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
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! 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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Christmas in August anyone? I had what was probably the first Nutcracker gig of the year over the weekend, when I returned to Saratoga Springs to perform with renowned British maestro Bramwell Tovey and the incredible Philadelphia Orchestra. On a sunny 90 degree day, with some bonus humidity in the form of an evening drizzle, the PO and the NYCB teamed up for a program called “Winter Tales.” The orchestra performed Rimsky-Korsakov’s suite of The Snow Maiden, Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, and Waldteufel’s Skater’s Waltz before Rebecca Krohn, Ask la Cour, Anthony Huxley, and I came out for a visual assist on selections from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. Anthony danced the Hoops trepak, I performed the Arabian solo, and Rebecca danced the Sugarplum Fairy solo and then the grand pas de deux with Ask. The orchestra played other excerpts from the Nutcracker Suite including the Act I March, Marzipan, the Pine Forest Scene, and the Waltz of the Flowers as a stirring finale.
It felt bizarre to perform the Nutcracker in the summer, but it was somehow fitting—for my role at least. After all, the skirted Arabian bikini is infinitely more appropriate attire for August than it is for December. It was the first time I wasn’t shivering backstage beforehand! I also had a decent tan from a recent trip to Grand Cayman, so I didn’t feel like such a vampire for once. But even more fun was dancing such a sultry piece in the lazy days of summer. Balanchine’s Arabian choreography is a bizarre mix of heavy grand allegro jumps and sustained, adagio développés. Sometimes there are quick steps for every note in a triplet—like in the opening stage crossings which always make me think of Tina Turner in Proud Mary. But sometimes there is George Balanchine famously said: “there are no new steps, only new combinations.” He neglected to mention that there are quite a lot of old combinations in his choreography too. This does not diminish his genius—he was so prolific that it rather shows how savvy he was at stealing his own steps. Most choreographers are avid recyclers. They borrow from others, and especially themselves. I get very excited when I spot a patch of repurposed material I hadn’t noticed before, and this week I happened upon two more.
Balanchine’s Harlequinade (1965) cycles through our rep only rarely, and it has been absent for over a decade. I was an Alouette when it last ran, and since the birds don’t appear in Act I, I had never seen it before. So I sat in the audience and watched the dress rehearsal. I was surprised to discover a cribbed verbatim sequence in the children’s choreography. The little girls who play the mini-Harlequins attack Columbine’s dopey suitor Léandre with the same choreography that the adult fairies in Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1962) employ to attack Puck. Both groups wield sticks, encircle their prey, and go on the offensive with attitude sauté chassé drives. I guess when you have nailed a balletic stick assault you have nowhere else to go with it! But this isn’t the only bit of recycling going on in Harlequinade. There are the Rouben Ter-Arutunian sets which were originally used for New York City Opera’s production of Cinderella. The plot is I am excited to present the Nutcracker story of my friend and former colleague Kaitlyn Gilliland. For Kaitlyn, ballet has always been a family affair, and her recent involvement in the Knockdown Center’s production of A Nutcracker: Part I proved to be an intense exercise in memory and legacy as well as an opportunity for personal and artistic growth. You can also read about Kaitlyn and the ballet here in a December NYTimes article by Gia Kourlas. New Year, New Nutcracker How many works of art are able to capture memory and the passing of time so profoundly on both sides of the stage? “The Nutcracker” has as much importance for the dancers who grow up performing it as it does for the audience members who grow up watching it. –Gia Kourlas, “New Sugarplum Memories.” NYTimes, December 2014 Track 27: Kaitlyn My debut as the Sugarplum Fairy with The New York City Ballet fell on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. Many of the corps ladies, myself included, had already paraded through the Land of Sweets several dozen times that December, once to the maddeningly off-tempo scream of the theater’s fire alarm for the entirety of the Waltz of the Flowers. (I kept close track of Nutcracker near-disasters that year, willing my first go at the great pas de deux not to be among the most memorable.) Much to my relief, my first performance was uneventful. Peter Martins came backstage to congratulate me with a hug, words of praise, and a twenty-dollar bill, suggesting I buy myself a treat for Christmas. Our laughter revealed mutual relief that evening, but I always dreaded dancing the role, never feeling quite right for the part. My final performance with the New Happy 2015! While most of the world is turning over a new leaf (or beginning to regret ambitious resolutions) we at the NYCB are still recreating Christmas Eve twice a day. In this respect ABT has our Nutcracker definitively beat, for their production has been wrapped for a solid two weeks now! Aside from that coup, let’s look at how the rest of their version stacks up.
Round (Act) II The second act of the Balanchine Nutcracker opens in the “Land of Sweets” with a corps of tiny angels encircling the Sugar Plum Fairy as she performs a solo to that famous pizzicato music. (I like to imagine that at every show, some Nutcracker neophyte in the audience is sitting up a little and realizing: “oh, Tetris!”) Alexei Ratmansky uses this celesta music as a solo for the grown up Clara as part of the grand pas de deux at the end of the ballet. His Act II begins with little fairies and pages flirting in the “Land of the Sugar Plum Fairy.” It was cute, but I much prefer the Balanchine approach in this instance because it gets right to some dancing. The Sugar Plum Fairy is the |
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