Worst of all, bugs are everywhere (like a moth to a spotlight?). Once during a Concerto Barocco performance a huge beetle landed on Albert Evans’s head at the very beginning of the adagio. It crawled around on his face throughout his pas de deux while we corps women snickered behind him. Panicked, he asked me to flick it off him when we got to the large winding circle midway through the piece. But we had formed a giant chain, and he and the girl behind me had my hands. I could be of no help, for there was no way to do it without resorting to a head butt! Eventually the beetle fell
Dancing in Saratoga Springs can be challenging. The SPAC stage is as hard as a rock and it has an extra panel of depth which throws off our normal spacing. The front wings are more recessed than the back ones which makes exiting and entering downstage labored (case in point: the downstage left grand jeté exit of my Raymonda solo was a real push). The backstage crossover is pure cement and very long so sometimes we get late when we have quick runarounds. The weather is often terrible too: sometimes it is so cold that we shiver and steam rises off our bodies visibly from the audience; sometimes it is so hot and humid that we can’t breathe and we slip all over the stage on our own sweat. The lights go out on occasion. Stray bats fly around above us. There is also no way to exit the amphitheater without climbing an incredibly steep hill—so after shows and in between rehearsals when our legs ache we are faced with yet another quad workout if we want to leave the compound.
Worst of all, bugs are everywhere (like a moth to a spotlight?). Once during a Concerto Barocco performance a huge beetle landed on Albert Evans’s head at the very beginning of the adagio. It crawled around on his face throughout his pas de deux while we corps women snickered behind him. Panicked, he asked me to flick it off him when we got to the large winding circle midway through the piece. But we had formed a giant chain, and he and the girl behind me had my hands. I could be of no help, for there was no way to do it without resorting to a head butt! Eventually the beetle fell
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After I danced Raymonda on Friday night I slipped into the wings as Façades was starting to watch Wendy Whelan’s last Glass Pieces outing. She and Adrian Danchig-Waring were absolutely beautiful, but it was sad to think that that was the end of Wendy in Glass. But then Russell Janzen—an incredibly handsome and talented corps member—bounded out of the wing and I knew that everything was going to be okay.
The adrenaline-filled third movement of Glass is one of my all-time favorite pieces of choreography. It is set to the Act I: Scene I funeral music from Philip Glass’s 1984 opera Akhnaten (eponymously titled for the 18th Dynasty Egyptian Pharaoh). It may seem counterintuitive that music intended for a funeral could be invigorating, but to the ancient Egyptians funerals were not dolorous memorials but joyous ceremonies of rebirth into another realm. Glass Pieces premiered “I’ve got to get out of these ballets where I’m the only guy,” Andrew Veyette said to me this past Tuesday as we sat on the front of the stage to watch the final rehearsal of the opening night’s Raymonda Variations cast. (We were to perform it on Friday.) I laughed. This ballet really does feel like it belongs to us women. As I mentioned before, the plum dancing in Petipa’s full-length Raymonda belongs to the ballerina alone. Balanchine tweaks that idea and spreads the wealth more liberally in his treatment, but the feeling is the same. Although he gives the male principal plenty to chew on, it is clear that his role is that of an interloper—for Raymonda Variations is all about the paradox of the pretty little ballerina. It is girly froufrou on top and tough as nails underneath –a balletic wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Given how familiar Balanchine was with Petipa’s choreography, I think he purposefully plays with gender and rank in his adaptation too. In the original Raymonda the ballerina has six variations; in Balanchine’s version there are six women who perform variations. (Five of these women get one solo apiece while the principal ballerina gets two and a pas de deux.) What is interesting is that Wendy performs the central pas de deux in Glass nowadays, and she has owned this role for years. As I write this, her final adagio partner Adrian Danchig-Waring is turning the leg of goat that is roasting in the oven of our farmhouse. Adrian is making a dinner to celebrate Wendy—as we have been doing all week. Wendy is at the theater dancing Christopher Wheeldon’s This Bitter Earth right now, but I am taking a break from my sous-chef duties to post about the Glass adagio.
The second movement of the ballet is set to the adagio Façades, also from Glassworks, and is as pure a manifestation of Balanchine’s “see the music, hear the dance” proto-concept as it gets. A long line of corps women in silhouette in the back panel of the stage perform staccato pulsations to match each beat of the music’s backbone. The pas de deux couple—clad in the same shiny unitards as the Rubric principals, yet in darker hues—performs stretchy movements to the soprano saxophone’s melody line floating above it. The steps in the corps’ endless march along the backdrop shift ever so subtly as the music also undergoes small variations. In one section (which the dancers call “rocking”) the women stand with their feet hip-width apart and simply teeter from side to side to the This week, the incomparable Wendy Whelan dances in her 28th and final Saratoga season with the company. As she is my friend and current housemate (I am staying on an amazing boutique farm with seven colleagues this year—very exciting!) as well as an idol of mine I’d like to take a break from Raymonda to post about Jerome Robbins’s Glass Pieces. Glass is one of Wendy’s signature ballets and she performs it for the last time on Friday. Wendy worked on the ballet with Robbins and she was kind enough to tell me everything she remembers about the experience. I have also watched some amazing video tapes of Robbins rehearsing a very young Wendy at the Performing Arts Library. Wendy’s first principal role in the ballet was in the first section so I’ll commence with that today. The first movement of this tripartite ballet is set to Rubric from Philip Glass’s 1981 album Glassworks. It is an energetic amalgamation of cascading horns and synthesizers held together by a steady driving beat, a complex cacophony that Robbins said, “felt like spaghetti” to him. The curtain rises on an empty stage adorned with a graph-paper grid backdrop. Robbins came up with the idea |
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