In the Presence of Transcendence: PNB’s ‘Serenade’, Round Two
Updated: 5 days ago
“I composed Serenade out of an inner urge. I felt it, and therefore, I dare to think it is not devoid of real dignity.” -Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Even after two weekends of performances, the curtain rising upon the startling blue of Balanchine’s crystalline formation never fails to elicit complete awe. Caressed by moonlight, with dew glistening upon the harmony of their spacing, Serenade is Balanchine’s painting of a world beyond, a work that travels through the physical towards the unseen. No matter how many times it greets us, the clarity of its prussian light and stillness is entirely new.
Serenade is one of the many Balanchine ballets that remind us that he was not only a master craftsman of movement and musicality, but that he had access to a kind of spiritual depth that remains untouched in its scope. For there, in the places where profound movement is raised to a kind of indescribable reverence–where arms turn towards heaven, and we see not the curve of the arm, but the endless, yearning reach, or when the offering of a hand seems to hold the entire weight of existence in its gently curled palm–Serenade, at ninety-two years old, is still a work that illuminates and captures what moves us inexplicably as human beings.
Up until his death, Balanchine was still returning to Serenade, his most timeless work, to refine and embellish it without tampering with its core, its original purpose. Namely, the simplicity that spins itself into genius. Lincoln Kirstein noted that in Serenade, Balanchine strove to strengthen the corps de ballet “past anonymity or any subordinate position”, and it is vastly devoted to the various ways that simple classroom techniques can be combined to create bewildering patterns. As in any Balanchine ballet, there are more moments than one can count where there is only an inner utterance of “ah” at the way that motion illustrates music; a new kind of seeing spurred on by the unpredictable delights of such a sensitive musical ear.
He leaves not a single millisecond of Tchaikovsky’s score unspoken for. Their ceaseless flurry of intricacies –dashing here and there, sweeping lush arms across the clear blue sky–adds layers of depth and unforeseen felicities to the celestial tenderness of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade in C. Balanchine lets us not only see this harmony, but feel how tightly woven sound and physical energy are. It is a guttural effect when the dancers slip back into their orange orchard formation with hands placed just so against the light, returning to the parallel position from where it all began, just as Tchaikovsky returns to his opening theme like a touchstone. The staccato port de bra matching the accented descending chords of the score, the use of repetition to cement the score’s melodies, and the satisfaction of toe taps adorning the orchestra’s pizzicato is almost too much for a heart to bear.
In so many of his works, Balanchine uses an incandescent tool–namely the introduction of a step that begins before the music actually matches it, and then in an instant, they ‘click’ and we, as rhythm-bodied beings, feel the novel thrill of this before we can explain why. In Serenade, he was already playing with this, having steps come softly and then letting the music push the same step into fully-realized motion. It is used to a stirring effect in the Russian Girl’s emergence from her dreamy state, and lets the most simple steps ring with cathartic will set free within the music’s rise.
Seen from the front, the swirling, rising sea of blue is brilliant enough, but glimpsed from the second tier, the ballet gains an entirely new form. I’ll always wonder whether he envisioned the creation of such works from a bird’s-eye view or from the front of the room, for surely the dichotomy of his large group engineering and most minute gestures could not come about without being able to see it all from every angle. There are a multitude of moments in Serenade where the movement itself is not revolutionary, but the way that he layers, poses, and interlaces contrasting motions as well as identical ones creates baffling images. He shows us that the same step simultaneously performed in two different formations alters it entirely. As Arlene Croce wrote in 1984, “pattern is everything”, and in Serenade, the linking of steps and bodies is not only a visual marvel, but a way to illustrate the sisterhood that fills the ballet.
As when the stage clears to let a breath of stillness fall in the wake of kaleidoscopic flurry and five women with overlapping arms en cronne begin a ritual of supreme presence. It is one of the most tender moments of the ballet: a presented hand, a gestural offering that extends as offering towards the unseen, linked limbs that twist and uncurl into geometry, and the little inflections of head tilts that so beautifully punctuate the purity of the music. As Toni Bentley puts it, far from the technical whirlwind only moments before, this scene is “a witnessing of women in allegiance, no cause, no common adversary, just five women bonded in music, beauty, and bourees.”
