February 9, 2019
New York City Ballet’s Winter season has been running since late January and I have thus far attended five of the six programs (I’m not including in my total the “One-Time-Only” program on the evening of February 9). The strangest, programmatically, has been the “Classic NYCB” program.
The program features five works: Mauro Bigonzetti’s In Vento, Wheeldon’s After the Rain Pas De Deux, Balanchine’s Variations pour une Porte et un Soupir, Balanchine’s Duo Concertant, and Justin Peck’s The Times Are Racing.
Since becoming a City Ballet regular in the past year or so, I have found the experience of comparing Balanchine’s multitudinous works to one another, and the way in which they interact with and play off of one another, to be very rewarding, and something like a game of “I Spy.” In the “Classic NYCB” program, I was able to play the game easily—by noticing three specific moments of gestural “recycling” or referencing in three of the separate works shown.
Before I launch into a description of playing the “I Spy” game, I will share the many reasons that I found this program to be strange: it was quite long, the three middle pieces were all pas de deux (too many pas de deux to put next to one another—unless this was a gala, which it wasn’t), and there was nothing “classic NYCB” about the program except for Duo Concertant. Surely, to be “classic NYCB” there would need to be at least one work that demonstrates the way in which Balanchine adroitly arranges and intricately manipulates large groups of the corps de ballet. This is one of his signatures, and there are many ballets from which to choose to illustrate it: Symphony in C, Concerto Barocco, Piano Concerto No. 2, Divertimento No. 15, to name a few.
Back to the game — I noticed in three of the five featured pieces three distinct moments of referencing from other pieces not on the program. Two of these three instances were Balanchine referencing himself, and the last was Peck referencing Robbins, a choreographer in whose lineage Peck firmly places himself.
In both of the Balanchine examples, Balanchine references moments from his own much earlier pieces. In the fascinating, atypical Balanchine piece Variations pour une Porte et un Soupir (“Variations for a Door and a Sigh”), set to a soundscape of creaking doors, the woman (this is a pas de deux for a woman—“the door”—and a man—“the sigh”) stands centerstage, posed with a still lower body (I think with her legs in parallel, one foot faced to a downstage corner, and the other popped en pointe—but I would need to watch again to confirm the position) and raises her downstage arm (the one closer to the audience). She swings the arm around and around, as if she’s winding up for something. Apollo, in Balanchine’s Apollo, makes this very same movement with his arm at the beginning of the ballet, miming the strumming of his lute, while posed in a wide turned out, croisé (“crossed”) position, with his front leg lunged out and his foot popped in a forced arch.
As “the door” character performed this movement, I immediately thought “Apollo!” and nanoseconds later, my date for the evening, also a seasoned City Ballet viewer, turned to me and whispered “Apollo!” It couldn’t be missed.
Why would Balanchine have placed this iconic, opening Apollo movement here? In the middle of a very different ballet, created decades later. What parallels can/should we draw between Apollo and “the door”? One is male, the other female. Both are commanding. One is a god, the other represents an inanimate object, but is fierce and imposing. Both seem to be the central fixture or main influencer of the universe that they inhabit onstage. They call attention, and the other figures in each ballet revolve around them, respectively. Perhaps it is those shared qualities that Balanchine wishes for the audience to register in recognizing the recycled movement, a kind of gestural shorthand—or maybe Balanchine merely wishes to reuse a movement that he liked from one of his own previous works. He might have liked the energy of the movement, and the intensity of it, in the way it suggests building up or winding up for something. He might also have liked the way it commands the attention of the audience, in the stark contrast between the stillness of the body and the fairly rapid swinging of the single arm. If the movement continued for an extended period of time, it might even become hypnotic.
