In 1967, George Balanchine created Jewels, billed as the world’s first three-act story-less ballet. But watching the New York City Ballet perform it at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center Wednesday night made it clear that even without a plot, Jewels has many stories to tell.
Jewels’ most important story, of course, concerns NYCB, the company Balanchine created with Lincoln Kirstein. The three works, in three different styles to three different composers, introduce NYCB’s hidden history: all the influences that made it a world-class company and, incidentally, made Balanchine a world-class choreographer. Emeralds, to music by Gabriel Fauré, pays homage to the French Romantic ballet—ballerina Violette Verdy called it Balanchine’s attempt to help the French rediscover their great balletic tradition. Diamonds, the evening’s Tschaikovsky finale, is a pipe dream of the classical Russian ballet in which Balanchine grew up. In between, Rubies, to Stravinsky, typifies Balanchine’s “Ballet is now!” ethic, in a rambunctious, jazzy, American dance reflecting his beloved adopted country.
Jewels also tells the story of each new generation of dancers who inherit its treasures, and Wednesday night’s cast made the evening dazzle. In Emeralds, Tyler Angle lofted Indiana Woodward in sweeping lifts, including a luscious, sustained backbend over his arm. Their slow joining of hands ritually combined longing and promise. Woodward needs to investigate more fully the quirky port de bras of her solo variation. Is she admiring the beauty of her arms? Her gloves? Her imaginary rings and bracelets? But when Angle twice caught her in mid-leap and swept her in the opposite direction, it more than made up for it. Emilie Gerrity and Peter Walker made their slow walking duet teem with erotic suspense, especially when Walker, kneeling, supported Gerrity in an arabesque and slowly separated his hands to lower her into his embrace.
In Rubies, Anthony Huxley and Emma Von Enck ate up space fearlessly. Huxley looked unstoppable, zooming around the stage in a circle of turning leaps and leading four men of the corps in a chase, a sequence that reminded the role’s originator, Edward Villella, of running from street gangs as a kid in his native borough of Queens.
Equally sensational, Mira Nadon brought a playful warmth to the role of the female soloist, combining human emotion with steely strength. Even when four men grabbed her wrists and ankles, she defied them and maintained her confident power. At one astounding moment, balancing on one foot, she plunged close to the ground and extended her arms fore and aft at a radical angle, in perfect parallel with her sky-high working leg. She held this amazing arabesque so remarkably that gasps broke out all around. Then, with a carefree fling of her arm—nothing to it!—she exited.
The world of Diamonds unfolds in exquisite order, beginning with the continually evolving patterns of its opening waltz, a blueprint for the rest of the work. The twelve waltzing women look not at us, but upward, responding to some higher power. The pas de deux for Unity Phelan and Joseph Gordon then lets us glimpse the erotic raised to a heavenly realm. Diamonds alludes in several ways to Swan Lake—the women of the corps wear feathers at their shoulders, like vestigial wings—but it gives us a joyous apotheosis. When Phelan runs to Gordon to embrace him, she puts a little skip in her step. When Gordon kneels to her and kisses her hand, she looks at him regally, as if to say, “Yes—of course.”
Diamonds concludes with Balanchine’s most superb and intricate polonaise for all 44 dancers, rescuing the lovers from tragedy and integrating them into society, ballet-style. It’s a grand dance that comes as close to heaven as we can know.
For NYCB ticket information, visit spac.org.
Jay Rogoff is a poet and dance writer who lives in Saratoga Springs. His new book of literary essays, Becoming Poetry, won the Lewis P. Simpson Award for outstanding criticism. His latest poetry collection is Loving in Truth: New and Selected Poems, from LSU Press.
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