5. 1934
Feet parallel, right arm raised, palm up, we begin. (© Paul Kolnik)
Once this position was established, there was a good deal of fidgeting, as we wobbled on that flat-footed pedestal. Frequent giggles erupted as each girl’s verticality was threatened by her alien parallel perch.
Suki offered a suggestion: “Pull in your stomach tight”—this direction applies to everything we do all the time, every time, forever and ever till death do us part—“reach down into the floor, and then reach up.” This apparently contradictory direction, echoing Miss Stuart, is not in the least foreign to a dancer but a well-understood paradox in a life lived so literally in the balance where opposition—up and down, right and left, in and out—reigns. Young dancers learn irony in their bodies, a literal, muscular irony, long before they might know its conceptual meaning.
Our survey over, we were ready for the next step. But it was not a step. It was an arm position. We need to talk about this arm. It is mainly the right arm in question, though, naturally, what one arm does for a dancer by definition involves a symmetry or, often, an asymmetry, but one that still retains a kind of balance, even if an illogical one. The arms connect as one across a dancer’s upper back, and across her torso, always making a single line, though sometimes a broken line. But always a line.
Suki directs us to the opening position: left arm natural to the side, right arm up in a softened diagonal, palm out, fingers apart. What Suki does not tell us is how this arm position came about at that first rehearsal in a dingy dance studio on Madison Avenue one evening in early 1934.
This slanted extended arm and its gentle hand tracing an ascending trajectory has come to symbolize so much to dancers and audiences alike. It is the single most famous image in this ballet—except for the other ones—and as such, all but a trademark of Balanchine himself. It is the identifying arm, literally, of his body of work, so truly, with him, a body. This position repeats the raised arm of the Statue of Liberty holding her torch, before whom Balanchine had passed just five months earlier in New York Harbor when he immigrated, a refugee of sorts, to the United States. What a kind of poetry it would be if Lady Liberty had indeed been the reference for Balanchine, who had escaped the Bolsheviks, illness, and starvation and landed in the Land of the Free. This, however, was never mentioned as an influence, its patriotic poetry too sentimental; something far darker was suggested. Lincoln Kirstein, the wealthy American from Boston who had brought Balanchine to America only a few months earlier, alluded to something more obscure, writing in his diary, “Hands are curved to shield their eyes, as if facing some intolerable lunar light.”
“Intolerable lunar light”? Is it blinding, thus “intolerable”? Or, rather, is there a darkness behind the moonlight? On one occasion over the years, Balanchine, uncharacteristically, told a dancer that it was “the light of God, too bright for human eyes.” Compounding the mystery, Kirstein recorded what Balanchine told him at that first rehearsal: “He said his head was a blank and asked me to pray for him.” A rather inauspicious start for Kirstein’s dream of a flotilla of pointe dancers pirouetting into American culture: a choreographer with a blank head asking for prayer. Perfect.
“He lined everyone up according to their heights,” wrote Kirstein in his diary of that first rehearsal on Wednesday, March 14, “& commenced slowly to compose a hymn to ward off sin.” Or was it “a hymn to ward off the sun”? Kirstein’s original, handwritten diary entry appears to read “the sun,” although there are three baffling dots about the word: one above the “u,” another squiggle above the “n,” and yet a third dot above the period. Kirstein was not a particularly messy writer, and random dots do not abound elsewhere: Is the first the dot above the “i” of “sin”? His own later transcriptions into type clearly read “sin.” Both evocative, though differently so. Did he, with a writer’s prerogative, choose to change “sun” to “sin”? And if so, why? Did he think his own original writing said “sin” when transcribing it later? Or did he know, as an actual observer in the studio, that it was “sin” and what he wrote in his diary was incorrect? And larger still: Is the concept of a “hymn” Balanchine’s indication or Kirstein’s interpretation, attributed to Balanchine? Or something else yet again?
“Sin” or “sun”—we will never know precisely and this conundrum is emblematic of the history, the myth, of all that is Serenade: the endless dig for clues by dance scholars, as if the ballet itself were an archaeological site, and they are seeking its origins, its meanings, its making, its changes, its shallows, its depths. Even its pronunciation has been debated: “SerenAHde” or “SeranAde.” (We say the former, Balanchine over the years apparently said both though I only heard him say in his later years, “SerenAHde.”) The search will never end, the Gordian knot that is Serenade will remain forever tied, forever alive.
Kirstein continues: “He tried two dancers breaking the composition, first in toe shoes, then without. Without won.” Soon enough it lost.
