10. STONEHENGE
During this exit at one Saturday matinee, I had stuffed several tissues into my costume’s bodice top to use just before making my next entrance. But, suddenly due onstage, I ran out with a tissue bouquet in full flounce about my neck like an oversized white carnation. The utter dismay. And I had to keep dancing as if nothing was amiss until my next exit. You want to die, just die. A different clock started running simultaneously with that of the music, and it became the longest entrance of my career. Onstage my peers saw my voluminous décolleté decoration and were biting their lips to not laugh. Oh, please, please don’t laugh: this is not Chaplin; this is church. Suppressed tight grins abounded. Mr. B, thank God, was not in the wings that day, so my great shame, while known by all, was not known by the one who counted most.
Though he wouldn’t have cared. Or not much. As he said to a friend who fell onstage and rushed to him after in tears apologizing for “ruining your ballet,” “You can’t mess up the ballet, dear,” at once calling out her ego and his own.
Until now, we seventeen have dominated the proceedings, creating mass movements and patterns of flying blue tulle. Two additional dancers have made such dashing entrances—for twelve seconds and seventeen seconds respectively—wearing exactly the same costumes as us, so that they will not have registered with the audience as new girls, different girls, or even extra girls, though they are. This is about to change. It begins now, with yet one more girl, the twentieth. After her, there will be no more; our troupe of women is complete.
This final dancer makes her entrance alone, on the emptied stage, also dressed identically to us. Focus immediately changes as specificity is telescoped from the swirling, leaning, running urgency of us all en masse that marked the opening minutes of the ballet. No dancer has been alone onstage until now, until her. She begins to represent. To symbolize. To tell a story, perhaps. But if there is a story, it is quite unclear.
We call this dancer the Dark Angel, but she is not dark yet, and your programs will say no such thing. This dancer and the two other soloists—the one we call the Waltz Girl, and the Russian Girl—are simply listed, without nomenclature, above our names, which are in alphabetical order, as was Balanchine’s way in my years, his later years.
But as with all things Serenade, even the program texts shifted over time: a program from 1957 lists the cast as the “Waltz Ballerina,” “Russian Ballerina,” and “Dark Angel,” not only differentiating their roles but using that much-encumbered word “ballerina,” with all its connotations of romance, beauty, artistry—and ranking. While the company always had a known hierarchy of principals, soloists, and corps, both backstage and publicly, over time Mr. B wanted to defuse any notions of personal stardom and its attendant cult of celebrity—something very much present in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and mid-twentieth-century ballet—by alphabetizing the roster. The message to us and audience alike: choreography was king. “A ballerina is a personality and personality means improvisation,” he said, “so she adds things, thus the choreography becomes merely atmosphere.” In time, Serenade’s three lead names morphed from “Ballerina” to the less laden “Girl,” where they have stayed.
Over the years of Serenade’s history, the choreography of these three solo girls has, depending on the circumstances and Balanchine’s choice, been performed variously by as few as one to as many as five dancers. These three roles have come to have signature demands that affect their casting: the Dark Angel requires authority and a particularly resonant arabesque, the Russian Girl must be a jumper and turner, and the Waltz Girl must be vulnerable, innocent, soft, must possess a more internal quality, a quality Balanchine needs in order to render her, by ballet’s end, the One.
The Dark Angel enters the bare stage from upstage left, with two sets of big sauté jumps in arabesque followed by a great high-flinging swing of her right leg from side to front, her left foot flat on the stage, her body pulled in, then away, from the impetus of her powerful leg. Once on center stage, she executes three even higher, wide-open développé kicks of her alternating legs to the side, though slightly back, her hips now leaning in the direction of her leg, pulling her torso entirely off-center so that her whole body is écarté—a diagonal that opens out, away.
