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
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
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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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