A Luminous Ode to Art Itself: Pacific Northwest Ballet's "Serenade"
Updated: Oct 6
“Serenade is a dance of rapture, of crushing beauty: a single mortal man spinning generations of mortal women into visible immortality, swirling, swooning, running, running, running into unending time with him.”- Toni Bentley
There could be no better way to open a season than to begin again at the foundation of it all: in parallel with hands lifted to block the light, palms illuminated, feet shifting to turn out and declare in an instant an ascendence into a different plane of existence. George Balanchine’s 1934 Serenade is a ballet so rich in serenity and intricate ingenuity that, given the chance, it could hold the night as a single bill, and we would leave wholly nourished and satisfied. But, wisely paired with a world premiere by Jessica Lang and the return of Alexei Ratmansky’s ever-delightful Pictures at an Exhibition, Pacific Northwest Ballet’s first program of the season is a mighty one, packed to the brim with artistic revelation.
It has been over a decade since Serenade fell like a blessing upon this stage. In that time, a new generation has risen into its vivid blue light, and there they stand, with history rushing underfoot. The beauty of its long-awaited return, the intensity of brilliance bottled within it, as well as the significance of its existence cannot be overstated.
In March of 1934, less than half a year after arriving in the United States, Balanchine asked Lincoln Kirstein to pray for him because his head was blank. He then proceeded to create the first work for his newly fledged group that would not only teach them to move the way he desired, but that would lay the path of American ballet while paying homage to the foundation of the art form and its simplest beauties. In his own words, “it seemed to me that the best way to make students aware of stage technique was to give them something new to dance, something they have never seen before.”
The early days of Serenade’s creation are steeped in lore. Did Balanchine really have the dancers raise their right arm in a striking resemblance to, or perhaps against, the Nazi salute but bent at the wrist because he was “not such a bad man,” or was the hand simply placed there to shield from the light? This all too familiar gesture was not lost on co-founder of the American Ballet, Eddie Warburg, and yet, there the hand remained. Whatever the case, it’s an unusual, yet entirely profound sight when the curtain rises on seventeen still figures, hands raised, bathed in pristine moonlight.
Balanchine later wrote that he thought “the hands should move first to give the girls practice”, and thus Serenade begins with a ritualistic sequence of exquisite simplicity. The gentle lift of the wrist, an encircled heart, the inexplicable beauty of a stage full of a single tendu; there they are, at the threshold, at the birth of American ballet. In an instant, they become dancers before us, shifting into first position and, by doing so, they enter the ballet, leaving all else behind, and simultaneously show us where the work of any dancer begins, where it always will begin.
From such cohesive simplicity, ingenuity breaks loose. After two minutes of undisturbed sacred unity, Balanchine spurs them to life with a thrush of blue tulle and begins his play with what can only be referred to as “Balanchinian geometry”: canons, asymmetries, uneven grouping lacing through each other, daisy chains of crossed wrists, bodies knitting themselves into kaleidescopic patterns that are still an unparalleled revelation ninety two years after their creation.
Serenade is born from Balanchine’s complete harmony with Tchaikovsky. It could not exist without this collaboration across the veil. More than any other ballet, Balanchine returned repeatedly throughout his career to alter it until at last, every strand of Tchaikovsky’s “favorite child” had been brought into full physical and spiritual realization. Serenade as we know it would not exist without the reverence that Balanchine held for his fellow St. Petersburgian. He had loved the score since he was a child, and as he began his first ballet on American soil, he later reflected that “Tchaikovsky encouraged me. Almost the whole Serenade is done with his help.”
Like so many of Balanchine’s works, Serenade is forever shaped by his original cast, that cobbled-together group of underdeveloped dancers who would become his first American students. Chance and circumstance of the fledgling group corralled Serenade into its form. When only nine dancers showed up for rehearsal, a dance for nine was made, when there were six, he choreographed a section for six dancers. Annabelle Lyon missed class one day, and thus the Waltz Girl will forever wander in late through the orchard of her fellow friends, searching until she finds her place. In rehearsal, Heidi Vossler fell down in the third movement and Balanchine told her to stay put. Even the poetic pose of the Dark Angel shielding the eyes of her partner was spurred on by the fact that Charles Laskey was nearsighted and Balanchine thought perhaps it would be best for him not to see at all.