With the solo dancer and all eyes focused on her, Balanchine blatantly ejects the properness, the squareness, the vertical/horizontal laws of ballet etiquette, where being off-center with the body, or having a leg kicking sky high, was unthinkable, possibly indecent. There was no influence that Balanchine would not use if he liked it, always calling himself a craftsman—“I assemble and I steal everywhere to do it”—and here he pulled the loosened hips of the Jazz Age into his 1934 ballet, plunging the sacrosanct nineteenth-century European art into modernity, into America, while he would still dress it in the crisp gauze of the Romantic ballet. How exciting. How beautiful. And so Balanchine’s ever-present, often subtle, eroticism makes one of its wittiest displays while being so fitting to Tschaikovsky’s music, ordained.
The soloist performs a little jump followed by a large piqué into a great arabesque, left leg extended high, high behind her, all the while moving her arms in fast cycling circles above her head. She does this twice, each arabesque being held for a few seconds, imprinting for the audience this most recognizable of all classical ballet positions. For a dancer, her arabesque is a vital, particularly unique, mark of her identity. “The leg thrown back into an arabesque is, of course,” wrote Volynsky, “nothing but a symbol of consciousness in its forward rush.” The position is used constantly, everywhere, in every way, posing, jumping, balancing; sometimes the leg is low behind, sometimes high. Having the upper body upright while one leg is placed high behind you—and turned out from the hip socket so the audience sees the front line of the leg while you are facing entirely sideways—requires a deep bend in the mid and lower back while the shoulders, neck, and head remain entirely vertical, carrying that present but invisible crown.
Like most physical demands of classical ballet, like turnout, this is not a natural bend of the body: the back is happy to lean forward, but to bend backward is counter to the spine’s desire. But the language of ballet is based on paradox, on flipping the expected and the known, and the tension created by the opposition of torso and leg reaching creates an image of extraordinary power.
My own rather average arabesque was, one day in company class, the occasion for Mr. B’s attention. The enormous fifth-floor studio full of eighty or ninety company members screeched into utter silence while everyone focused on him and me, his prey. Being so ultra-aware of my many inadequacies, I felt an ever-tense juxtaposition between wanting attention and my even stronger fear of getting it. As a child, receiving attention more often than not signaled parental displeasure. On this particular day, we were already toward the end of the one-hour company class, Balanchine’s laboratory, when he came over to me as I was holding an arabesque, left foot on the floor, right leg extended as high as possible behind me, on a diagonal.
He stood exactly in front of me, looking at my lines from absolute center. He was very close to me, and my heart was pounding. And everyone—Suzanne Farrell, Patricia McBride, Jacques d’Amboise, Helgi Tomasson, Adam Lüders, and all my peers in the corps de ballet—gathered around closer to hear what he would say. The focus on me was just horrific. Like a war already lost. He gently put a few fingers under my chin and guided it up. Balanchine loved, required, his dancers to not look straight ahead but to tilt the head upward, just so, looking toward that upper horizon. It gives a beautiful line to the neck and completes all the other lines in the body, expressing the art’s upward intentions, the physical reaching toward the unseen.
I, of course, knew this—but found it extremely difficult to do. This relatively small physical adjustment took enormous confidence, pride in oneself as a dancer, and belief in one’s right of being. And I just didn’t have it in me at that time. Placing my head up like a queen, like a goddess, like I merited attention, like I was beautiful, was so psychologically difficult for me I simply had to fake it. This Sisyphean struggle lasted for years. My chin’s up now, finally, as I write.
Once he’d hauled my jaw up, Mr. B lined himself up with my forehead, and, like a scientist doing research, he narrowed his eyes in a slight squint and assessed my various lines of head, shoulders, arms, hips, and legs. Without a word, he put his right hand up vertically in front of my nose and moved it to his left, directing me to move my body an inch or so to my right. I moved accordingly, but the already precarious balance on one leg was shaken and I wobbled. Oh God.
