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The DanceView Times, New York edition

Letter from New York

19 April 2004.
Copyright © 2004 by Mindy Aloff

On Thursday, April 22, for one night only, New Jersey Ballet (NJB), directed by Carolyn Clark, in concert with The New Philharmonic Orchestra of New Jersey, will perform the evening-length staging, by Vitali Akhoundov—artistic director of the Russian Theatre Ballet GITIS, in Moscow—of Vladimir Bourmeister’s Esmeralda at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. The staging will include the adagio from Marius Petipa’s choreography for the Pas de Six from Esmeralda, which fans of the Kirov may remember from its 1980’s performances in the U.S. with Altynai Asylmouratova and which NJB already has in its repertory in a staging by Leonid Koslov, who, with Eleanor d’Antuono and Edward Villella, serves NJB as an artistic advisor. Sets and some costumes have been borrowed from Russia; the Hunchback’s costume and Esmeralda’s tutu have been made in the U.S.

The New Philharmonic Orchestra will be conducted by Leon Hyman, who founded the organization in 1977. Mr. Hyman has also conducted the New York Philharmonic and the Columbia Symphony for Columbia Records, as well as the American Symphony, the Jerusalem Orchestra, numerous Broadway shows and operas, and the Joffrey Ballet on tours of the U.S. and abroad.

NJB’s unique performance of the Bourmeister work in Newark this week will be followed by more performances of it in New Jersey theaters later in the fall.
For a history of the ballet, further information on the stager, and contact information for the theater, call New Jersey Ballet: 973-597-9600.

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So, three college freshman are sitting around late one night, talking, the way college freshman do. And they were speaking of this, that, and the other thing, and sometimes they agreed, and sometimes they didn’t. But mostly they did: everything that mattered was in a sorry state, very sorry indeed. What was to be done about it? They decided they were the men to change the world. And so, one guy—let’s call him Eddie—posed the big question: How does one become a patron of the arts?

These three students spent pretty much the rest of their lives trying to answer that question. The college was Harvard. The era was the late 1920’s. The guys were Edward Warburg, John Walker, and Lincoln Kirstein.

Here’s a big question: Do any freshmen today, at any college in the U.S., sit around late at night trying to figure out how to become patrons of the arts?

The occasion for this wondering was a remarkable celebration on Saturday by the Town of Greenburgh, New York, of George Balanchine’s 1934 ballet, Serenade, which was given its world première in early June of that year for some 200 people on the back lawn of Woodlands, the Warburg mansion in Hartsdale, which now serves as part of the public Woodlands High School, in Greenburgh School District #7. The story of the late-night Harvard discussion was told by Warburg (1908-1992), himself, in an excerpt from a filmed interview with him made by Woodlands high school students in 1984. Warburg—supplemented by the remarks of Nancy Reynolds—gave the audience something of the Serenade performance, which actually were two performances. The first one was rained out as soon as the dancers lifted their outstretched arms on Tchaikovsky’s opening chords. The audience ran into the house for a buffet, provided by Warburg’s mother and father, Frieda and Felix, who had organized and underwritten the evening as a present to Edward who, when asked what he would like for his birthday, replied, “A ballet.” It was announced that the performance would take place the next evening, same time, same place, at which Mrs. Warburg exclaimed that the next day was Sunday, and how was enough food for a second buffet ever going to be purveyed on a Sunday? The Tudoresque mansion; the steeply raked bank of soft grass on which the audience sat; the shelf of grass, surrounded by woods, on which the platform was built where the dancers performed, all still exist and are commemorated by a small plaque, set in the ground, with a legend that notes the event. The platform would not have been very large, and it was instructive to watch a performance of Serenade—staged with sharp attention to detail by NYCB alumna Bettijane Sills for student dancers of the SUNY/Purchase conservatory program—in the similarly constrained auditorium of the high school’s nearby main building. Compressed in space, the ballet’s energy intensified; and seeing it at such close range, one was reminded of how thoroughly the theme of being a student permeates the choreography. Professional dancers in Serenade are thinner, stronger, perhaps more virtuosic, but they don’t have the look of complete commitment to a mortal challenge and mysterious process that dedicated students do. To truly see Serenade in its letter and its spirit, I think, one must see youngsters, with their entire lives and hopes before them, perform it. Only then do its most melancholy ironies, the retrospective elements that the choreographer built into the work, surge forth with stinging clarity.