Though Serenade is largely a work of pattern brilliance and equanimity, the three lead roles that emerged (originally shared by multiple dancers as separate solos) are distinctly vivid images of the way that Balanchine created spiritual depth without any tale beyond the story of his physical and musical fusion. Toni Bentley writes, “His devotion spawned the greatest body of work by a single choreographer in the history of dance. It will never be surpassed–these portraits of women–not in all future lifetimes.”
A new generation does not arrive in one fell swoop. There never comes a particular day where a new generation of dancers begins in a ballet company, but when Serenade is led with sublime artistry by three dancers who were all apprentices ten years ago, it suddenly seems quite evident: here we are, arrived. It was this cast’s debut, with Madison Rayn Abeo as Waltz Girl, Sarah-Gabrielle Ryan as the Russian Girl, and Amanda Morgan as the Dark Angel, that shifted the entire nature of the piece with a breath of artistic catharsis. Serenade does not call for acting or feigned drama, but there was something in the air during Saturday’s matinee that let honest emotion swell until the entire work felt like a genuine artistic release that just happened to be shaped by Balanchine’s vision.
Balanchine once said that Serenade simply could have been named “Ballerina”. For though Serenade is plotless, he traces the arc of a life in dance from the first turning out of the feet to a ritualistic rising into some place beyond all understanding. Each dancer in Serenade carries this arc within her, but at the helm of the ship is the Waltz Girl, a role that, when danced with such fully-fleshed presence becomes a picture of artistry like no other. Madison Rayn Abeo dances it with innate knowledge, as though it has always been hers. The most contented placement of her hand amidst the orchard, the peace she finds within Balanchine’s whirlwind, a striking string of grandiose pique turns, simply her carriage of self and the way she lingers a hair to relish the full beauty of every millisecond, somehow lets us see every thread of the path that led her to this place of lucid eloquence; glorious choices everywhere.
From the lavish height of her first entrance, Sarah-Gabrielle Ryan’s Russian Girl is not only so tightly technical that one can practically feel the precision of her minute details, but soulfully steeped with meaning. Russian Girl gains a vast majority of her character from the flitting joy of her crisp footwork, but in Ryan’s hands, no step lies empty. To not just dance the steps, but imbue them with soul, to extend the beauty of Tchaikovsky with poetically lush gesture, and to dwell in such gratitude that freedom resounds from every intricate step are the gifts of her interpretation that make her Russian Girl feel rather destined to be.
There’s a particular quality that overcomes Amanda Morgan in these ethereal Balanchine works. Last season it was Emeralds that revealed newfound serenity, and in Serenade, her long lines literally extend the beauty of the ballet, throwing billowing tulle to the clouds with mature authority. Her winging arms too, growing from Luther DeMyer’s back, are a breathtaking sight of swift command.
Toni Bentley described New York City Ballet’s Maria Calegari as possessing a “depth of movement–virtue embodied, fueled by soul rather than youthful duty”, and that is precisely what flitted across the stage during Saturday’s matinee. To witness such cathartic movement, to watch a dancer be overcome by music and Balanchinian delights is, to say the least, a very moving thing.
The finale scene of the Elegy is one that Balanchine had first sketched in his 1923 work, Funeral March, and though devoid of such morbid specificities, its mood is nonetheless a rapturous scene of transcendence in which not only the Waltz Girl is lifted towards some higher plane, but we with her. The symbolism of their arrangement is physically-manifested poetry: seven dancers in their opening parallel stance but risen onto pointe, the Waltz Girl higher still, lifted heavenwards, eight port de bras opening to embrace the light they were only a short while ago shielding with their hands.
Thirty five minutes after the curtain’s rise, all has happened, nothing has happened; time has stilled and spun its own cocoon of blue, love has come and gone as swiftly as the moon’s clear light. Nothing but awe in its wake.
