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
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
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The summer is officially over and the New York City Ballet is back to work. Yet, as I rehearsed Balanchine’s Donizetti Variations this afternoon my wine-tasting vacation to the Piedmont region of Italy felt closer than expected—for we were practicing the “grape dance.” Ironically, back in August my oeno-inclined summer reading kept reminding me of ballet! Odd as it may seem, Paul Lukacs’s Inventing Wine (a comprehensive history of the beverage starting in antiquity) has more than a few similarities to Jennifer Homans’s excellent history of ballet, Apollo’s Angels. Although wine predates ballet by many millennia—Homans sets the birth of ballet in the year 1533, Lukacs estimates that winemaking comes about sometime in the Neolithic period, about 8000 to 4000 BCE—dance has been linked with wine since the very beginning. The Greeks felt that dancing and winemaking were civilizing activities responsible for the formation of society. Wine and dance were also intertwined with religion in the ancient world, as dancing and drinking were conduits to communion with the gods (particularly Dionysus/Bacchus—the god of wine who kept an entourage of wild dancing women called maenads). In my research on Glass Pieces I discovered that the dithyramb Jerome Robbins quotes frequently in the Akhnaten section of the ballet was an ancient dance meant only for the drunk. Apparently, one could not lead the dance unless “smitten with wine.” Another old Greek saying went something like, “when you drink water, it isn’t a dithyramb.” Unfortunately, perhaps, we at the NYCB perform the Glass Pieces dithyramb dead sober.
But even after ballet was created in the mid-sixteenth century, wine and dance did not part ways. Fine wine at the time became dependent upon the patronage and palates of kings and nobles (like the House of Savoy or the Marchesa di Barolo in the part of the world I visited this summer) just as ballet, born of royal courts, relied upon the whims and predilections of particular monarchs throughout its development (Catherine de Medici, Louis XIV). Both ballet and wine have had odd 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 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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