In Duo Concertant, which premiered in the 1970s, as did Variations, Balanchine also seems to reference himself. Duo Concertant, also a pas de deux for a man and a woman, is much brighter and has a happier atmosphere than Variations, and features a pianist and violinist onstage with the dancers. At one point, the dancing couple is downstage, stage left, next to one another, en face (facing the audience, head on). They are in a parallel position and alternating a bobbing, rhythmic, repeated leg movement, slipping each of their outside legs alternately to the side while bending their supporting leg in a plié, with accompanying port de bras (movement of the arms). The woman moves her arms first, lifting her outside arm (while her outside leg is “in” next to her supporting leg, about to dart back out) into a high diagonal position with a flexed hand facing away from her body. She then moves her extended arm back in to the body, with her elbow bent and her hand curved and touching her opposite shoulder, as her leg darts back out. These two arm positions—extended outward with a flexed hand, and tucked inward with a soft, cupped hand touching the opposite shoulder—are very similar to, or even the same as, two of the opening port de bras positions of Balanchine’s much earlier work Serenade.
In Serenade, a corps de ballet of 17 women start the ballet with an iconic port de bras section, in slow, serene unison. The curtain rises with all of the women standing in parallel with their legs together (sometimes called “sixth position”), and their right arms extending diagonally outward and upward, with a flexed hand facing away from the body—the same arm position as this moment in Duo Concertant. The women then very slowly raise this extended arm up and over, moving the wrist so that it touches the head at the temple. The arms then move from the temple smoothly downward, so that the arm is bent in front of the body and the hand cupped and touching the opposite shoulder—again, one of the arm positions of the Duo Concertant woman.
You can see Kay Mazzo, dancing here with former NYCB Artistic Director Peter Martins, show this seemingly Serenade-inspired port de bras section at 4:58 in this video of Duo Concertant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgd4-3hWuX8.
The Duo Concertant woman switches swiftly between this first and third arm position from the three opening positions of Serenade, skipping the second temple-touching pose altogether. Serenade (premiering in 1935) preceded Duo Concertant (which premiered in 1972) by close to forty years. Again, what does this referencing mean? Serenade is famously the first ballet that Balanchine choreographed in America. Perhaps the small moment of referencing this iconic ballet in Duo is a way of demonstrating how far Balanchine had come by 1972? Or a reminder to himself of how he had changed and grown in his art? Serenade is lyrical and romantic, Duo is spunkier and more relaxed. Had Balanchine picked up on the “spunkiness” of American culture, and inserted it into his dance? Was he showing in Duo how versatile his stylistic choices could be? Or how different a simple movement could look when inserted in different contexts, and to different music?
Justin Peck, in his sneaker ballet The Times Are Racing, also seems to briefly, perhaps even unintentionally, reference a movement from an earlier ballet; not one of his own, as Balanchine did in the examples I listed above, but one of Robbins’s. Peck has clearly been inspired by Robbins’s sneaker ballets in his own works, but the precise moment of referencing that I saw in The Times Are Racing was from one of Robbins’s pointe shoe ballets, In the Night.
In the Night (from 1970) is a romantic ballet that features three separate couples dancing three separate pas de deux, each with its own atmosphere and quality. The couples only interact with each other in the finale of the piece, briefly. In one of these pas de deux, the couple stands in an embrace with their heads on each other’s shoulder. They slowly move their heads to reach back, looking up at the ceiling, and then to reach around to rest on the opposite shoulder. It is a simple, sweet moment—and Peck uses it during a central pas de deux in The Times Are Racing, a modern, politically-charged piece made in 2017. Perhaps, due to the simplicity of the movement, this is not an intentional use of referencing. It could be, however, a covert homage to a master choreographer whose work clearly influences Peck’s.
As I continue to see NYCB, and add to my own repertoire as a viewer, I’ll look for these nuggets of recycled movements, or specific moments of referencing, and continue to ask myself questions about what they might mean, or what the choreographer may have wanted audiences to notice. I’ll ask too whether these moments are coincidences or purposeful, why they might be used in certain ballets, and what the relationships are between the ballet that features the original iteration of the movement and the ballet that features the recycled version. I am excited to notice more, and connect more dots between works, as I continue to observe and absorb the intricacies and details of the City Ballet canon.
Dance As I See It 