Between two jam-packed, technical ballets, Jessica Lang’s world premiere of Pages is a thought-provoking and atmospheric reflection on the creative process. Thick haze hangs suspended above endless black, a hanging transparency veils shifting form, a white block builds scene, place, and obstacle. A solitary chair stands witness, later, another one hangs suspended mysteriously in the dark abyss.
Pages was originally meant to premiere in June in Sun Valley, the place that inspired Lang to reflect on the solitary nature of creation, but after a summer snow storm swept away the opportunity, Pages joins the five other Lang works that have premiered in McCaw Hall. It’s a world away from Serenade, and yet, in their inventiveness, the two works are surprisingly compatible neighbors. Like Serenade, there is no clear narrative to follow, but images emerge that stir and conjure, lingering days later as visceral metaphor.
Using David Lang’s vocal arrangement of “When I’m Alone”, a cacophony of sound strings together a singular dancer’s wrestling with what it is to be alone with oneself. Others watch from the dim corners of the stage, waiting to add to her profession like the layers of voices themselves. Amidst the dissonant phrases of spoken word, physicality often feels stunted by the words themselves, for there is nowhere for the movement to flow, but when words give way to stirring, strung-out strings Pages softens into serene beauty.
It is here, where low-hung lights illuminate chiseled strength and the delicacy of Jillian Lewis’ costumes, that Pages reaches a flow state. In music’s soft embrace, movement becomes a dreamy, mesmerizing thing. The experience of witnessing a simulation of inner noise versus a breath of relief in that airy silence gives Pages a multi-dimensionality of not only mood, but style. This timeless orb stands in sharp contrast to the returning dissonance of vocal layers, as well as a bustling entourage of quick, flurried velocity that incorporates some lovely nods to Lang’s past vocabulary and reminds us of the daring strength her work demands.
Pages is a work that gains beauty with every viewing. Filled with unusual physicality, things our eyes have never consumed wake us up in a way with the possibilities of how bodies can come into movement together. An attitude threaded through the needle of another’s arms, three bodies morphing into bridge and waterfall at once, the inner revelation of wrangling with unrest, it all takes visual form in shapes we instantly recognize as true reflections of experience.
Set and props give Pages its clear focus on authorship over life, and the reality of a creative life. A rectangular block is used throughout in every formation possible, a scroll of paper both contains and disrupts, and in the final scene, as the lead dancer stands at the end of the scroll facing these voices, it’s a rather ingenious image of creation versus self. As she casts them away from her path, ripping paper from the block, Pages reaches a cohesive close. There she scribbles “TRUST” upon the block’s facade, and with the declarative crossing of the final “T”, all has been said, cut to black.
An ever-present voice in Lang’s creations, Leah Terada uses her instrument viscerally to shape Pages with the sharp rawness of her profession. The urgency she finds within its final moments, and the intimacy of her relations within that dark space is a testament to her ability to evoke more than one can comprehend. Another striking form in that stark light, Dylan Wald and Christopher D’Ariano have a beautifully poetic partnership that is a powerhouse pairing of vast gesture and command. Watching Wald consume space like oxygen and fill the stage with a larger than life purpose is, after missing his presence for half of last season, something we cannot possibly take for granted. In bold vigor and reach, he reminds us without fail that this is what he was born to do.
It never fails to surprise me how, even on the fourth run, a new cast can reshape a piece, can quite literally spin its core into a different tale. With an all-possessing truth, Elle Macy weaves a tale that only she could tell. Even Lang’s most abstract forms are transformed by her pacing and deliberation. There’s a tendency in such declarative works to turn towards the raw edges of humanity, and Macy somehow does this without losing the beauty, detail, or tenderness of her poetic unraveling.With bright-eyed curiosity, and strength brimming through her limbs, Macy is a storyteller whose artistic growth seems to know no end.
The unexpected highlight of the program is the return of Alexei Ratmansky’s unusual, witty, and fascinating Pictures at an Exhibition. Modest Mussorgsky’s score, inspired by the experience of walking through a retrospective showing of his friend, Viktor Hartmann’s paintings, led Ratmansky to create distinct worlds of character and style; art inspired by art inspired by art. Last seen when it premiered at PNB in June 2017, its return serves as a grand celebration of art that practically rang from the rafters on opening night.
