recalls the fields where dances like tinuing a line evident in Apolloand Prodigal Son. the khorumi were traditionally performed. They became modernist attempts to disrupt Much as events in Serenade reverse the gender the surface – in paint erly terms, to break with roles in Giselle, Serenade’s single-sex ensemble the fini, or “licked” surface of academic paint- inverts the Georgian performance tradition, ing – but also to invest the works with mean- where dancing is mostly men’s work and they ings imported from other works. are the bearers of virtuosity. (Male dancers From the subtexts of Gi selle, or the ballet in the Caucausus dance on a kind of “pointe” blanc, to the stage pictures formed in the kho- – on the knuckles of the feet wearing tight- rumi – which, frank ly, only Balanchine would fitting boots that support the foot much like have known at the time he was creating and pointe shoes.) More importantly, the vestiges refining the new ballet – Serenade borrows of the Romantic-ballet tradition we typically from two dance monuments of two very dif- identify in Serenade – the nighttime setting ferent dance cultures: a traditional work with and the dancers’ falls – refer to the Georgian a long history of stage performance, and per- khorumi no less than to Romantic-era works haps the most frequently appropriated work such as Giselle. of Western nineteenth-century theatrical What can these two quite diverse sources dance. The borrowings from these two very tell us about Balanchine’s creative method, diverse sources gives insight into that “hinge” and about his early works in particular? Es- moment in Balanchine’s career as they also sentially, we see a choreographer asking – and foreshadow the wide range of movement learning – how to tell a story at a time when sources Balanchine would continue to mine.

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