The New York City Ballet brought a program of three classic mid-twentieth-century ballets Friday night to a packed amphitheater crowd of 5000 at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, with hundreds more watching from the lawn. George Balanchine’s versions of Swan Lake and Firebird and Jerome Robbins’s Fancy Free drew huge ovations, showing that works that set NYCB atop the ballet world artistically can also attract large, enthusiastic audiences.
Balanchine’s 1951 version of Tschaikovsky’s classic cuts the narrative radically, focusing with laser-like intensity on the doomed romance of Prince Siegfried and Odette, the enchanted Swan Queen. At thirty-five minutes, it teems with as much great dancing as the full four-act ballet, and Sara Mearns as Odette, pursued and partnered by Tyler Angle as the Prince, was simply thrilling.
Mearns moves with luscious liquidity in Balanchine’s choreography for Odette, which symbolizes the complexity of her situation. Her working leg points to noon during a backbend, then swings down past the floor, kicking up behind her to midnight as her body plunges deeply forward into an arabesque penchée. The continual fluidity of her steps expresses the metamorphosis she must suffer as the sorcerer Rotbart’s victim, half-swan, half-woman.
When Angle lifts Mearns, her legs shoot out into a split, suggesting how his support could empower her and break the spell. But Odette’s thirty swan maidens, all in black, as if mourning the love affair’s tragic fate, race about and form circles, carrying out Rotbart’s bidding to separate the lovers forever.
In 1944, Robbins and Leonard Bernstein created the jazzy, comic American ballet Fancy Free, their first collaboration. Three sailors on shore leave in New York seek adventure and romance, and they launch a dance competition for the attentions of two women. Daniel Ulbricht’s high-speed solo features remarkable leaps in which he thrusts his legs out horizontally and touches his toes. Joseph Gordon dances smoothly, with sudden slides across the floor, and Jovani Furlan’s rhumba has so many sexy moves that his swaying torso almost has a mind of its own. Gordon and Indiana Woodward also wrap themselves around each other in a languid duet, with Woodward’s extended leg a fitting emblem of seduction.
The sexual politics of Fancy Free, including the sailors’ mischievous games with Mary Thomas MacKinnon’s shoulder purse, belongs to a more innocent time, and Robbins’s choreography renders the men’s advances more playful than predatory. Besides, the women give as good as they get, and, unlike our three heroes, exit the ballet with their dignity intact.
Balanchine’s 1949 Firebird, with stunning curtains and backdrops by Marc Chagall, also shortens the original 1910 version by using Stravinsky’s suite rather than his hour-long score. In this Russian fairytale ballet, the magical Firebird enables Prince Ivan to defeat Kastchei the Wizard and free the young women he holds in thrall, including a beautiful princess. Tall Isabella LaFreniere’s Firebird displays speed and lightness, leaping in low and high splits. Her plunging arabesques in different directions express her exotic nature, and when Peter Walker’s Ivan catches her, her Orientalizing slithers and the waves traveling down her extended arms make her resemble an Indian goddess.
Kastchei’s monsters, choreographed by Jerome Robbins, attack Ivan with delightful cartoonish menace. After he kills the wizard, LaFreniere dances a beautiful passage up on pointe, floating magically above the creatures and clearing the stage for the wedding of Ivan and his bride, elegant Miriam Miller. The finale’s famous music sounds so grand that Balanchine decided it needed no dance steps at all. Children race about with trays of delicacies for the wedding guests, the maidens, and even the grateful, liberated monsters, and the happy couple sweep their arms regally from right to left, welcoming us to this new world in which imagination reigns and, as so often in Balanchine, ballet explains everything.
Jay Rogoff is a poet and dance writer who lives in Saratoga Springs. His latest poetry collection is Loving in Truth: New and Selected Poems, and his book of critical essays, Becoming Poetry, will be published by LSU Press this fall.
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