15. TRANSITIONS
For the Ballet Russe version, he used one ballerina and a soloist for parts split earlier between several dancers, and added a second man and four demi-soloists for the Russian Dance. He had already changed the orchestration around 1935 from that of George Antheil’s 1934 version—“ces affreux trompettes!”—to the composer’s own scoring. He tinkered with Serenade, returning to it like a touchstone over the course of his life, until every note of Tschaikovsky’s score was finally visible onstage. In 1977, more than forty years after first making the ballet, Balanchine said Serenade “took me a long time. Just two years ago I finished it completely, so not one bar is left out, all cuts are restored. I made the full ballet now.”
The first costumes changed too, as they would several more times over the next decades. Early ventures included “pink Latex which tears easily,” Kirstein noted in his diary in late 1934, “and spirals of black material sticking out stiffly from it.” While the costumes of the solo dancers were “made in white and gray bath-toweling—as [Helen] Leitch said ‘one dirty and one clean towel’—snipped at by scissors to look ragged; they were fierce and finally scrapped. Great row as to whose fault it was—Balanchine’s or Okie’s who ‘designed’ the costumes.”
Later costumes included long, totally transparent skirts; short, puffy skirts; two-colored, paneled, multi-flapped skirts in several tones; mid-thigh tutus with petal-like flaps over tight pleats; thick-roped braiding trim; off-one-shoulder attached sashes; bodices with dark, webbed veins; white head bandannas and opera-length gloves—until Karinska’s final version in 1952 put a stop to the atrocities.
The Serenade blue, however, is to be found doggedly popping up in both costumes and scenery from the very start. It’s a wonder the ballet itself survived beneath what can only now be seen as unflattering, highly distracting hoopla. Even Karinska’s final design has undergone small refinements: the fabric of the bodice went from unyielding satin to stretchy Lycra; the two beige leg panels were added, and the hem went from being even all around to what I danced in, where the hem was shorter in front, just above the ankles, so all the pointe work was visible, and longer in back, to the ankles, to give a slight illusion of a flowing train behind us as we moved.
Various early stage sets were also weird, some appalling. The first designs for the 1934 premiere in Hartford, Connecticut, sported an imposing, swirling, trompe l’oeil cyclone, jabbing its modernism out on center stage from a navy blue background. It was never used.
For a 1941 tour of South America by Ballet Caravan, the backdrop featured “the sky over the Southern Hemisphere with the start of the Southern Cross intertwined with two meteors.” A quixotic Paris Opera production in 1947 boasted a stage set that included a life-size nude statue of the virile young god Eros officiating over the proceedings from a high pedestal center stage with soft curtains swathed all around, while the dancers wore short, soft skirts with Russian-style diadems and trailing veils crowning their heads: a Gallic pastiche of a mythical Slavic bedroom.
Eventually the scenery was reduced to the barest possible: simple black wings and borders, and a deep blue scrim with a dark blue backing that is lit from a lighting trough upstage that throws up an even, vertical sheet of light onto the scrim. “It’s all reflection,” says Perry Silvey, our adored, ever-calm NYCB stage and production manager, who kept things running backstage and onstage for over forty-two years. “What you see [from the audience] is all reflected light—six lamps in every wing of deep blue and ten more lamps of steel blue and deeper medium blue. I always thought the blue corresponded to sky, but he never said that.” Throughout the ballet, the lighting undergoes slight shifts in tandem with the choreography: “After the Waltz Girl falls [in the Elegy], there’s a cue that changes very subtly that adds a little color, and at the end, when she is up in the air on the man’s shoulders, there’s a slow cue upstage right so the light is on her, up high,” Perry explains. “Mr. B was notorious for going out front to the lighting board. We had to signal the lighting operator as he was scared to death because Mr. B would walk into the booth, during an actual performance, and change the lighting in the middle of a ballet sometimes, a possibly disastrous move. One of us would always run after him as he headed out front.”
Balanchine altered and added to Serenade in numerous smaller ways too (hair in high bun, low bun, in-between bun), alongside larger musical and choreographic additions and alterations. He was still making significant changes just before he died. During my time—his last years—he was always in the front wing watching Serenade. I can only wonder what it would have been like for him to see us, his ultimate thoroughbreds, dancing that same dance he put together in 1934 with that brave and rather motley crew of early voyagers.
The music of the Russian Dance begins so softly, with a few high, sweet notes, that we can barely hear it, though we are only feet from the orchestra pit. But we can see the conductor clearly and follow his baton. I am standing just to the right of the Russian Girl, who is the center of our little band of five, echoing the five of the Aspirin dance, though we are different dancers and we do not have headaches.
This was one of the first roles I learned when I got into the company. It is sometimes referred to as a “demi-solo” role: the four Russian Girls dance everything the rest of the corps dances plus this dance—which means they have the most time onstage of any role in the ballet. By the end we are beyond exhaustion, having danced ourselves into an altered realm.
After a breath in, we close our B+ on the exhale, pulling the extended left foot into a tightly sealed fifth position, feet in 180-degree opposing directions but suctioned together along their sides. Mr. B did not like a loose-fitting fifth, not at all. We came to know that it was messy, slack, unfinished, a cheat: psychologically, one remains on two feet, while he wanted a newly created single high-reaching column comprised of two legs, and two feet bonded as one.
Breaking this bond, we extend the front, right leg forward and begin a very slow slide all the way down to the stage floor. The move is led by a full, beautifully pointed foot forward, toward you, but, in practice, when the edge of the hard box on our pointe shoes hits the stage it sticks and halts the slide, so we all know to keep our arches pointed but simultaneously relax the ball of the foot so that the forward underside of the shoe, not the tip, hits the stage and glides easily. A few inches into the descent, gravity, momentum, and body weight take over and we point our toes again as we slide smoothly, gradually, into full splits on the stage floor. While it is clear to the audience that we are in five aligned acrobatic splits, because they are forward-facing and topped by mounds of tulle, this classical anachronism looks, well, classic, though it certainly is not. No one got this low, in quite this way, in nineteenth-century ballet.
Arms open wide to the side, softly we place our right hand down and imperceptibly push into the stage floor, using the leverage to lift ourselves up and back, until we are each sitting on our bent left leg, right leg straight, pointed forward. And over we go, arms and torso extended forward over our front leg. We are now, five of us, dying swans all.
This folding, one of ballet’s most recognized poses, was burned into history in 1905 by the legendary Anna Pavlova in her four-minute solo, by Michel Fokine, called The Dying Swan. Pavlova performed this short dance to enormous acclaim over four thousand times around the world—it was her signature piece—and this moment of the Swan weakening, folded over her own legs as she is losing life, is its iconic image. “Nobody cared about the dancing, really,” Balanchine said in a feisty interview in 1963 about this solo. “They are just waiting for her to die. ‘Ah!’ they say. ‘Great die!’”
Anna Pavlova in The Dying Swan, 1905 (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
But this pose was not new on Pavlova in 1905: it had appeared ten years earlier in the Petipa-Ivanov Swan Lake, at the start of the Act II pas de deux, where Prince Siegfried reaches down to gently raise Odette up from the same stance: she is a Swan Queen awaiting her prince. Was Balanchine making a bow, literally, to his forefathers in the Russian Dance of Serenade? Perhaps, perhaps not—but it is there, a nod to our tradition in the pose. We, though, are not Swans with birth, love, and death stories; we are simply women doing beautiful movements, honoring our heritage while advancing it.