Category: Serenade

Season Kickoffs and Free Agents

9/20/2016

Baby Craig and me, photo by Rosalie O'Connor

Gwyneth in Serenade

Fall is my favorite time of the year. I am thrilled that the temperature is leveling off and the mums and squashes have begun to appear on the neighborhood stoops. It is always an invigorating time in New York, as it is the start of so many cultural seasons. Mercifully for me, it also marks the start of football season, which has been a necessary distraction as I eagerly await the birth of my baby who is now past due! Perhaps he or she will come on the autumnal equinox?

Though dance and football have not been sympatico so far this season (my beloved Antonio Brown was fined in the very first game for this end zone dance, which I may borrow as a labor position…), they have been foremost in my mind lately. For today is also the kickoff of the NYCB fall season, and I have been thinking of my colleagues. Tonight’s gala showcases four new ballets, two of which are by female choreographers—hallelujah! NYCB Principal Lauren Lovette and guest Annabelle Lopez Ochoa are the debuting duo. There is also a new offering from resident choreographer Justin Peck and one from the young corps member Peter Walker, who is an excellent partner and a genuinely nice guy. I wish them all the best of luck this evening.

But as the season begins I want to acknowledge a slew of retirements that happened at the end of the summer. Three lovely young women, Dana Jacobson, Lara Tong, and Stephanie Chrosniak, have moved on to other pursuits. I have no doubt they will find success in their next endeavors. Senior corps men Joshua Thew and David Prottas have also left the company. Josh, who is an amazing singer, is going to devote more time to this other skill as well as model. David is joining the touring company of An American in Paris. I danced my last show before maternity leave with David, he has been a wonderful partner over the years. They will all be missed.

Especially transformational for the company is the loss of two dancers who had been around for almost two decades: Craig Hall and Gwyneth Muller. I attended their final performances on back to back evenings in Saratoga Springs this summer, and it was such a moving experience. Craig wrapped up his performing tenure with the Concerto section of Balanchine’s Episodes. His handsome calmness and phenomenal partnering skills were on fine display. I liked that he went out in a quirky part too, for Craig is also a total goofball and the role’s swings between seriousness and playfulness suited him perfectly.

Gwyneth danced her last Serenade the following night. There is no more fitting retirement vehicle than Serenade, Balanchine’s masterpiece of life, death, and rebirth. Gwyneth, who has never given less than one hundred percent of her energy onstage, looked especially radiant in her final evening of swooshing blue tulle. Her last incarnation as the “mother” figure in the elegy section was intensely emotional.

These incredible artists have been my close friends since our early days at the School of American Ballet, and their professionalism and positivity have made them pillars of the NYCB community. Craig, with whom I have a lifelong bond from our intense early experience of dancing in Chris Wheeldon’s Scènes de Ballet, is staying with the company as a ballet master. Gwyneth, who has been a dear friend of mine through high school, undergrad, and ballet life, just kicked off her first semester at Yale in a prestigious arts administration program. I am sure that Craig and Gwyneth will be as prosperous in their new roles as they were in their dancing careers and I am so very proud of them.

Gwyneth, photo by Erin Baiano

Craig, photo by Matthew Karas

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Ben Lerner Essay/ A Personal Announcement

5/19/2016

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Russell Janzen and I recently went to hear Ben Lerner read at the New School. Russell turned me on to Lerner’s writing a few years ago, and since then I have become a little obsessed. I loved his novels Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04, but I was quite surprised when I read an excerpt from his new essay “The Hatred of Poetry” in the April edition of Poetry Magazine (to be published in its entirety on June 7th) and found myself analogizing several of his thoughts on the stigmatization of poetry to the ballet world. Lerner writes in the excerpted essay that, “some kids take piano lessons, some kids study tap dance, but we don’t say every kid is a pianist or dancer.” I have to disagree with Lerner here. For at least in the latter case, people most certainly do!