While Kirstein recalled that this first rehearsal transpired on a rainy evening, Ruthanna Boris, a fifteen-year-old dancer, one of the original seventeen, remembered it was a “nice sunny day.” But then Lincoln was a rainy-day man even when the sun was blazing. And for his part, Balanchine refers to the “first night” of rehearsals.
March 14, 1934, was three days before Boris’s sixteenth birthday, but she had already been dancing at the Metropolitan Opera for some time and would go on to a long career as a lead dancer and choreographer herself. Before she died in 1988, she left her testimony of that time. Her witness is unique.
One Sunday I was reading John Martin’s dance column in the Times and I saw a notice that Mr. Lincoln Kirstein, the editor of a magazine called Hound and Horn, and Mr. Edward Warburg were founding a school and a company and were bringing in Mr. George Balanchine as the artistic director. I went for the audition wearing what we wore at the Metropolitan—pink dresses below the knees, pink tights, pink ballet shoes, and little bows tied so our brassiere straps wouldn’t show. In a room at the School on Fifty-ninth and Madison there were two men…. [Balanchine] was young and handsome. Gorgeous. The other man was very austere…I could jump like a flea. Balanchine said, “You are Italian. Italiansky.” His English was charming. Then he said, “Do a double pirouette.” But we weren’t allowed to do that at the Met, and I told him I could only do single turns. “No,” he said, “you will do it. You will see.” So I tried…I went around twice and fell down. I looked at him and knew this guy was making jokes. And I loved it. I wanted to be taken in.
Boris was indeed “taken in.” And began that journey every dancer Balanchine chose took: of falling in love with him and dancing, a triangulated affair where body, heart, and spirit were woven together with his presence, bonded by beautiful music. “But,” said Boris, “I didn’t look at Balanchine the way a woman looks at a man. I looked at him more as an inevitable force—like I would at lightning, at Niagara Falls, at Mount St. Helens, at cosmic events.”
A few months later she remembers Balanchine saying, “Today, I think I’ll make a little something.” Thus he began Serenade, placing the girls for the first time in two diamonds, as Suki placed us forty years later.
He excused the gentlemen and started putting girls in place and standing back to see what it looked like. Annabelle Lyon and I were the two smallest, and we already knew he liked tall ballerinas. He took forever to arrange everyone; he wanted all his girls to show. He placed Kathryn Mullowny, Heidi Vosseler, Holly Howard, until finally Annabelle and I were the only two left, standing across from each other. Her face told me what I felt: “Oh, God, we’re too small; we’re going to be the understudies.” But then he jumped up on the bench and summoned us: “Ruthanna, Bella.” We came running and he put her in front on stage left and me on stage right.
Boris and Lyon were the front points of the two symmetrical diamonds, across the stage from each other side to side. All those decades later I stood where “Bella” stood, “front on stage left.” There is the legacy, and the honor, of knowing who the girl was who stood there first, whose place I and so many before—and after—have taken, will take. Annabelle Lyon was eighteen years old that sunny rainy day (night) in 1934. She died at age ninety-five in 2011.
When the girls stood in parallel before him as we later stood before Suki, Balanchine stopped to chat a bit, something he did, though not often, with us too, in class or rehearsal, and how our ears were pricked and eyes glued to him as we gathered closer to listen in church-like silence. Gathered like family but alert as to a priest.
“He was looking for a way to begin,” Boris said. “He started talking about Germany.”
I was there with Diaghilev. There was an awful man there [Hitler]. He looks like me but he has mustache. The people know him, they love him. When they see him all people do like that for him. [Balanchine put his arm up in the Heil, Hitler salute.]…I am not such an awful man, and I don’t have mustache. So maybe for me you put together this. Your hand is high.
If one believes Boris—why fabricate such a strange story?—Balanchine derived the signifying opening arm in Serenade from having seen the Hitler salute when still in Europe the year before. What to make of this? Was Balanchine simply doing as he always did, taking things from life to use in his ballets? He said that he found the open-shut, open-shut hand motion of Apollo in Apollo in the flashing lights of Piccadilly Circus in London.
While the extermination camps were still years away in March 1934, Hitler was already making inroads toward his final solution. On the first of January that year, all Jewish holidays were removed from the German calendar; the next day, “non-Aryans” were barred from adopting “Aryan” children. During the next few months, Jews were arrested with increasing frequency for a variety of reasons, the Nazis published a new version of the Psalms of David excising all references to Jews, and the film Catherine the Great—starring Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Elisabeth Bergner, a Jewish actress—was banned in Germany only four days before Balanchine began making Serenade.
