Serenade, Rubies, and Ballet Imperial
The Kirov Ballet
New York City Center
New York, New York
April 18 - 20, 2008
Watermill
New York City Ballet
New York State Theater
New York, New York
May 2, 2008
If the Kirov's reduction of its Petipa ballets to one act offerings during the opening week of its New York season showed how such cut-down Petipa could look like Balanchine; the all Balanchine program on the Kirov's final weekend (Serenade, Rubies, and Ballet Imperial) showed something else: that between the two kinds of work there's a revolution in the way ballets are structured. The organizing principle for Petipa is the structure of the classical pas de deux - entrance for the couple, variation for each, then recapitulation. Serenade and Ballet Imperial abandon that principle.
To demonstrate this, if you diagram (or abstract) the structure of Petipa's Diana and Acteon Pas de Deux (beautifully performed here) it begins something like this: (1) entrance for the corps de ballet, then ensemble dance (waltz); (2) entrance for the principal couple, who then dance together; (3) variation for each principal dancer, etc. This is the pas de deux form at its simplest, with the duet merely amplified for the stage by the addition of a corps de ballet.
Or again, if you abstract the beginning of Balanchine's Raymonda Variations, the principle is the same, only more complex: (1) entrance for the corps de ballet and soloists, then ensemble dance (waltz); (2) entrance for the principal couple, although a variation for the principal woman has come before the couple's ensemble dance; (3) series of variations for each soloist, but with the principal couple also dancing individual variations in the series and thus mixing as individual dancers with the soloists. My point here is that Raymonda, like Diana and Acteon, can still be accounted for by the amplification of the classical pas de deux.
Neither Serenade nor Ballet Imperial, though, can be intelligibly diagrammed that way. Ballet Imperial starts with the corps de ballet on stage in two lines (male and female) approaching each other and performing nearly an Eighteenth Century reverence. After this the second ballerina enters with a pair of male attendants and dances to a musical theme that the orchestra states in opposition to the piano; only then does the principal ballerina enter (and without her cavalier too) to perform swivel pirouettes to the piano's solo cadenzas.
Enough has been said, I think, to show that the principle organizing this ballet is completely unprecedented in the Petipa form. Based on how I described it above, you'd be tempted to say that the new principle is the structure of the music; and that's the way most dance historians describe it. But actually I think it's more complicated because of the symbolist/surrealist element at work in Balanchine pieces like Serenade where every viewer can supply his or her own emotional plot for the action (just who is this woman who is abandoned by her consort and collapses on the floor; just what is going on here?); and because other elements as well are used to drive the composition - allusions for example in the second movement of Ballet Imperial to the romantic plots of Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty.
* * * *
Watching the revival of Watermill at City Ballet last Friday week, I was astonished by the way the ballet inadvertantly reminded me of Sesame Street - a cultural artifact, actually, of the same era, the early 1970's. There it was, Japanese culture presented like a children's TV show: a Zen landscape and midnight moon like the label on a bottle of saki; lanterns on poles; origami; boys prancing around with martial arts batons; women in straw Japanese hats planting rice - all trite, pretentious, childish, and very dull. And when Adam Hendrickson entered in his furry costume to stomp about in the role of the Magician, I nearly laughed out loud: even the Cookie Monster!
Besides the pretentiousness and boredom, the trouble with Watermill is that it's bad at what it aims to be: a meaningful adaptation of Noh drama for the ballet stage. The most pedestrian example of Noh performed by dancers brought up and trained in that tradition would have had greater merit and been more meaningful to watch. I never saw Edward Villella in this, though some people say he made it watch-able. All I can say is that Nikolaj Hubbe in a diaper did not pull of that trick.
In Ives Songs (also in repertory this spring) Robbins treated the theme of an ageing person looking back at his life more successfully. The difference is that in Ives Robbins composes in the cultural and dance languages he was born and bred in and not in a foreign tongue. Ives is just as ambitious as Watermill - the subject is memory, the passage of time, and the bitterness of age and approaching death. But Ives paints a true-to-life picture of human nature (as does Fancy Free) in the specific terms of a particular American time and place that Robbins knew.
Photo: The Kirov Ballet in Serenade Courtesy of the Mariinsky Theater
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