“If you are an adult foolish enough to tell another adult that you are (still!) a poet, they will often describe to you their falling away from poetry: I wrote it in high school, I dabbled in college. They will tell you they have a niece or nephew who writes poetry….There is embarrassment for the poet—couldn’t you get a real job and put your childish ways behind you?” Lerner writes. I laughed as I read these lines, for if you switch out poetry for dance it becomes a conversation that most professional dancers have frequently.

Often, when I explain that I am a ballet dancer people will say “oh yes, I did that” or “my daughter is a dancer too.” In reality, they took dance when they were five and their daughters are fourteen and on cheerleading squads or in competitions—which is great, but it is not quite the same as performing seven shows a week for years! Sometimes people ask me what my day job is, or what I will do next. There is little consideration that ballet dancing could be a real occupation. Though of course, they are correct in that one cannot practice ballet forever, as one could potentially write poetry well into old age. But still, their dismissal ignores the fact that dance could be a multiple-decades long, quite serious (if not very lucrative) endeavor.

Lerner continues: “when you are foolish enough to identify yourself as a poet your interlocutor will often ask you to name your favorite poets. When you say, “Cyrus Console” he squints as if searching his memory and nods as if he can almost recall the work and the name, even though of course he can’t (none of the hundreds of non-poet acquaintances who have asked you this sort of question ever can).” This passage also resonates, for unless I respond with Baryshnikov or Nureyev I will get a blank stare. Perhaps current ABT principal Misty Copeland is becoming one such household name, but the truth is that the general public is not well educated on trends in the field. Obviously if you follow this obscure blog you are not the random airplane seatmate, for example, to whom I am referring!

If I can make it clear that I am a dancer, and that it is my sole source of income and it is indeed a full-time job, they will become skeptical again when I reply to further inquiry that my favorite ballet is not Swan Lake but Serenade or Concerto Barocco. Naturally they have never heard of it, and then they think I must be in some amateur troupe. (Balanchine and neo-classicism are not in common parlance outside of New York.) There is nothing wrong with that, in the same way that I enjoy poetry, read it sometimes, and had no idea who Cyrus Console was either. But I was not surprised that a working poet did not respond with Keats.

It is wonderful that so many people take ballet classes in childhood, yet I find it unfortunate that their conception of an entire art form is frequently crystallized in that fledgling experience. I also believe that people intuitively respond to movement and can find aesthetic pleasure in it, but somehow that appreciation is not widely cultivated in our society. I was taught the difference between Impressionism and Mannerism in public elementary school, but there was not much in the way of dance education.  Dance fandom becomes a study in esoterica if that passion survives into adulthood.

At the reading, Lerner did not select an excerpt from his new essay but instead chose one from 10:04, perhaps because he is far more famous for being a novelist than for being a poet. But during the Q&A session afterwards he spoke about how he will always describe himself as a poet, because he feels that it is who he truly is, even if he is now known for something else. He spoke of poetry the way dancers speak of dancing—like it is a calling or an identity rather than a hobby or a livelihood.

I have been thinking a lot about this lately because I am pregnant. I am so incredibly excited about my new role as a mother, but it is funny to feel utterly divorced from my dancing life as my body changes and my waistline expands. Unlike some dancers—notably NYCB principal Ashley Bouder, who was able to take ballet class in pointe shoes past her due date!—I was forced to stop dancing before the end of my first trimester. My baby and I danced through some hectic weeks of Nutcracker, but by the time the Winter Season began I became so nauseous ("morning" sickness can apparently be a 24 hour affair) and exhausted that it was impossible to keep up a healthy gestational weight. Ballet dancing in peak physical form is hard work, ballet dancing on an empty stomach is nearly impossible. My doctor—and my instinct—told me it was necessary to bow out and take it easy.

The pregnancy books recommend that women disclose their pregnancies to their employers at four or five months along. Ha, as if that could be possible for a dancer! Even the indomitable Ashley could not perform too far into her second trimester, and there was definitely no hiding the fact that she was pregnant much earlier than that. Since I had to stop dancing before I wanted to announce my pregnancy to the company and the public, I was in a tough situation. Luckily ballet mistress Rosemary Dunleavy helped me to drop out quietly midway through the season. I am forever grateful to her for being so understanding and supportive. I was sorry that my little one did not get to be a part of such moving, iconic works as The Four Temperaments and Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto #2, but clearly he or she—my partner and I have decided to leave it a surprise—wanted no part in dancing!