We will never know about this exactly, and it becomes just one more Serenadian obscurity, though, in the light of history, one of the more intriguing ones. Balanchine’s ballets were never political, always classical, and he never made any direct references to politics in his dances. When he became an American citizen in 1939, he was thrilled and proud. He was conservative, Republican, and dancers during the 1960s recall him telling them all not only to vote but whom to vote for. But only rarely did he assert his patriotism publicly. When the Iranian hostages were released in January 1981, he arranged a special performance of Stars and Stripes. I was in it, and it was a fantastic night, with Mr. B in his front wing looking quite pleased.
After the Hitler speech, which, Boris reports, both confused and bored most of the young girls—“I still didn’t know who ‘Mr. Hitler’ was”—Balanchine asked the girls to put that right arm up there, palm facing out.
There was a second young man besides Kirstein at that rehearsal. Edward Warburg, a son of the Jewish financier and philanthropist Felix Warburg, had been convinced by his Harvard classmate, the brooding Kirstein, to pay for Balanchine’s passage to America from Europe. Eddie didn’t know much of anything about ballet at the time, but he knew something about world politics, and he was concerned when he saw Balanchine put the girls’ arms up at this rather alarming angle. After considerable whispering between the two young men, Mr. Kirstein, a mammoth figure, lumbered over to Mr. Balanchine, a wisp of a man, and told him that Mr. Warburg thought the girls looked as if they were hailing Hitler. Not perhaps a good way to begin an American ballet, like a Third Reich rally.
Did Balanchine, in fact, intend to appropriate Hitler’s choreography of fascism and hate and reshape it, convert it, into one of beauty and freedom? Was he seeking, in part, to make a ballet to counter that “awful man”? Was this the “sin”? Balanchine told the girls to “soften” the arm, to bend the elbow ever so slightly and move the arm a little more to the right, fingers apart. And there it remains today.
Fifteen days later, on March 29, Balanchine invited “an enormous crowd of people,” according to Kirstein’s diary, to a rehearsal, a good indication that in two weeks a significant section of the ballet was polished enough that even Balanchine welcomed viewers. By April 7 it appears that three movements were completed, “very ragged,” wrote Kirstein, “because abt. 10 [dancers] were missing.” It would be unheard of now to have more than half the cast of a ballet missing from rehearsal, but these were the scattershot early days.
On April 24, some “dark blue uniform practice costumes” arrived at the rehearsal studio. “They didn’t fit very well,” Kirstein reported, “because Bal. as usual had wanted them cut low over the breasts and they were cut too low and consequently they had to be worn backwards.” Oops. Thus began the ensuing twenty-year saga of Serenade’s search for her appropriate apparel.
At the request of their son Eddie, for his twenty-sixth birthday, the Warburgs had agreed to present the new School of American Ballet’s debut performance (in reality, a recital) of three ballets by Balanchine—Mozartiana, Serenade, and Dreams[*]—outdoors, on a small erected stage, at their estate called Woodlands in Hartsdale, in the town of Greenburgh, New York, near White Plains, twenty miles north of New York City. The date was set for Saturday, June 9, and 250 guests were invited. It took two performances for the three ballets to finally make it onstage.
As the date was fast approaching, the costume quest continued: “Hunted for bathing suits for the boys in Serenade,” wrote Kirstein on June 5, and the following day: “Hours spent more or less fruitlessly with Bal. at Bloomingdale’s…while he tried to make up his mind abt. costumes for the Boys in Serenade. He has a spoiled boy’s vanity which makes him at once refuse any given suggestion. One must approach him always from behind. Even this no cinch as there are always more than two alternatives….” The day before the performance suitable shirts for the men were found “at last at Abercrombies.”
That same day, at 3:00 p.m., the unlikely troupe set out for Hartsdale to set up the stage and rehearse for the premiere, but, as Kirstein recorded in his boots-on-the-ground unpublished diary, things were touch and go every step of the way. “The Warburg mansion, when we arrived,” he wrote, “had the air of a castle deserted before the onslaught of invaders. No one was around…. Frances Mann, one of the important 2nd line dancers, hurt her foot. Caccialanza tripped and fell. Another girl wept and was suspected to have female ills…The students looked peaked and were cold and hungry and I feared a revolution…Vladimirov [Dimitriev, Balanchine’s volatile Russian manager] was in all his states: Voila vôtre Ballet Americain. [“There’s your American Ballet.”] I said ‘Nôtre Ballet Americain.’” [“Our American Ballet.”]
