One needs a dose of perfection from time to time, to be transported by music, by dance that enhances the music, and Balanchine certainly does the trick. Part of the Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival (they also supported Balanchine’s Jewels here)—three short neo-classical pieces, about thirty-five minutes each, slip down very easily.
Trained both at St Petersburg’s Imperial Ballet School and at the Conservatory of Music, his father an opera singer and composer, Balanchine (1904–1983) makes music visible—or, as he said (he’s eminently quotable), music was his “floor for dancing” (thank you Gavin Plumley).
The most musical of choreographers, the three chosen works (out of an incredible total of 425 we are told in the programme notes), from 1929, 1935 and 1947, show The Royal Ballet Company off to invigorating excellence.
Serenade,Balanchine’s first original ballet in America in 1935, set to Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings in C four movements, opens with a stage under a blue sky full of statuesque goddesses (he did say ballet was woman, but did he put them through it…) in ethereal dresses, but in fact the piece evolved from a dance class, ad hoc at that, on the students at the School of American Ballet which he had just founded with Lincoln Kirstein.
There’s nothing ad hoc about tonight’s polished run-through. Some twenty-five dancers in total—women naturally outnumbering the men—with principals Lauren Cuthbertson, Mayara Magri and Melissa Hamilton flitting amongst them aided by William Bracewell and Ryoichi Hirano.
Solos, tableaux, pas de quatre, cinq, pirouettes in a circle, a merry-go-round of dance—what is astonishing is to see a row of five women of identical height and hair. Hands flick just so, and his fabled filigree patterning, maybe not so visible from the stalls (I’ve already bought a ticket to see this production from on high), is light and airy. There’s a burgeoning Orpheus and Eurydice narrative, but maybe I’m imaging it.
A delicious sorbet of a dance is followed by meatier fare, Prodigal Son, his second piece created in 1929 for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, with a new score from Prokofiev and fabulous set and backcloth design by fauvist / expressionist Georges Roualt, who seems to have taken the primitive Scythian route (ancient huts on a wide river). I also think of Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky score and the city of Pskov.
Three acts: leaving home, debauchery, returning home on knees. There’s a Pushkin short story, The Stationmaster, which may have triggered Balanchine’s visual folk tale imagination and the biblical theme of sin and redemption. And the bald-headed, goon-ish drinking companions are fantastical creatures, toads, bedbugs and crabs… where have I seen them before?
Very much of its avant-garde era, and a piece of dance history, the Prodigal Son also has some Russian-style bravura leaps, which Cesar Corrales takes on effortlessly. Natalia Osipova is the sexy, slithery Siren (naturally I think whore of Babylon) tying not only her long, plum cloak between her legs but him in knots. But I do worry about his knees when he has to traverse the stage on them till his father scoops him up in his arms and envelops him in his astonishing cloak.
Symphony in C by Georges Bizet (incredibly, written when he was only seventeen) is the icing on the cake. Women in white tutus and men in black (costumes Anthony Dowell), it was created for Paris Opera Ballet in 1947 as Le Palais de Cristal.
What I see is more bravura dancing, ending in what could be a grand defilé with some fifty dancers on stage, amongst them Fumi Kaneko, Vadim Muntagirov, Marianela Nuñez, Reece Clarke, Joseph Sissens, Daichi Ikarishi ably replacing Marcelino Sambé.
The four movements, Allegro, Adagio (Nuñez holds her balances long enough for Clarke to change sides) and the two Allegro Vivace, fly by. I don't want them to end. A young man’s (Bizet’s I mean, but it could be Balanchine’s) dreamscape? It certainly is mine. What a legacy...
Not only his, but, keeper of his flame, Patricia Neary’s—six decades of staging Balanchine’s ballets with The Royal Ballet and around the world. There is so much history here. She danced in Balanchine’s New York City Ballet in the sixties, and fulfilled his prediction that she’d make a good teacher.
There are amusing tributes in the programme, director Kevin O’Hare makes a speech, and flowers rain down when she takes her bow—now I’ve not seen that for a long time. The Royal Ballet dancers do her and Balanchine credit. Terrific—I’ve heard the dance and seen the music.