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JARED'S GUEST POST: Liebeslieder Part II

1/28/2016

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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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A One Temperament Toga

7/28/2015

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Adam Luders in Phlegmatic
Saratoga Springs was as idyllic and charming as ever this year, but I was more than a little distracted by the end. My 15 year old cat Eddie was hospitalized late Tuesday night of the second week of our Saratoga run, and I was aching to get back to Brooklyn to say goodbye to him for the rest of the tour. I raced back to the city on Sunday morning and arrived an hour before he died in my arms. I've lost a lot of pets over the years but this one was by far and away the hardest. What a summer.  I feel I have become an accidental eulogist on this site lately, and I would very much like to stop writing about death!

The saving grace of the week was dancing Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments.  I have been doing the First Theme in 4T’s for such a long time that it feels like it was made on me, though of course it wasn’t. (This is one of Balanchine’s gifts: his ballets are so effortlessly habitable.  A mere hour after learning his choreography one feels intrinsically rooted in the movement and the music.) Balanchine created 4T’s for the inauguration of Ballet Society in 1946. He had privately commissioned the Paul Hindemith score in 1940 and only later decided it should become a ballet.  

The First Theme feels more like yoga than ballet, which is probably why it was such a welcome distraction.  It consists of sustained, contorted poses—one for each note in the score. It is pure and literal: when the strings’ notes ascend, I get lifted up. When the piano is heavily clanged, I am accordingly dropped nearly to the ground and dragged offstage during its lingering rumble.  Extended notes for the strings become slow promenades in which my legs wrap around my partner’s ankle, thigh, and neck. It is an impassive, asexual Kama Sutra. It requires an intense focus 



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She is Legend

11/7/2014

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Wendy by David Michalek
The NYCB fall season ended on a bittersweet note with the retirement of longtime principal dancer Wendy Whelan.  There has already been a ton of press surrounding the event, but I feel compelled to add to the mix how much her career meant to me and to the members of our company.  In a field where personnel turnover is incredibly high, a thirty-year career is not just an anomaly, it is an extraordinary physical feat.  The average retirement age for dancers in the US is 27 years old, Wendy retired at 47.  For Wendy to have danced into almost her fifth decade is remarkable.  For perspective: I am among the senior generation of the company’s current roster, and I was a toddler when Wendy joined the company. It will be hard to start work again next week without her; she is one of the nicest and most generous women I have ever met.  

I have been a huge fan of Wendy since my student days, and her long evolution as a dancer has been incredibly inspiring to me and my peers. When I got to the School of American Ballet Wendy was a fully realized artist in her prime, and she had already been a principal for many years.  I went to watch the company perform nearly nightly and she was always on, often in multiple 


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Restless Creatures

10/23/2014

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Alexandra Danilova and Freddie Franklin
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Allegra Kent bows with Balanchine
The Sleepwalker role in Balanchine’s La Sonnambula is uncannily open to multiple readings and interpretations. What makes it especially unusual is that although the role is so clearly the spiritual component of the ballet, it can also take on very dark shadings.  The music for the Sleepwalker/Poet pas is “Qui la voce” from I Puritani.  When I saw Olga Peretyako sing this aria at the Met last year it made me think that maybe this Bellini opera had more in common with Balanchine’s ballet than the eponymous La Sonnambula.  The aria is part of the soprano’s mad scene, and the way that Peretyako (clad in a wedding gown after being stood up by her betrothed) pulled dementedly at her white veil seemed unnerving in the vein of the Sleepwalker.  The jilted bride of Puritani and the Sleepwalker are both pure, good figures—but there is also something a little off about them. 

Alexandra Danilova, for whom the role was choreographed, says in her memoir Choura that, “[i]n an ordinary pas de deux, the woman is somehow engaged by the man, and she goes toward him.  But I was going toward the moon. And that attracts the Poet, because he can’t make contact with this woman….[he] knows that she belongs to the moon.” This connects back to the aria, as the libretto translates to, “Oh return my hope or let me die/ Come, beloved, the moon is in the sky!”  Allegra Kent, for whom the ballet was revived in 1960, has described the Sleepwalker as someone who cannot awaken from a nightmare—a state that she claims reflected her complicated personal life at the time in her compelling biography Once a Dancer.  She also writes, smartly, that the role is


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Glass Pieces - Akhnaten

7/22/2014

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Photo by Paul Kolnik
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



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    Faye Arthurs
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