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JARED'S GUEST POST: Liebeslieder Part II

1/28/2016

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Picture
Jared and Wendy Whelan, photo by Paul Kolnik
​Liebeslieder: Public/Private
 
As the curtain closes on the first section of Liebeslieder and the ballerinas rush away backstage, the ballet shifts from a public experience to a private one.  It reminds me of that point in the television show Downton Abbey when, after dinner, the women disappear to another room and the men are left to drink and smoke cigars at the table.  But instead of cigars and brandy, the men in Liebeslieder only take off their gloves, possibly grab an Altoid from the ready supply kept at the stage manager's desk, and use a tissue to dab the sweat off of our brows.  We then reconvene onstage to talk, and to wait for our ballerinas.  
 
The ballerinas, meanwhile, are working much harder.  They rush to their dressing rooms, take off their gloves and shoes, change dresses, and hastily put on pointe shoes.  Careful preparation of the pointe shoed-foot is a ritual repeated many times daily in a ballerina's life, but during this pause they have to wrap the paper towel around their toes, shove their foot in, and tie the ribbons as fast as they can because we're all waiting for them.  It’s always a contest with the stage manager as the judge: "who will come back to the stage ready to dance first?"
 
After the last ballerina rushes to place, the curtain rises but the mood is changed.  We see the couples in their same starting positions as in the opening of the first section, but the lights are dimmer, and the women are now wearing romantic-length chiffon tutus whose layers of tulle reach to mid-calf, and the aforesaid pointe shoes.  Again we start dancing in a circle and lifting the women, but almost immediately Balanchine has the ballerinas weaving away from their partners and back again.  You get a sense that this is a more tempestuous world, where the couples relate to one another and themselves in a more unguarded manner.  Finally each ballerina starts to run offstage, her original partner catches up with her and escorts her off, and one couple is left onstage to dance a pas de deux.
 
While the pas de deux in the first half are danced in front of the rest of the cast, in the second half each couple’s pas de deux is danced alone onstage.  This, in addition to the pointe shoes and exposed legs of the ballerinas, conveys a sense that the couples are finally able to express their true feelings—which were perhaps only alluded to in the first section.  So instead of polite embraces and distanced waltz positions (one of the favorite corrections in the first section that we always receive is to hold the girl as far away from us as we can), the couples give each other full 

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JARED'S GUEST POST: Liebeslieder Part I

9/30/2015

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I am thrilled to present Jared Angle’s first post on Thoughts from the Paint. I have been begging Jared to write about ballet since before the site even launched. I cannot say publicly what I had to threaten to get him to finally do it! I have known Jared for 20 years; he is one of my very best friends as well as my most annoying next door neighbor.  In addition to being an amazing artist, he is incredibly insightful about music and dance and hopefully I’ll have enough blackmail material to keep him writing for some time to come!  I would like to wish him a happy ballroom birthday! 

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Liebeslieder Walzer, photo by Paul Kolnik
October 1st is apparently World Ballet Day, when various ballet companies will give behind-the-scenes access to their inner workings on YouTube.  Coincidentally it happens to be my birthday, when I will have the privilege of dancing George Balanchine’s Liebeslieder Walzer as part of New York City Ballet’s Fall Season at Lincoln Center.  I can think of no better birthday gift than appearing in this wonder of a ballet.  Since YouTube cameras will not be transmitting my morning ballet class with the customary “Happy Birthday” tribute played by the accompanying pianist (usually after a tip-off from a colleague), or the inevitable final dress rehearsal of Liebeslieder, I thought I could offer an insider’s perspective of dancing in this ballet which continues to reveal itself in more depth every time I encounter it. 

Liebeslieder, choreographed to Johannes Brahms’s Liebeslieder Walzer Op. 52 and Neue Liebeslieder Walzer Op. 65 for four voices and four hands at the piano, is an outlier in Balanchine’s canon.  Most of his ballets are set to fuller orchestral scores. And except for some short vocal sections in Mendelsohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and the children’s chorus in the snow section of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, there are no others in which we get to dance Balanchine’s steps to the sound of the human voice.  The mis-en-scène is also atypical for Balanchine, who often preferred 


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The Last Waltz

3/6/2015

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Me, Jared Angle, and Sterling Hyltin after La Valse. (That is Antonio Carmena photobombing in his Chaconne getup!) photo by Jon Stafford
I was thrilled to dance the last La Valse of the season the past weekend. Balanchine's La Valse is one of my favorites pieces to perform, it is so decadent and free. And I love the mashup of Ravel pieces which comprise the ballet's score. It was a treat to finish off the winter season with it. I think I was actually smiling during the finale, and since the finale consists of big jumps and lifts encircling a dead girl in the center of the stage maybe I shouldn't have been!  La Valse is one of Balanchine's darkest works, in which a virginal ingenue in a white dress literally dances with death in the middle of a high society ball and meets her demise. But the debauchery of the citizenry of the belle époque is one of the themes of the ballet, so maybe my smile was apropos. Perhaps it added to the ballet's menacing, glauque atmosphere!  

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    Faye Arthurs
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