Programming Choices and Content in Balanchine's Wake
On a mixed bill, a ballet is always more than just its own bordered existence; its lingering air is inevitably influenced by its neighbors and what their relation reveals about the other. Two recent programs at New York City Ballet: Masters at Work 1 and Eclectic NYCB 1, felt like a selection of works randomly drawn from a hat that, despite their individual strengths, were puzzle pieces that didn’t quite fit beside or strengthen each other.
Masters at Work featured the work of City Ballet’s most influential early choreographers George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins in a triple bill meant to show the vast scope of the choreographic voices that shaped the company’s identity. Balanchine's lovely 1968 La Source and 1948 The Four Temperaments (rather jarring in juxtaposition) are academic studies compared to the lightheartedness of Jerome Robbins’ The Concert (Or the Perils of Everyone) that closed the night.
This selection of Balanchine works illustrates not only the range of his work, but what spurred on the scope of his artistic voice, namely the music. La Source, set to excerpts from Léo Delibes’ La Source and Sylvia, is all the classical, musical delight that fills Balanchine’s Coppélia. The ballet’s central pas de deux premiered just two years after The Four Temperaments, and shows that despite Balanchine’s desire to push ballet to new heights, his classical ideals never ceased to coexist. One would assume that such a choreographer would follow a steady line as he brought ballet from Russia to the United States, but twenty years after the avant-garde experimentalism that fills The Four Temperaments, a year after Jewels, the same year as Slaughter on Fifth Avenue, five years before the neoclassical treasure Stravinsky Violin Concerto, and just six years before he would explore Delibes again in his charming Coppélia, here he was, returning to build upon his 1950 Sylvia Pas de Deux. For him, the music made the calls. Delibes ushers forth felicitous delights of the classical vocabulary, and it could be no other way.
There’s a tenderness to the Balanchine we see in La Source, a romanticism formed by crossed wrists, folk-infused brushes of the floor, pirouettes with hands on shoulders, the way detailed phrasing seems to breathe through the score, and the design of the corps de ballet that is so pleasing to the eye that there’s really no need for a soloist.
In the pas de deux, Tiler Peck and Roman Mejia swell each step with charm. Peck’s delight in all the little flickers of musicality, her velveteen ease, and the soft spun wilt of her hands are encased in the pure clarity of her intentions. Just the attention that she pays to what her feet are doing, the way she seems charmed by their own inventions, brings forth Balanchine’s details into a new light. When Mejia comes into motion, it’s always with an abundance of power bounding across the stage like a jackrabbit, and with an adoration for what he does, an inner content that seems to make each billowy gesture and gravity-unbound leap more meaningful.
Premiering twenty years earlier on the first program of Ballet Society, The Four Temperaments, to a commissioned score by Paul Hindemith, is a world away from the refinery of La Source. From the curtain’s rise, we’re in an entirely different Balanchine sphere, one where flexed feet and articulations of position already allude to his future neoclassical ballets. The scope of his experimentation within The Four Temperaments is a playground where elements arise that he would later reuse: the flicked-up, flexed hands of Rubies and Stravinsky Violin Concerto, the jogging steps and one dancer physically manipulated by four which he replicates in Rubies. What an interesting thing, to think of what appeared here in 1946 that he chose to revisit or explore further in future works. Already in 1946, here he was, experimenting with shape, pacing, and style, seeing how he could reshape the balletic body, how he could twist, collapse, and declare.
The Four Temperaments is one of Balanchine’s less musically-driven ballets. While he usually paints the music’s texture before us, The Four Temperaments contains a certain opposition to the force of score. Nonetheless, Balanchine builds patterns that repeat until the second we start to expect it, and then he moves on. He plays with off-balance partnering, musically-avoidant posing, hip thrusts, and a most unballetic, draping physicality. Though most of his works that transitioned to simpler costumes benefited from such clarity, The Four Temperaments could benefit from the character of its original, surrealist costumes by Kurt Seligmann. Nearly eighty years after its premiere, The Four Temperaments is still unapologetically modernist, seeking novelty over beauty, and style over tradition in a way that places Balanchine far ahead of his time.
Perhaps after such serious reverence for the works of Balanchine, closing the night with something lighter is wise, but Jerome Robbins’ The Concert (Or the Perils of Everyone) lands as an inept work of theatricality after two rigorous works. It devalues Robbins’ work, and highlights just how essential programming choices are to the reception of works.
But, putting that aside, joy resides in The Concert. Though the dancing is slight, and often purposefully unpoised, though we must tuck away any expectation that we come to the ballet to see beauty, there are moments where whimsy wins us over. The theatricality of the pianist lifting a cloud of dust from the piano, the humor of a corps de ballet falling apart in a waltz, and a Swan Lake mockery are all humors for a ballet-loving crowd. Robbins himself noted that in The Concert, “through the music, all the characters abandon their everyday selves.” Each distinct Chopin selection elicits a different world upon the stage, and the dancers transform themselves readily (with crass tutus, umbrellas, and the most charming butterfly wings) to step into the musical world set for them. The Concert is filled with images that linger like icons: an umbrella-adorned dancer lifted above a bouquet of rain-awaiting hands, a dashing butterfly fellow overtaken by the glee of the music, the simplicity of costumes and physicality that instantly render characters before us. But the dancing itself is not the focus of The Concert, and perhaps that is where it has a tendency to grate at the end of such a Balanchinian night. It’s a reminder to not take ourselves so seriously, a work that has the power to close a program with uplifting, artistic freedom and a laugh, but the ladder up to such a plane must be set, and in this particular program, not all of us made the climb in time.