The feelings of dancers are eternal. Their training has evolved and become more scientific, more effective. However, the conditions for them to project that training and those feelings exquisitely—the choreography and the patronage—no longer are available, to them or to us, the audience, outside the staging of older repertory. Sometimes, late at night, a balletomane is hit with the fact that it isn’t only youth that is tragically lost in time, but ballet, too.

The Purchase Dance Program, which is directed by Carol Walker and in which Sills teaches, is a conservatory program: many of its students intend to become professional dancers, although most of them go into either modern dance or ballet companies that feature crossover balleto-modern works. As one Purchase faculty member put it afterwards, at a reception, “The ballet dancers don’t intend to go into ballet companies when they graduate. They say, ‘I just want a job,’ dancing anything.”

I was very moved by their dancing, although another student performance of Serenade, on Thursday night, by dance students at Barnard College, almost brought me to tears.

The Barnard Dance program is not a conservatory program, for which students would audition. It is part of the college’s academic offerings and is open to any undergraduate with the desire to undertake it. This means that many of the dancers do not have the requisite bodies at all to make the vibrant geometries of Balanchine’s ballets. Some are thin; some are pudgy; some are decidedly overweight. And yet, thanks to the staging and coaching of visiting ballet professor Barbara Sandanato—former principal with The Pennsylvania Ballet (which had a beautiful production of Serenade vetted by Balanchine from the company’s earliest years) and herself a student of both Balanchine and Pennsylvania Ballet founder Barbara Weisberger (who, at eight, became the first child accepted at the nascent School of American Ballet)—these undergraduates put on a rendering of Serenade that caught one of its essential, and ineffable, elements: the discrepancy between being young and completely open to experience and being perceived in a frame, in a context, in which that youth and candor are treasured as tragically lost aspects of daily living.

Barnard’s Serenade was part of a program of extraordinary choreography that also offered works by Martha Graham (the 1934 Celebration, with live music, staged with a slight change at the end this time by Yuriko Kikuchi), José Limón (the 1958 Chopin suite, Mazurkas, also with live music: an astonishing and, in some ways, more compelling antecedent to Jerome Robbins’s Dances at a Gathering, made a decade later), and Robert Battle (Battlefield from 2001, for an army of Amazonian women, with fantastical grunge fantasy costumes by A. Christina Giannini). I’m an adjunct teacher at the college, so I can’t review the dancers individually; some of them are even my students. I should like to note, though, that—just as the Woodlands concert would not have happened without the burning imagination, dedication, and love for Balanchine of art historian and Hartsdale resident Greta Levart—the Barnard program is a magnificent tribute to the leadership, imagination, energy, and Herculean perseverance and patience of former Dance chairman, now department consultant, Janet Soares. At Woodlands, Greta Levart’s first warm thank you was to Paul Feiner, the Greenburgh Town Supervisor, who had never heard of George Balanchine before she approached him with the idea for the evening, was open to being educated, and demonstrated his enthusiasm with substantial resources and high morale.

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Quotes for the Week:

“We all know it was never about money with him.”
--Francia Russell, speaking on 23 March 2004 to a panel consisting of Barbara Horgan, Violette Verdy, Peter Martins, Kent Stowell, and Richard Tanner, of why George Balanchine made ballets and generously gave away the rights to their performance by many companies.

