This is not the dancers’ fault, nor is it something anyone can undo.
Balanchine, it seems, has become orthodox: classical, beautiful, the radical edges zipped up and smoothed. Even the heart-stopping passage in the Adagio when the ballerina risks a dive into a deep arabesque was executed with academic caution.Īs I watched the dancers trade vulnerability for perfection, I wondered if there wasn’t a more crucial fact that the long absence was laying bare. But, again, tentative precision held sway. It is so technically difficult that it paradoxically requires abandon-think too much and you will falter. This ballet is fiercely demanding, and it builds to a spectacular finale with some fifty dancers onstage. But things were much the same with the other major work on the program, “Symphony in C,” to Bizet. Maybe they were nervous, I thought, or adjusting to a live audience after too many lonely months. (There’s a moment in the middle where a woman falls to the floor-something that came from an accidental fall during rehearsals, back in 1934, which Balanchine wove into the dance.) But, instead of giving themselves over to the ballet’s off-balance rush of movement, the current company delivered a spine-straight and strictly classical performance, as if they were living in the corseted world of the Russian Imperial ballet. Human frailty and improvisation are written into its very construction. It has since become a signature ballet for the company, and it seems to contain the full arc of life, from its simple opening pose to its dances of fate, love, and death. Made in 1934, “Serenade” was Balanchine’s first American dance, and it was designed to teach his young dancers how to move-more, bigger, freer. The program opened with “Serenade,” George Balanchine’s gloriously flowing dance to Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade for Strings,” a perfect choice for the post-pandemic start. They had worked hard in preparation for the reëntry, and the house was packed with a fully masked audience eager to welcome them home. I imagined the dancers pent up and ready to dance their hearts out. By the time New York City Ballet opened its fall season, a few weeks ago, at the Koch Theatre, at Lincoln Center, it had been more than eighteen months since the company performed there.
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