Then he said to me that I should do “Pee-LAH-tees”—the now ubiquitous but then still obscure series of strengthening and lengthening exercises, invented by the German Joseph Pilates, that was the only form of study outside our theater that Mr. B advocated—to straighten out the asymmetry he’d just diagnosed in my shoulder and torso lineup. What was astonishing is that he could see this truly minuscule unevenness at all. Everyone has some; mine stems from a very small drop and forward rotation of my right shoulder in relation to the left that even I, at the time, was unaware of. But he was right. In fact, this weakness, five years later, became part of the physical chain reaction down the right side of my body that would cause the damage that would prematurely end my career onstage. I feel the discomfort there now as I write this. No teacher at the School had seen it, and even I, who had already been working on and examining my own body inside out daily for fourteen years in class, was not aware of it. This brief interaction, one of many like it that he had with dancers every day, was for me momentous and not good, not good at all. Having any flaw pointed out to me, particularly by the all-important boss, was more than my fragile ego could take, and I felt such shame. We all wanted to be good and beautiful and perfect for him, and his X-ray vision had exposed an imperfection.
He finished this brief one-on-one by asking, “Are you Italian, dear?” Mr. B was always interested in the heritage of his dancers. With my pale skin and almost black hair, I certainly could have been Italian. But, alas, I had to disappoint yet again: “No, I am Australian.” (Though I spent four years of my early childhood in England, I was born in Australia to an Australian father.) So unexotic, so unromantic, so prosaic. He had no comment, and class proceeded. Later, once alone, I cried, obsessed, cried some more, experienced utter failure and humiliation. And called a Pilates studio for an appointment the next day.
The Dark Angel is joined by two of us who enter from one side, and we each get close to her, encasing her with our bodies by lunging on flat feet alongside her outstretched arms and legs. She flips her backbend to the other side and two more of us rush in, surrounding her similarly: we are now four about her. And then, so unexpectedly, the Russian Girl flies in from backstage and does six enormous flying jetés around this close-knit group. The five—the Dark Angel and four of us—shuffle out of our folding formation and open up into a diagonal together, holding close, each left arm encircling her friend’s waist. We are as one, stepping forward on pointe, right arms opening down, palms up, and then pulling the wrist back to our foreheads as in the opening of the ballet: the Aspirin dance.
Along with his graphs, John Taras wrote out notes for this complex grouping, illustrating how difficult it is to convey dance accurately in words: this will have any meaning only to someone who already knows the ballet well, providing a few essential details only.
Serenade 1st movement
After Jillana’s [Dark Angel’s] entrance soloist finishes soutenu & back bend facing S.R. as 1st 2 Girls enter change with large port de bras to face S. L.
First 2 Girls hold soloist in small of back lunging forward on outside legs arms forward.
Soloist goes under arms to face S. R. again as 2nd Girls enter inside arms joined pass over soloist’s head to hold small of back as well—first lean forward on inside legs in 4th & then outside legs lean back…
As 2nd Girls go over head 1st Girls under on inside legs outside arms back & into Aspirin.
Maintaining our Bennet sisters closeness, each girl extends her free right hand outward, a low palm opened up to the audience, and then in unison we lift our arms up, wrist to forehead, head turned left. It is an exact echo of the opening of the ballet, but we are now five, not seventeen, and we have pivoted from facing front. And we all have a headache. The same headache. And, yes, we do this sweet sequence on a diagonal. A few repeats and we split up again. This is the closest, most intimate sign so far of sisterhood in a ballet about sisterhood. There will be more. Minute 5:55.
Soon fifteen of us are back onstage entering entirely on parallel pointes with jaunty toe stabs into the stage, like Goldwyn chorus girls, and we assemble in a formation that I have always thought of as Serenade’s Stonehenge—a timeless place, an outdoor temple of secret ceremony, worship, death, resurrection, and astronomy that exists inside Tschaikovsky’s acoustics. Complicit (you have been all along), the audience forms the final section that encloses the circle where we, like druid priestesses, are performing a ceremonial rite. Divided into five sets of three girls, we position ourselves in a wide semicircle around the center of the stage. Each grouping of three dancers is vertically staggered: the front girl sitting low down on her folded knees, the middle girl behind her upright on her knees, and the back girl standing. We each are seen, but as one body.