Serenade stands firmly on the threshold, rooted in the traditions of Balanchine’s choreographic forefathers and simultaneously declaring the placement, speed, abstract beauty, and novelty that would inform American ballet as its own unique lineage of ballet. Within that ornate sea of blue, we see not only the intoxication of vision that would become the future of American ballet, but the homage he paid to the history of this art form. Shadows of willis, swans, and sylphs abound, aided by the airy tulle of the Karinska costumes that finally sealed the ballet’s classical look in 1952.
Balanchine always claimed to disregard Giselle for its superfluous drama, and yet, here in Serenade, his most ghostly ballet, dancers charm, drift, float, disappear and reappear as though not firmly of this world. We find the stage bordered in a Giselle-like line of penches, arabesque hops that turn in place to echo Giselle’s Act Two entrance, four lines of dancers cross the stage in arabesque hops that mirror the wilis, and the loosened hair (not added to the ballet until 1978) that recalls Giselle’s mad scene. Though most New York audiences had not seen Giselle at the time of Serenade’s premiere and could thus not have made these connections, the wellspring of history beneath his dancers' feet is no empty gift of reverence to ballet’s lineage. He was stretching a thread across time, giving his dancers “dance–not as a means to achieve a purpose, but as the purpose itself” (Bentley). Spinning the future without turning his back on the past.
In the Elegy, the world he’s been building of speed and counterbalance suddenly evolves into a different realm. He transcends his own work. The story is in the music. It’s all there: the yearning, passion, and lush romanticism, but what he did with the score renders it a swell of poetry. It remains a plotless ballet, and yet, the shadow of a story appears, or rather, images imprint themselves upon us and let our hearts do with them as we please. What he captured there, in the most tender of gestures and an almost religious tone, is unparalleled.
In an early review of Serenade, Edwin Denby wrote that Serenade depends on “the sweetness of the bond” between dancers, and though that sounds frivolous, it is entirely true. For in order for Serenade’s emotional resonance to ring, dancers must exist on the same plane and commit fully to telling the same plotless story in breath and momentary glance. During the second weekend, it was once again the cast of 2016 apprentices that managed to conjure up the necessary cohesion and depth of feeling which transforms Serenade into a soul song.
The beauty of Sarah-Gabrielle Ryan’s Russian Girl is that she seems to be discovering the beauty of the ballet at the same moment as us. She sees the wonder of it all: the sacredness of five interlaced rings, the significance of the path she traces, the pure delight of falling into Tchaikovsky’s score with cathartic will, and in such wonder, she reveals and relishes Balanchine’s intricacies like no other. Impassioned, chiseled precision, and delicacy coinciding with corralled strength floods all she does. The power with which she pushes from the earth will never fail to be a marvel in itself, for she is boundlessly free, and in such freedom, finds the drama that lies within the steps themselves. If only Balanchine could see this: the fully committed, technically crystalline, and soulful performances that would fill his ballet some ninety-two years later.
At the heart of Serenade, Madison Rayn Abeo’s Waltz Girl is all grace, bright-eyed delight, lyricism, and ease. She traces a complete journey through this plotless tale: from the youthful insistence in the placement of her hand amidst the orchard, to the soul-stirring longing of the Elegy that, by some miracle, makes it seem like we’ve watched her grow into a fully-realized artist in the span of thirty minutes. Her musical ear lets the smallest of inflections catch the light. Perhaps most profound is the way she wakens at the end of the Elegy. Roused by Tchaikovsky’s melancholy and fate calling her home, she runs to her “mother” with the urgency of Giselle, in complete surrender to the score’s insistence. Arms open to the heavens, full soul reaching, utterly sublime.