Just as Balanchine was led not by desire for a specific outcome, but rather by the story that the music tells, Ratmansky responds with the freedom of a child moving organically to music; a rather brilliant concept in itself. He moves against expectation, constantly full of surprises, wit, and humor, yet never forcing these qualities. He simply builds a landscape of imagination in completely genuine reaction to the score, and this creates a marvelous effect, for more than any other work of the night, the dancers of Pictures listen. Truly listen. Not for musical cues or timing, but as if to know how to respond to the spontaneous moods of Christina Sieman’s solo piano.
Wendy Whelan, who first staged the work at PNB, calls Pictures at an Exhibition an “unending treasure chest of ideas”, and indeed, Ratmansky’s curiosity leads him to touch on a wealth of the human condition. His ability to convey emotion through body language so that it is instantly recognizable beyond the classical vocabulary is infused with an eccentric sense of honesty. Even when his dancers are slumping to the ground or pattering about unballetically, there is beauty in this musical honesty. Though the work is filled with humor and whimsy, it never feels like Ratmansky is trying to play a comic, he takes such a musical response as seriously as any other.
Against the vivid hues of Kandinsky’s Color Study Squares with Concentric Circles, the range of expression is immense. From the daring spontaneity of the finessed attack in“Gnomus”, to the menacing power of “Baba-Jaga”, and the soundless, soft as an evenings’ breeze steps of “Tranquillo”, Ratmansky demands an entirely unique physical adeptness and vocabulary. In the fluttering speed of “The Tuileries Garden”, Angelica Generosa tosses her cares to the wind like a dashing bumblebee to flit through the glee of Ratmansky’s precise footwork with all the vivacious freedom in the world.
In “Bydlo” (cows), Ratmansky shapes character with physical torque, letting his dancers lose their balletic postures and instead turn their forms as impressionistic as the art behind them. His choreography is entirely unafraid of the shape that it takes, and that kind of freedom brimming through mighty folkloric kicks, stomping pointe shoes, and thrusted limbs is a novel delight. There is something wonderfully cathartic about such a heavy beat and the way that they anchor themselves to the gravity of its mood, falling into its rhythm as if discovering the joy of movement for the first time.
After giving his female dancers a gleefully stomperish time, five men pounce upon “Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks” with all the whimsy that such a title suggests. In Pictures, Ratmansky choreographs with a “why not?” attitude, and what evolves from such freedom is a viciously good time. There’s an element of play in the way that he lets his dancers respond to the music, and the comradery that he paints there, in whimsical shapings of humor and musicality, is unexpectedly poignant.
One of the purest gifts of the night is the soft-spun realm of “The Old Castle”, where blue and yellow tranquility weaves a heavenly pas de deux. Like two sails upon the sea, Dylan Wald and Yuki Takahashi float in a time-suspended dream that instantly recalls the pristine clarity of their Afternoon of a Faun. Their pairing is far too rare, for they sink into the soul of Mussorgsky’s serenity as though they weave each note themselves. Wald, ever Apollonian in his freedom and deliberation, and Takahashi, a supple swallow soaring windswept in his arms, are in their responsiveness to each other a song of pure poesy. Nothing short of divine.
To place Pictures at an Exhibition on a program with Serenade inevitably lets us find connecting threads between the two, and is a rather brilliant choice to frame an evening. Two Russian scores composed six years apart, two St. Petersburg-born choreographers creating works in New York City eighty years apart, and in the choreography itself, subtle nods to Balanchine not only in the sheer inventiveness of Ratmansky’s form, but in the port de bra of the finale that on a program such as this, ties the evening with a silver bow.
The conviction with which they all sail through Ratmansky’s arduous finale is an exuberant celebration of art and life coursing through their limbs. At the end of a marvelous night, this is all there is: the precious present moment where light falls warm upon a carefully placed hand, an upturned cheek, and it seems we’ve lived a lifetime since the curtain first rose on that blue cathedral of light. And indeed, we have.
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