The Dark Angel (Heléne Alexopoulos) in a backbend and the Russian Girl (Melinda Roy) in a flying leap, with Carole Divet kneeling and Julie Michael to left (© Steven Caras)
The Russian Girl now does an astonishing thing: after an effusive aria of mighty runs, jumps, hops, turns, pivots, leans, runs, shuffles, and grand jetés all about the stage, she bourrées to center stage, pulls her right wrist to her brow, palm facing out, echoing the gesture of emotion, of “Oh no,” as in the Aspirin dance—and at the ballet’s opening with all in attendance. And suddenly this powerhouse woman, as if overcome by a sudden wave of neurasthenia, like a Victorian waif about to collapse onto a fainting couch, goes down, down, to the stage floor, crumpled, but beautifully, in the center of our half circle. She lies there on her right side, still, draped across the stage, her face turned downward. Has she passed out? Is she taking a sudden rest after her exertion? Did she have a sudden shock? A bad memory? Is she in some unknown despair? Under a spell? Or perhaps dead? A 1940 film clip shows her lying faceup with her hands across her chest, like a corpse in a coffin, but somewhere along the way, Balanchine turned her to her side, as she lies now, elongated, not so dead.
According to witnesses, in the first rehearsals in 1934, this dancer actually tripped and fell by mistake and began to cry. Balanchine told her to stay there and kept her misstep in the ballet in what Kirstein called “a climactic collapse.” So goes Serenade’s mercurial founding filament.
In the useless, but ever-present, fascination about how genius works, this moment provides ideal instruction on the simplicity, almost practicality, of it all, at least for Balanchine. A fall is a bad enough shock to any dancer whose worth is predicated on her grace, but to fall down right in front of Balanchine, I know from personal experience, was a singular blow. It is unlikely that her tears were due to physical pain, so inured to physical pain are we.
Balanchine looked at her on the floor, and whatever he may have had in mind before she fell—and he may well have had nothing in mind yet—he liked what he saw, and told her to stay there. And so by chance, this became a remarkable moment in the ballet, and quite possibly changed the entire trajectory of the piece as we now know it—later he has another dancer fall to the stage floor twice more, to even greater effect. How quickly Balanchine was able to pirouette on a dime, and use what he saw. “I am made only to see movement and hear sounds,” he said. “What I have, really, is that I see better than anybody else—and I hear better…God said to me, ‘That’s all you’re going to have.’…I said, ‘Fine.’”
This downing of a dancer purposefully (via mistake) was another break in the classical dance tradition of the nineteenth century, where a dancer’s function was to fly, to be airborne with an unearthly grace that did not acknowledge gravity, much less the actual stage floor. This fall had more in common with the vocabulary of the newer terra firma of modern dance, where gravity pulled inward and downward; an impulse emerging in the 1920s and ’30s as Martha Graham took the mantle from the recently deceased Isadora Duncan.
If drama was barely hinted at before, this fall is overt. Here, as in all that’s to come, the ballet’s inexplicable dramas appear out of nowhere and remain unresolved, as if adhering to the admonition by the Roman general Pompey the Great, “Navigare necesse est, vivere non est necesse.” (“It is necessary to navigate, not to live.”)
While the Russian Girl lies there, we remain at our stations and perform very precise arm and head movements, sometimes in unison, sometimes in consecutive motions that create a sequential ripple, a sequence we called the “Egyptian Arms.” The effect of each group of three—each identical—is like a Russian Shiva with three heads and six arms. It is a supplication surrounding the fallen one. She rises up, up, up, all the way to the tips of her pointes as if robustly resurrected by our incantation, and immediately begins jumping with renewed force even higher and more widely and wildly than ever before. And she flies off the stage. She was down for just twelve seconds. Minute 7:46.
Balanchine disperses us sixteen (an extra girl has slipped back onstage unnoticed) into a stage-wide circle and we execute a very simple, and yet cumulatively bravura, series of consecutive piqué turns—stepping far out onto our right leg, all but jumping onto pointe, pulling the left leg high up to our knee while turning. Our circle navigates the entire stage in width and depth in hundreds of yards of turning tulle, and the implied centrifugal force becomes the world ever expanding, as we are each individually carried to the opposite side of the stage from where we began. It is for audience and dancers alike the most thrilling moment of the ballet so far—such an enormous display of reckless order.
