The New York City Ballet continued its post-pandemic “On and Offstage” experiment Thursday afternoon at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center with its second sampler of ballet excerpts, this time all from the work of George Balanchine. Despite its modest trappings—no sets, no orchestra, just expert piano accompaniment by Nancy McDill and Alan Moverman— this “All Balanchine” program was simply terrific.
Any Balanchine program promises marvels. The co-founder of NYCB, he deservedly ranks among the greatest choreographers in history. At this performance, almost 40 years after his death, 15 company members showed how skillfully they embody his choreography, and how much they love to dance it.
Principal dancer Gonzalo Garcia expertly played our guide, detailing what made Balanchine’s ballets revolutionary, and why, after many decades, they still look fresh. The selections rolled out in chronological order, from the 1928 Apollo, the oldest surviving Balanchine ballet and his first collaboration with Igor Stravinsky, to Who Cares? his 1970 tribute to George Gershwin.
Garcia explained how Apollo established Balanchine’s neoclassical style with unorthodox transformations of classical steps—the dancers’ feet sometimes parallel instead of turned out, and sometimes flexed as well as pointed. In the solos for Apollo’s three muses, Sara Adams, Emily Kikta, and Teresa Reichlen displayed how these ballet taboos make Apollo still look innovative.
For The Four Temperaments, Balanchine’s 1946 Hindemith masterpiece about the human condition, Garcia had Meaghan Dutton-O’Hara and Davide Riccardo demonstrate how Balanchine pushed ballet even further. A supported classical turn looked beautifully strange and modern, for example, when Dutton-O’Hara bent her supporting knee, a keynote move in the work’s third pas de deux. We could then follow the gradual mutation of this and other steps in the ballet’s opening Theme section, from Jacqueline Bologna and Lars Nelson in the first duet, to Mimi Staker and Kennard Henson in the second, and finally to O’Hara and Riccardo, with those bent-legged turns.
The pas de deux from the 1957 Agon showed Balanchine at his most radical and his most traditional. Miriam Miller and Amar Ramasar combined ultramodern steps with courtly ones, and angst with gaiety to Stravinsky’s difficult music. At one point Ramasar, while lying on the floor, not only partnered Miller, but also promenaded her through several degrees of arc.
Three dances from Balanchine’s 1967 Jewels suggested its revolutionary role as the first full-length non-narrative ballet. With ballerinas Claire Von Enck, Adams, and Miller, Garcia explored how Barbara Karinska’s jewel-encrusted costumes create atmosphere and historical context for the ballet’s three sections: Emeralds, to Fauré, Rubies, to Stravinsky, and Diamonds, to Tschaikovsky. Von Enck teamed with Bologna and Spartak Hoxha in the elegant Emeralds pas de trois, while Garcia himself partnered Adams in a sassy reading of the Rubies pas de deux, alternating severe abstraction with jazzy fluidity.
In the Diamonds pas de deux, cavalier Tyler Angle displayed Miller’s tall majesty, floating her slowly in lifts across the stage and enabling her limbs to unfold in a beautiful series of supported arabesques, backbends, and turns. When Angle knelt and kissed her hand at the end, Miller turned to him in delighted surprise.
Three songs from Who Cares? provided the finale, with Riccardo romping happily in a balletic softshoe to “Liza,” five women dancing with perfect classicism to “Somebody Loves Me,” and five men blending jazz, ballet, and Broadway to “Bidin’ My Time.” “All Balanchine” proved a perfect way to bide our time on a summer afternoon with the New York City Ballet.
The All Balanchine program returns Friday and Saturday at 7:30. NYCB’s Short Stories program returns Saturday at 2 PM. For ticket information, visit spac.org.
Poet and critic Jay Rogoff has published seven collections of poetry. His latest book is Loving in Truth: New and Selected Poems, from LSU Press. He has written about dance for many publications and is the dance critic for The Hopkins Review. He lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.
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