Tricky logistics and a lousy first trimester aside, the experience of being pregnant has been absolutely fascinating to me. I am sure most mothers feel that way, but I think for dancers—who are so attuned to their bodies—it is a time of particularly heightened sensations. I knew right away that I was pregnant, before a urine test would work, because my body felt immediately different. Even while I was able to perform through my first few months, everything felt wonky. My muscles were looser, my center of gravity was constantly shifting. My partner David Prottas kept asking me during Symphony in C: “are you on your leg? I can’t tell.” Hehe, I couldn’t either. My pelvis seemed to be in a different place every day. My colleagues claim not to have noticed a difference in my appearance, but my tutus certainly fit differently. Even as I was losing pounds my breasts and abdomen were growing and I was loosening the hooks of stiff bodices.

Even more bizarre was the inability to control my own eating habits. As a dancer, I must consciously plan my meals around maximizing nutritional energy. By my third month of pregnancy, I could not stand the sight of meat. I was having all sorts of odd cravings and (mostly) aversions; it was so hard to ensure that I was getting enough protein. I found it incredible that something the size of a blueberry could dictate so many aspects of my life. Now that I am further along I am loving the feeling of the baby dancing around on its own all day, and all through the night!

It seems that there are as many different pregnancy experiences as there are pregnant bodies. I know that Ashley, as well as new NYCB mothers Maria Kowroski and Abi Stafford, had very little morning sickness throughout their pregnancies. Some dancers have come back from childbirth very quickly, for others it takes much longer. Many women have told me that the experience was radically different with each child they had. The first lesson in motherhood seems to be that you cannot control everything, and it is a humbling one.

I am doing more reviewing on this blog now that I am not performing, as many of you have noticed. Thank you to everyone who has inquired about my absence! For now I am taking it day by day and listening to my body, which is essentially what I do when I am dancing anyway. So maybe these identities—mother, dancer—are not so incongruous after all.

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Twyla Tharp's 50th

11/28/2015

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Preludes and Fugues, photo by Sharon Bradford

I once read that the urge to dance necessarily comes from a place of joy. The way a dog shimmies when it is excited to see its owner or the way a baby laughs while kicking its arms and legs are examples of an innate drive to move in euphoric moments. The fact that weddings involve dancing and funerals mostly involve sitting (today that is—in the Ancient world the Egyptians and other peoples staged funerals as celebratory rebirth ceremonies with lots of dancing) would also support this claim. Intuitively, this evolutionary biology theory seems plausible, for I certainly never feel like dancing when I’m sick or depressed.

Twyla Tharp seems to understand this idea, and her propensity for shimmying and shaking feels right so much of the time—like when she uses jerky phrases to undercut the serious perfection of music like Bach’s, as she does in her new piece Preludes and Fugues, to excerpts from his Well-Tempered Clavier I and II which I saw at the David H. Koch Theater last weekend. The messy humanness of these interpolated tics marries so well with the sanctity of the Bach—music that is so beautiful it hardly seems like it could be man-made. How can one not spasmodically rejoice that something so perfect exists? Great music (and great art in any form) can indeed tingle the spine and make one involuntarily shiver.

Preludes and Fugues was one of four new pieces Tharp made for her 50th Anniversary Tour. The troupe performed for ten weeks all across the country, but the Koch Theater—its final stop—could not be a more perfect setting for the program. The choreographic bookends which opened each half of the show, First Fanfare and Second Fanfare (to annunciatory brass compositions by John Zorn), echoed the Fanfare for a New Theater which Igor Stravinsky created for the inauguration of the building in 1964. In fact, the massive chandelier which hangs over the auditorium is meant to evoke

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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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Season Kickoffs and Free Agents

Ben Lerner Essay/ A Personal Announcement

Twyla Tharp's 50th

Serenade Sadness

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