I have been a huge fan of Wendy since my student days, and her long evolution as a dancer has been incredibly inspiring to me and my peers. When I got to the School of American Ballet Wendy was a fully realized artist in her prime, and she had already been a principal for many years. I went to watch the company perform nearly nightly and she was always on, often in multiple
The NYCB fall season ended on a bittersweet note with the retirement of longtime principal dancer Wendy Whelan. There has already been a ton of press surrounding the event, but I feel compelled to add to the mix how much her career meant to me and to the members of our company. In a field where personnel turnover is incredibly high, a thirty-year career is not just an anomaly, it is an extraordinary physical feat. The average retirement age for dancers in the US is 27 years old, Wendy retired at 47. For Wendy to have danced into almost her fifth decade is remarkable. For perspective: I am among the senior generation of the company’s current roster, and I was a toddler when Wendy joined the company. It will be hard to start work again next week without her; she is one of the nicest and most generous women I have ever met.
I have been a huge fan of Wendy since my student days, and her long evolution as a dancer has been incredibly inspiring to me and my peers. When I got to the School of American Ballet Wendy was a fully realized artist in her prime, and she had already been a principal for many years. I went to watch the company perform nearly nightly and she was always on, often in multiple
1 Comment
The Sleepwalker role in Balanchine’s La Sonnambula is uncannily open to multiple readings and interpretations. What makes it especially unusual is that although the role is so clearly the spiritual component of the ballet, it can also take on very dark shadings. The music for the Sleepwalker/Poet pas is “Qui la voce” from I Puritani. When I saw Olga Peretyako sing this aria at the Met last year it made me think that maybe this Bellini opera had more in common with Balanchine’s ballet than the eponymous La Sonnambula. The aria is part of the soprano’s mad scene, and the way that Peretyako (clad in a wedding gown after being stood up by her betrothed) pulled dementedly at her white veil seemed unnerving in the vein of the Sleepwalker. The jilted bride of Puritani and the Sleepwalker are both pure, good figures—but there is also something a little off about them.
Alexandra Danilova, for whom the role was choreographed, says in her memoir Choura that, “[i]n an ordinary pas de deux, the woman is somehow engaged by the man, and she goes toward him. But I was going toward the moon. And that attracts the Poet, because he can’t make contact with this woman….[he] knows that she belongs to the moon.” This connects back to the aria, as the libretto translates to, “Oh return my hope or let me die/ Come, beloved, the moon is in the sky!” Allegra Kent, for whom the ballet was revived in 1960, has described the Sleepwalker as someone who cannot awaken from a nightmare—a state that she claims reflected her complicated personal life at the time in her compelling biography Once a Dancer. She also writes, smartly, that the role is I had a wonderful time performing one of my favorite roles over the weekend—the Coquette in Balanchine’s La Sonnambula. The ballet was originally called Night Shadow when it was choreographed in1946, and it is surely one of Balanchine’s most bizarre creations. Although it is set to composer Vittorio Rieti’s adaptations of music from the Bellini operas La Sonnambula and I Puritani (and to a lesser extent Norma and I Capuleti e I Montecchi), the ballet has little to do with the plots of those works. As far as I can tell, no one is exactly sure of the ballet’s storyline—which I confess rather annoyed me when I was first learning the ballet years ago, but I quickly found it to be liberating. The story’s ambiguity means that we dancers can play with various interpretations of the central roles: the Coquette, the Baron, the Poet, and the Sleepwalker. The concrete actions of the plot are as follows: a poet interrupts a masked ball thrown by a wealthy Baron and his mistress, the Coquette. The Poet is quite taken with the Coquette and they flirt during a series of divertissements. After the guests drift away the Poet and the Coquette dance a lusty pas de deux in the deserted ballroom. When the mob returns the couple pretends as if nothing has happened and they join them in group dances and games like blind man’s bluff. As they all exit for dinner the Baron returns and snatches the Coquette away from the Poet, who is left alone with his thoughts.
Suddenly the Poet notices candlelight descending from the upper story of the mansion and a mysterious somnambulist appears, clad in a nightgown and holding a flickering taper. She does not appear to see him or awaken, but they dance together and he falls in love with her. The Coquette, who has escaped the dinner to look for him, stumbles onto the scene just in time to |
AuthorCategories
All
Archives
September 2016
RelatedNew York City Ballet |