Spend enough time watching George Balanchine’s ballets, and you start to believe that he could express anything on the stage. Friday’s all-Balanchine New York City Ballet program at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center progressed from tragic romance to comic celebration, with Swan Lake and Stars and Stripes marking its emotional poles.
Balanchine joked that you can fill the house by calling every ballet Swan Lake, and Friday’s huge audience made his witticism seem true. Using Tschaikovsky’s famous music, he packed more exciting dancing into his 1951 one-act ballet than other companies in their full-evening versions, eliminating everything but the basic tragic story of Prince Siegfried’s love for the enchanted swan-woman, Odette.
Balanchine’s Swan Lake also eliminates Odette’s evil twin, Odile. Instead, the entire corps of 28 swans wear black and do the bidding of the sorcerer, Rotbart. Their brilliant, menacing choreography sends them hurtling around the lovers in continually evolving rings and spirals, engulfing them in great avian waves to frustrate their desire.
Isabella LaFreniere shone in her début as Odette, launching circles of piqué turns and spinning passionately, vainly attempting to break Rotbart’s spell and join her Siegfried, Andrew Veyette. Veyette partnered her confidently, lifting her high in splits that expressed her impossibly divided life.
At the other extreme, Balanchine’s exuberant 1958 Stars and Stripes celebrates his beloved adopted country, using, of all things, the marches of John Philip Sousa, in clever
arrangements by Hershy Kay. Two regiments of women, led by Alston MacGill and Olivia MacKinnon, romp through balletic marches, and a regiment of men, led by KJ Takahashi, produces an orderly explosion of leaps, ending with unison double air turns.
The pas de deux paired the wonderful Mira Nadon with Peter Walker, who supported her in extended arabesques and attitudes on pointe. When she bourréed away from him, he raced after her, scooped her up and swept her off into the wings. Walker nailed his virtuoso turns and high leaps, while Nadon raised the stakes with fast footwork, gigantic splits, and a big circle of piqué turns, then whipped up a tornado of fouettés. The grand finale merged all 41 dancers in a melting pot of intricate patterns, ending with the women perched on the men’s shoulders as Old Glory rolled up behind them, a fantasy of a proudly united America.
In between, two short ballets sustained the evening’s themes. In The Steadfast Tin Soldier a 1975 work to Ravel, the toy soldier, Daniel Ulbricht, loves a paper doll ballerina, Erica Pereira. Ulbricht falls forward, straight as a board, comically kneeling at the last moment to kiss her hand, and her affection sends him into circles of bent-legged leaps.
Pereira expertly mimics the paper toy, blowing kisses with stiff forearms, pirouetting with her feet fully flexed, and losing balance in the slightest breeze. When she overheats from their joyous dancing and opens a window, a gust blows her helplessly into the fireplace. The soldier stoically takes up his post and salutes. The Steadfast Tin Soldier is a silly little tragedy—why, then, do I choke up whenever I see it?
Twenty-four local ballet students made up the corps for four of the wedding dances from Balanchine and Alexandra Danilova’s 1974 Coppélia, with music by Delibes. Baily Jones led the Waltz of the Golden Hours with the 24 girls, one for each hour, and Mary Thomas MacKinnon, Miriam Miller, and Olivia MacKinnon fronted the other dances.
In Balanchine’s choreography for children, the kids really dance, joining the fabric of the larger work. He made his Swan Lake to boost his fledgling company’s box office, but creating Coppélia was a mission—“For Saratoga,” he said, “and for the children.” The children deepen Coppélia’s rituals of marriage and family, expressing hope for the future of ballet, and for the world.
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.
