Lively Currents From Balanchine’s River of Ballets

<First published online in the New York Times on April 27, 2007>

Balanchine is a lost man, Lincoln Kirstein said around the end of 1939, only he said it in French: “Balanchine — c’est un homme perdu.”

George Balanchine, the genius choreographer whom Kirstein had brought to America, was then immersing himself so fully in the musicals of Broadway and Hollywood that there seemed to be no extricating him. Something happened in the next year or two to bring Balanchine around, though; about 1941, he was saying to the critic Edwin Denby, “We must save ballet.” When Denby replied, “But the dance is eternal,” Balanchine answered, “I don’t mean the dance. I mean ballet.”

And then there began to pour from Balanchine a great river of ballets whose core and main subject is academic dancing as wed to music. Since that river scarcely stopped flowing for the next 40 years, it’s hard now to believe how despondent Kirstein, a founder of the New York City Ballet, must have been at the end of the 1930s. Did the unstoppable Balanchine ever seem lost?

In this Kirstein centenary season of City Ballet, the second all-Balanchine program takes us from “Concerto Barocco” (1941), made just at the beginning of that outpouring, to two ballets from the 1972 Stravinsky Festival, in which Balanchine proved more prolific than ever. All of these are as unmistakably American as they are classical; the point is most obvious in the program’s centerpiece, “Square Dance” (1957), in which music by Vivaldi and Corelli, high-density ballet classicism and the friendly forms of traditional American social dance are all part of the mix.

I first watched City Ballet dance all four of these ballets in 1979, some with the principal dancers on whom Balanchine had first made them. (I had already seen a British company attempt “Barocco” in 1977 — not an edifying experience.) Looking at them now, and at the other Balanchine ballets with which this spring season has begun, I would say that all save one are certainly alive, more so than I would have dared hope 15 years ago, when standards of orchestral conducting and ballet execution showed signs of alarming slovenliness.

The most obvious differences are that in 2007 the ballets look relatively groomed and polite. The corps de ballet dances with a kind of unison it seldom if ever had under Balanchine. (The ballerina Merrill Ashley has related how other coaches used to get the corps unified in revivals until Balanchine supervised final rehearsals and urged the dancers to aim not at synchronicity but at energy — “What are you saving it for?”)

Arms and upper-body carriage this spring have few if any of the inelegancies that were almost a City Ballet hallmark. But the crucial Balanchine transfer of weight, taking each step as if stretching into the beyond, doesn’t gleam as it used to. And at the principal level there is far, far less of the poetic individuality that once made cast changes an event of serious significance.

Even so, here are these great ballets, honored closely in the letter and partly in the spirit, still glorious works of art to behold and to inhabit. The exception so far has been the Stravinsky “Duo Concertant” (1972), which on Wednesday was turned into wispy saccharine by Darci Kistler and Nilas Martins. But since I saw a far sharper performance of this from City Ballet with Yvonne Borree and Nikolaj Hübbe only in January, I see no cause for despair.

That ballet’s 1972 contemporary “Symphony in Three Movements” remains an astounding conception: tying Oriental gesture and rhythm to Western swing-based dances, linking echoes of 1940s wartime behavior and airplane imagery to futuristic views of society.

Even if you’ve seen several dozen other Balanchine ballets and know something of his range, the construction of this ballet remains startling, and so does its dance vocabulary. Perhaps no image stays with you more lastingly than the opening of the central movement: a pas de deux in which man and woman enter from opposite sides, both facing front, both flourishing arms in Balinese fashion, stepping sideways with ceremonious impersonality.

I want to call this Balanchine’s “South Pacific,” but that can give you no clue of the colossal violence with which it starts and ends, the wheel-within-wheel circlings of its women or the moments when new formations of dancers appear and move like an inhuman machine.

The conductor Maurice Kaplow took everything Wednesday at quite a lick. This did most danger to “Concerto Barocco,” especially in an impatient slow movement, in which Wendy Whelan’s austerity in the central role became too harsh. In the outer movements she and Rachel Rutherford were an effective, diligent pair of counterparts to Bach’s two solo violins; in the finale they and the corps even managed to turn some of the too-brisk tempos into an effect of happy spontaneity.

In “Square Dance” Megan Fairchild dances the ballerina role with almost too much sweetness, but there’s a freshness to her dancing that’s appealing, as there is with Ashley Bouder in the outer movements of “Symphony in Three Movements.” However, the latter ballet’s central female role needs more cool and plasticity than Abi Stafford’s debut performance as yet demonstrates.

There are dancers to love here, but among the women there are few signs of the interpretative particularity that helps some of us forget the memories these ballets carry of Ms. Ashley, Maria Calegari and others.

Do you know the Herbert Farjeon poem that starts “Ballet isn’t what it was when we were what we were”? Just as I was wondering if that applied to me too, Mr. Hübbe danced the male role of “Square Dance” as if taking charge of the ballet’s whole imaginative world. In the surprising twists and turns of the solo that Balanchine added to the ballet in the 1970s, Mr. Hübbe danced as if this were his journey and his discovery — and made them ours too.

@New York Times, 2007