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, men t 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 ballets, 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 later Balanchine works. When they reach the fallen 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 similar 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).

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