The other highlights of this run of Serenade include Angelica Generosa’s Russian Girl, who is, as we find her in any Balanchine ballet, brilliantly bright, for she carries his daring spirit within her. Her fleet footwork is only paralleled by the divine freedom that floods her. In the Elegy, when she runs to Dammiel Cruz-Garrido’s waiting arms, it is with the feverish necessity of waiting a lifetime to do so, and entirely saturated with poetry. Innately swift urgency, sustain, and charm…what a moving thing it is to see a dancer so fulfilled by the steps they inhabit.
Yuki Takahashi too, with her eagerness and flighty speed, flies through like a gust of wind. The drift of her silken hands embellishing each gesture, the swell of romanticism in her carriage, and the most grateful bow towards the audience amidst the waltz is all cloaked in an ease that could only be her own.
Perhaps there is no other way to describe Clara Ruf Maldonado’s Waltz Girl than drenched in emotion. From the moment she finds her place among her colleagues, it seems as though everything in the world lies contained in the hand she places and watches with utmost rapture. Deeply feeling from the beginning, her delicate lyricism and passion tell a story that, by the time she hears fate calling, is an all-possessing evocation that is nothing short of glorious.
As the curtain fell upon this profound tableau one final time, there it was again: a kind of crushing loss for the indescribable beauty and bittersweet bliss that weaves its way through Serenade. Until next time, there they rest in memory, reaching towards sublimity.
It’s always intriguing to see how much a piece can grow before your eyes in the span of two weekends. In between two musically-reliant works, Jessica Lang’s Pages is born in a dark, hazy space in which the mind can rest and let impressions land as they will. In a daze of insistent motion, Lang reminds us that her work always reveals some feeling or image we’ve never gleaned from a piece of dance before.
It is fitting that in a triple bill program which pays such reverence to the existence of art, Pages recognizes the process of creation itself, and the multitude of voices and dark corners that must be overcome in order to create. In the cacophony of layered voices, movement suspended in strung-out strings, and frantic, impulsive speed, Lang captures a nearly too-intimate reality in which we recognize ourselves; all the beauty and the weaknesses of being a person drawn to create.
Days later, what lingers most poignantly is the work’s final scene: a dancer gently casting away intruding voices, and chiseling upon the page the word “trust” with declarative persistence. With the mighty crossing of that final “t”, and the lights cutting to ebony, a satisfied “hmm” closed every single performance of Pages. Should audible audience responses be any clue, the truth in such an image, and perhaps the permission to take such advice into life beyond the theater, is no empty gesture.
Throughout the work, the central figure slowly separates herself from the other voices, until she stands in opposition to their influences. In Pages, Elle Macy is a pillar of strength and fluidity who extends the work's beauty by proliferating every ounce of Lang’s vision to its molecular limit. Her honest evocation of inner life dwells in her ability to disappear into a character and let revelatory strands of truth emerge. Her lyricism, levity, and energy change the entire nature of the piece by stringing together the most unrelated steps and imbuing them wholeheartedly. The polarity of strength and delicacy, of visceral declaration and revelatory details, finds Macy where we always find her: deeply centered within a work’s truth, professing a choreographer’s language as though it is her own.
To name a few more unforgettable visions: all the inner wrangling made visible through Sarah-Gabrielle Ryan’s exterior strength, both Ashton Edwards and Yuki Takahashi turning faster and with more ease than the eye can understand, Malena Ani draping herself upon the darkness like a butterfly, and Dylan Wald’s ever more luminous magnitude of presence.
The very best of works are those that seem unafraid to take whatever form the music declares. Just as Balanchine did not think about the emotional intention but rather only “about the composer and his music”, Ratmansky lets Pictures at an Exhibition gleam its character from the score’s indications. Placed on a program with Balanchine, it’s also clear to see just how differently these two choreographers derived dance from a piece of music.
