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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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Ode to Toga

7/30/2014

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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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    Faye Arthurs
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