Serenade rehearsal, Balanchine right of center, on outdoor stage at the Warburg estate, June 1934 (Source: The New York City Ballet by Anatole Chujoy)
The following day the plein air premiere was all but entirely subject to the weather forecast while recalcitrant dancers and difficult costumes added to the tension. There was much prayer all around, not so much for success or recognition of the arrival of a new art form on American soil but for the rain to not moisten that soil—or the makeshift stage perched precipitously upon it. Or the piano that was hidden in the nearby bushes for the music.
“I made myself as boring as possible,” wrote Kirstein, “by asking & praying & wondering abt. the weather.” The pianos were covered and uncovered with tarps repeatedly and the stage dismantled and reassembled three times under the threat of a downpour. “Balanchine wholly indifferent,” wrote Kirstein, “went off in his car into White Plains to get some decent food. Fair weather came & Dimitriew searched in vain for him to rehearse.” By evening: “more rain: Bal. said calmly God’s will be done. Around 8.40…I got nervous & screamed at two of the boys to hurry & Dim. came in & roared at me. General apologies afterwards. Mozartiana looked lovely: went off well. Ridiculously stupid audience…Serenade was prepared. But then the rain set in, in earnest.”
“With the music of Tchaikovsky, the lights went up,” wrote Eddie Warburg, picking up the story of this now legendary non-premiere, “on the assembled group of dancers, each one standing with an arm outstretched, looking up towards the heavens. It was a moving moment. I can never look back at that scene now without remembering the White Plains performance. No sooner had the dancers become visible when, as if in answer to their raised arms, the heavens opened up, and it poured!”
The show was shut down, the audience ran for cover, and Serenade’s world premiere did not happen. “A more agonizing and inauspicious occasion,” said Kirstein, “could scarcely have been planned by the Devil himself.” The audience agreed to return the next day, a Sunday, for a redo.
Kirstein’s jottings the next morning continue the weather surveillance:
A little sun when I woke up—but considerable heat and the threat of rain increasing as time went on…at 5 o’clock in spite of threats we again completely embarked for White Plains with an added cargo of husbands, mothers, friends, etc…. Rehearsal of “Serenade” on the sticky stage. The weather seemed to clear. Blue skies with holes in dense cloud. I looked for every slight change of wind. It seems to split 2 ways over the house. Nelson Rockefeller called up from Pocantico [Pocantico Hills, the Rockefeller estate] to say there’d been a cloudburst on the Hudson but it had passed…it started a light rain just as they were going up for “Serenade.” I’m glad to say however it was pushed through—with little enough confusion—although the piano keys were so wet that Mikeshina and Kopeikin [sic] cd hardly play…“Serenade” looked very lovely, the boys OK in red pants and brownish polo shirts. Laskey’s make-up left something to be desired…Conditions were very difficult & everybody behaved extremely well.
Less than two years later the “red pants” were dropped while “red wigs” were added, and the curiosities of Serenade’s clothing continued.
The mishmash of costumes remained, understandably, uncredited, though Kirstein did provide an interesting program note for the audience, something of an artifact not least because for the ensuing decades there has been no program note at all, in keeping with Balanchine’s edict to explain nothing. Notably, Kirstein deemed the ballet a “tragedy,” a female one.
Without an implicit subject, the music and its thematic development indicate the tragic form of this primarily feminine ballet. Its lyricism is the large, fluent sentiment of Tschaikovsky shifting from the fresh swiftness of Sonatina, the buoyant accumulating passage of the Waltz, through the sustained adagio of the Elegy. The classic dance has been used here in conjunction with free gesture, developed logically for the whole body’s use. The corps de ballet, as such, scarcely exists. Each member is inseparable from the schematic design in personal individual meaning. The soloists crown the action alone, their tragedy prepared by the frame of the previous dances.
The audience at this, the actual premiere, comprised not only more people than the previous evening but many of note, including Nelson Rockefeller and Alfred Barr, the young director of the newly founded Museum of Modern Art—and money was pledged toward the struggling venture. “Alan Blackburn [assistant treasurer of MoMA] looked at me,” wrote Kirstein, “as [if] I had deflected the Warburg millions from the Mus. of Mod. Art. A group of fifty repaired to a banquet at a New York restaurant [Chestney’s] where “toasts of all were drunk including the weather, the City of Philadelphia etc…. Bal. read a little speech sober and comic ending with ‘we only have one Dollar…but soon we hope to have many dollars.’” And soon they did—at least enough to push through to 1935, when, on August 19, Kirstein recorded the uncertain progress of the fledgling enterprise: “The Ballet had a great success in Philadelphia though Helen Leitch fell into the cymbals.”