Eclectic NYCB 1 brought together three distinct pieces that, tonally, have little business being placed back to back. Christopher Wheeldon’s Continuum, created for San Francisco Ballet in 2002 floats about in an unmusical space with jagged shapes, Alexei Ratmansky’s grief-filled Solitude is as poignant as at its 2024 premiere, and springing from such a dark space, Balanchine’s delightful Bourée Fantasque is, in his own words: “a dance spectacle” that puts the musicality of the program opener to shame.
Whereas New York City Ballet’s founder relied so heavily on music to guide and shape a piece, in Christopher Wheeldon’s work, I always find a disregard for the thread of music running beneath his motion. In Continuum, a rambling, leaden-footed piano creates an empty space where dance blossoms on top, but not from the music. With contorted lines, flexed feet, and a sedate pace, Continuum is a post-modernist exploration of movement that, despite its occasional flickers of ingenious lifts, lacks lyricism, musicality, and beauty. Its presentational manner of floating static motion around a stage for forty-five minutes fails to reach two elements that can sustain such a work: a sense of life and necessity. Perhaps it is better suited to dwell between two works on a triple bill, but as an opener, it seemed to place a damper on the program before the ball even had a chance to roll.
At the center of City Ballet’s Eclectic NYCB program lies Alexei Ratmansky’s hauntingly beautiful Solitude. Like his Wartime Elegy, created for Pacific Northwest Ballet in 2022, what he is able to evoke in drawn-out, drifting, shadowed forms is a landscape of wordless tales.
Curtain rise upon a desolate scene, just a frozen figure seated upon the stage with a lifeless child’s hand in his own. All around, a flurry of dim figures, yet still he sits. He sits while folk melodies lift his fellow dancers into measured evocations and tender gestures that rise and fall within the grim dark. He sits while a landscape of ever-shifting shapes and shadows move with the weight of grief. When two of these figures notice for the first time his stillness, they pull the child to standing, and the work gains a new dimension. The child becomes one of them, re-enlivened, or perhaps, brought beyond.
When the man (Joseph Gordon) at last moves from his sedentary, frozen state, he is off-kilter, leaning unbalanced as he charges towards the child, who slips away before he can be reached as though he was never there at all. Loose, dashing flashes of grief flood the stage through Gordon’s vulnerability until the weight of Ratmansky’s own cathartic artistic release is palpable within Gustav Mahler’s heartfelt score.
At last, the child is in his arms again, and they stand separated from the rest, divided until the score stirs them once more. Wild forms overlain, a manége chase, flurried shadows of individual until, all at once, there they are again: the man and child on the ground in their starting places as though all motion was nothing more than an unearthly dream.
Balanchine’s musical choices could be a book in itself, for throughout his career he struck inspiration in a vast range of styles and genres that gave his catalogue of over four hundred works the variety of a musical connoisseur. In Boureé Fantasque, he lets the band strike up a rousing “festival pace”, while touching with delicate humor on the conventions of classical ballet and interweaving popular dance forms.
He compresses so much of his artistic sensibility in Boureé Fantasque, from the rollicky precursor to Stars and Stripes, to the swooning, evening mood of the second movement, where Serenade-like nods to Giselle peep through the romantic air and long tulle. In some ways, Boureé Fantasque a precursor to Jewels, in that he found that distinct movement styles could be interwoven into a cohesive image.
In three movements, he forms a Balanchinian smorgesborg. A classical pas de bourée that melts into angularity, the curated humor of uneven partnerships, and tasteful humors that blend with sentimental nostalgia in a swinging waltz tune. In the finale, a stage full of thrilling formations arrive and fold with building velocity until our eyes can hardly catch up to the fleet feet and dashing glimmers of brilliance. What a joy, to watch his visions fill this stage.
New York City Ballet has the tremendous task of carrying on George Balanchine’s legacy and ideals while not remaining in the past. The company performs more ballets per season than any other company in the country, and slating them into perfectly curated programs is surely no easy task. To be fair, perhaps in the house of Balanchine, programming has never been the greatest concern, considering that Emeralds, Rubies, and Diamonds first premiered on a quadruple bill with Prodigal Son of all things. Perhaps we’ve been spoiled by curated programs that chart the development of a choreographer or that reveal similar threads picked up by generations of artists, or learned to let work seep beyond their boundaries. Either way, there is something to be said for the way that a work is influenced by what comes before and after its curtain, what is revealed, or fails to be illuminated by placing two works side by side.
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