Balanchine’s genius lies in his ability to make music wholly visible, while Ratmansky shapes the voice of the music into a character, or into an atmospheric tonality. His abstract renderings of these characters, and the musical worlds they inhabit, leaves Pictures at an Exhibition still brimming with allure after two weekends. It is a gem of novelty. A deeply intimate ballet, where joy and wit weave as easily as the sheer expressions of emboldened spirit that rage through Ratmansky’s work.
“A lot of times, I’m going to go the opposite way, not the expected way,” he once said, and in Pictures, there’s a certain charm in this that overtakes any expectation. The authenticity of his shapings relies on the dancers belief in them, or rather, in their own honest findings of truth within Ratmansky’s expressions.
There’s the gratifying, heavy beat of “Bydlo” where swinging arms and stooped forms unapologetically paint the score’s mood and brim with relinquishment to its power (Sarah-Gabrielle Ryan in particular, fills every fiber of its cathartic drama). There’s the darting glee of the “Unhatched Chicks”, which requires immense presence in order to make such games of play and humor resound (Dylan Wald’s pure thrill and finessed agility is an unforgettable delight). A moment later, Amanda Morgan and Christopher D’Ariano find themselves lost in the deep blue, patting and stomping about, becoming the geometric shapes behind them, and filled with dramatic demands (which in the opposite cast, find Dylan Calahan and Lily Wills as rather brilliant dramatists).
Angelica Generosa pounces upon Ratmansky’s playful steps with glimmering anticipation, always catching the audience’s eye as if to say ‘look at this delight!’. At her side, Jory Luther, who was thrown in at the last moment for all seven performances, is not only a perfect pairing for her dashing technicalities, but already possesses a presence that lets all else fall away when he brushes the earth with the most poetic tenderness. In an entirely different hue, Luther DeMyer as some rendition of Baba Yaga is a menacing feat of might and exhale whose power overtakes the stage. Sarah-Gabrille Ryan fills this fiery scene with glimmers of her indelible Firebird: all fierce-eyed chiseled precision upon which she plays with the fullest expression of both music and inner ardor.
But far from such bold physical renderings, lies a time-suspended cocoon of beauty. Within it, Yuki Takahashi and Dylan Wald dwell upon a different plane, in the clouds somewhere, far removed from all that came before and all that will come after. There is only this moment, where their seamless flow of finely-attuned musicality and presence swells the stage; each breath a revelation. “The Old Castle” was created on Wendy Whelan in the final months of her thirty-year career, and in her footsteps, Takahashi rises to a level of maturity that we’ve rarely seen before. Wald has been at such a level for years, and yet, to watch his innate intention, focus, and exuberance as he soars unbound from the earth never fails to overwhelm in its pure virtue. At the end of such a dream, there she stands like a sail upon his arms, and off they go, ascended beyond, beyond it all.
If there was only one word to describe Pictures at an Exhibition, it would be ‘vivid’, not just for Mark Stanley’s lighting that occasionally paints the stage as rich as a children’s book, but for the quality of movement which fills it. Though nearly the entire ballet is shaped by the varying characters and arising atmospheres of Mussorgsky’s score, in the finale, Ratmansky lets the cohesion of his dancers flood the stage. It is only a cast of ten, there’s not a tutu in sight, and yet Ratmansky has somehow captured the essence of a classical ballet finale. To the ceremonial procession of Mussorgsky’s “Great Gate of Kyiv”, it is a ritualistic exuberance that echoes both the canon’s most classical polonaises and the kind of endurance test that recalls what Twyla Tharp puts her dancers through in In the Upper Room. The intensity of expression is chilling in this arduous finale, and at the end of the run, could not have contained more gratitude for these incandescent moments we get to share.
I said it last week, but I must say it again: the pairing of Pictures at an Exhibition with Serenade is a rather brilliant way to open a season and show the inheritance of artistic freedom. Add a third work which veers in an entirely different direction in terms of musical reliance, and the abundance of creative liberty lingers prolifically.
Serenade streams through October 12; don’t miss out! Learn more at pnb.org/digitalseason
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