“I’ve always been bored with just making money. I’ve wanted to do things,
wanted to build things, to get something going.”
--Walt Disney

“We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art.
We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective.”
--Michael Eisner

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Casting

The Town of Greenburgh Celebrates Balanchine and Serenade
17 April 2004
Woodlands High School
Hartsdale, New York

Introduction: Greta Levart
Opening Remarks: Nancy Reynolds
Video Presentation: Edward Warburg interview at the Warburg Mansion, 1984
(Video made by Woodlands High School students)
Excerpt about Serenade from George Balanchine (courtesy, Thirteen/WNET)

Serenade
Choreography: George Balanchine
Music: Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Serenade in C Major for String Orchestra, Op. 48)
Staged by: Bettijane Sills
Costume Design: Karinska
Lighting: David Grill
Dancers from the SUNY/Purchase Dance Department:
Principals: Miranda Grove, Joan Kilgore, Cheng-Fang Wu,
Barrington Hinds, Todd Staiger
Corps: (from program: there were several cast changes I couldn’t check)
Allison Anich, Jessica Batten, Erin Bellis, Jamie Brege, Jessica Campbell, Heather Daane, Isabel Fernandez, Lauren Fisher, Margaret Houston, Jolina Javier, Christina Kardambikis, Susan Lawrence, Maya Ogunusi, Meredith-Lyn Olivieri, Nicole Tompkins, Jennifer Tortorello, Danielle Zuccheri, John Timone, Justin Ternullo, Travis Waldschmidt, Patrick Welsh

Closing Remarks: Miriam Bernabei (Director of Arts, Music & Special Programs,
Greenburgh Central School District #7)
Reception music: Kathleen Coletta, violinist

Barnard Dances at Miller
15 April 2004
Miller Theater, Columbia University

Celebration (1934)
Choreography: Martha Graham
Music: Louis Horst; new arrangement by Ken Pierson, 2003
Reconstruction: Yuriko [Kikuchi], 1987
Staging and Direction: Yuriko and Susan Kikuchi [presented as a contribution from Yuriko’s Arigato Project]
Rehearsal Assistant: Marie Yereniuk
Costume Design: A. Christina Giannini
Musicians:
Benjamin Baron (clarinet), Gilles Obermayer (percussion), Ken Pierson (piano)
Dancers:
Jessica Backus, Molly Brush, Nina Diaz, Eileen Farrell, Megan Furman, Lianna Heidt, Ana Keilson, Elise King, Danika Pramik-Holdaway, Christina Saratsis, Megan Wacha, Lauren Webster

Serenade (1935, the year of its NYC performances)
Choreography: George Balanchine
Music: Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky (Serenade in C for String Orchestra, Op. 48)
Staging and Direction: Barbara Sandanato
Costumes: After Barbara Karinska, courtesy of the North Carolina School of the Arts
Dancers:
Anne Kelly, Johanna Morris, Hannah Vahl, Damien Johnson, Stephen Straub
Emily Bartha, Elise King, Jessica Stern, Tanya Whited
Corps:
Natalie Arellano, Lindsay Dreyer, Caroline Farrington, Ronnie Gensler, Lianna Heidt, Danika Pramik-Holdaway, Katherine Nyce, Julia Sandell, Brian Salfas, Jonathan Sandler, Karen Schloss, Kyra Settle, Pamela Terry, Melanie Tolan, Christen Weimer, Amelia Wood, Tony Wright

Mazurkas (1958)
Choreography: José Limón
Music: Frédéric Chopin
Staging and Direction: Raphaël Boumaïla
Costume Design: A. Christina Giannini
Rehearsal Assistance: Merle Holloman, Janet Pilla, Robert Regala
Pianist: Steven Ryan
Dancers:
Entrance (Prelude, Op. 28, No. 6):
Molly Brush, Danielle Fein, Megan Furman, Ronnie Gensler, Kate Hersh-Boyle, Ana Keilson, Jonathan Sandler, Megan Wacha, Rebecca Warner, Alissa Zingman
Duet (Op. 41, No. 1): Rebecca Warner, Ronnie Gensler
Solo (Op. 41, No. 3): Ana Keilson
Trio (Op. 33, No. 2): Kate Hersh-Boyle, Ronnie Gensler, Jonathan Sandler
Solo (Op. Posthumous, A minor): Rebecca Warner
Solo (Op. 30, No. 2): