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Serenade Sadness

1/21/2015

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Photo by Paul Kolnik
I know, that title sounds like a Lana Del Rey spoof! But I am bummed because the NYCB winter season opened this week with Balanchine’s Serenade, one of my favorite ballets, and I could not participate.  My injury took a little longer than anticipated (ugh, when doesn’t that happen?) and I do not return to the stage until next week when I debut as the Theme couple in Robbins’s Goldberg Variations. At least there is the comfort that Serenade will be back. Like death and taxes, Balanchine’s signature works--Serenade, Symphony in C, Agon, Concerto Barocco and some others—are perennials in our rep. In fact, all of those ballets are being performed in the first few weeks of the season, and three of them were grouped together opening night! The first few weeks of programming for this season are incredible, and I would have been on every night.  I’m sad to miss all of it, of course, but especially Serenade. It is the first ballet that Balanchine made in America, and it feels a priori in every way.  I wouldn’t mind if it opened every season!

Serenade begins in a calming blue darkness with seventeen women standing still, their right arms raised to shield their faces from what feels like moonlight. When Tchaikovsky’s opening musical phrase repeats they slowly move their arms in unison until their parallel feet snap to first position. Then, with their arms opened wide they arch backwards to the sky as the last chord trails off into silence. It is a balletic hosanna. From there the music picks up and the women begin to bend and shape themselves into little floral-patterned quartets (your math is correct, one girl simply runs off into the wings for much of the piece) and the stage becomes a swirling sea of blue tulle. But that tranquil, evanescent opening is so spiritually charged that it never fails to awe me.

It is roughly two minutes long and it summarizes the whole ballet—and also the entirety of human experience! The women’s arms float effortlessly, but the path they trace is heavy with meaning: 

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GUEST POST: Kaitlyn's Nutcracker Evolution

1/13/2015

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I am excited to present the Nutcracker story of my friend and former colleague Kaitlyn Gilliland. For Kaitlyn, ballet has always been a family affair, and her recent involvement in the Knockdown Center’s production of A Nutcracker: Part I proved to be an intense exercise in memory and legacy as well as an opportunity for personal and artistic growth. You can also read about Kaitlyn and the ballet here in a December NYTimes article by Gia Kourlas.     

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Lisa Lockwood, Kaitlyn Gilliland, Valda Setterfield, and Louisa Blakely in the final moment of "A Nutcracker" photo by Maria Baronova
                                                             


New Year, New Nutcracker


How many works of art are able to capture memory and the passing of time so profoundly on both sides of the stage? “The Nutcracker” has as much importance for the dancers who grow up performing it as it does for the audience members who grow up watching it.  

                                                     –Gia Kourlas, “New Sugarplum Memories.” NYTimes, December 2014

Track 27: Kaitlyn

My debut as the Sugarplum Fairy with The New York City Ballet fell on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. Many of the corps ladies, myself included, had already paraded through the Land of Sweets several dozen times that December, once to the maddeningly off-tempo scream of the theater’s fire alarm for the entirety of the Waltz of the Flowers. (I kept close track of Nutcracker near-disasters that year, willing my first go at the great pas de deux not to be among the most memorable.) Much to my relief, my first performance was uneventful. Peter Martins came backstage to congratulate me with a hug, words of praise, and a twenty-dollar bill, suggesting I buy myself a treat for Christmas. Our laughter revealed mutual relief that evening, but I always dreaded dancing the role, never feeling quite right for the part. My final performance with the New


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Throwdown Part II

1/4/2015

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ABT's Flowers and Bees
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NYCB's FLowers and Tiler Peck as Dewdrop, photo by Paul Kolnik
Happy 2015! While most of the world is turning over a new leaf (or beginning to regret ambitious resolutions) we at the NYCB are still recreating Christmas Eve twice a day.  In this respect ABT has our Nutcracker definitively beat, for their production has been wrapped for a solid two weeks now! Aside from that coup, let’s look at how the rest of their version stacks up.

Round (Act) II

The second act of the Balanchine Nutcracker opens in the “Land of Sweets” with a corps of tiny angels encircling the Sugar Plum Fairy as she performs a solo to that famous pizzicato music. (I like to imagine that at every show, some Nutcracker neophyte in the audience is sitting up a little and realizing: “oh, Tetris!”)  Alexei Ratmansky uses this celesta music as a solo for the grown up Clara as part of the grand pas de deux at the end of the ballet. His Act II begins with little fairies and pages flirting in the “Land of the Sugar Plum Fairy.”  It was cute, but I much prefer the Balanchine approach in this instance because it gets right to some dancing.  The Sugar Plum Fairy is the 


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    Faye Arthurs
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