After fourteen turns, we sauté jump and run quickly, discreetly, directly to our original places at curtain’s rise. We suction our flat feet into parallel and place our right arm up to the side but slightly forward, palm outward to that ever-present lunar light. The space transitions instantly from the lively frenzy of fast movement to utter stillness. But one of us is missing.
She enters quietly, slowly, almost imperceptibly from way upstage left, alone, walking, looking, turning back on herself, looking again, weaving her way through us while we stay still, unmoving, oblivious, while she searches among us: “Is there a place for me?” Finally, she finds an empty spot at the front downstage right point of one of our two diamonds. Opposite to where I now stand. “I felt I was searching for something I knew I could never find,” says Allegra Kent, a particularly mystical Waltz Girl during Balanchine’s later years. Like an honored new student, she carefully places her feet in parallel like ours, and then she raises her right arm up to the light and becomes one with us. And so the first movement of Serenade draws to a close as it began. Though not quite.
The music repeats identically as at the opening curtain; though she starts as one of us, one of many sisters, this new girl, the Waltz Girl, by ballet’s end will be our leader, our essence distilled. She flips her right wrist and begins the beautiful opening arm sequence. But we do not. On the same note of music, we all turn to our left and slowly walk with quiet gravitas together off into the wings, our right arm trailing behind us, but the hand turned upward as if passing through water, not air. Immediately, she is alone, again, but the few seconds she had in unison with us sealed an unbreakable bond. Though our backs are now to her, this is no mutiny: it is her destiny, which is ours.
So much meaning and yet, as Balanchine told it, this lone girl’s entrance came about, like others in the ballet, entirely by chance. On the particular day he was making this section, one girl was late to rehearsal and came into the studio looking to find her place. He kept her search, transforming a quotidian moment into one of not only nuanced beauty and asymmetric ambiguity but also of far-reaching consequence, one might even say of profound definition.
A woman separate longs for her place with us, to join. Is it possible? Here, in his first American dance, this son of Russian imperial heritage, and several hundred years of ballet tradition, flipped the core of classicism on its head in the ordered anarchy of Serenade. Yet he neither destroyed nor negated its aristocratic heritage but, rather, gathered up that grand perpendicular hierarchy and flooded it with a great wave of equality, raising the art higher still in a single surge: the imperial pyramid spreads horizontally while the democratic expanse rises vertically. Spiritual paradox embodied in actual bodies.
This was a revolution that reached beyond mere innovation within the form—like cubism or surrealism in modern painting. Balanchine did not so much change an aspect of the art itself or create a new trajectory as push it, in its lush entirety, onto entirely new ground, higher, wider ground. And yet somehow, he simultaneously equalized its players, releasing soloists from their rigid pedestals and the corps de ballet from its decorative function, thus freeing both.
Never had democracy been brought so explicitly to the aristocratic art of ballet before, and never had it appeared so lofty. From the diamond tiaras of queens and the gold crowns of kings, he molded a live conundrum: an aristocracy of equals, an aristocratic democracy, a democracy of aristocrats. This was Balanchine’s America.
As we exit the stage, a lone man appears in the ballet, entering from upstage left, dressed in blue tights and a blue top. He walks slowly, elegantly, diagonally toward the solitary woman while she continues her arm movement, oblivious of his approach. As the closing notes of the first movement play, he gently touches her shoulder with his right hand. “When he walks in through this group of people, almost as if through a forest,” explained the dancer Joseph Duell, “he’s only aware of the woman. Balanchine told me not to tap her on the shoulder; I rest my hand for a minute—a very gentle touch to bring her to life.” She reacts instantly, as if a spell is broken and, swooning, falls away from her independence, from her alliance with us. He catches her waist and she leans in to his arm but looks away as he looks on. Is he a suitor? A lover? A protector? An aide—or an equal? A mirage or a man?
The Sonatina is over. Minute 9:18.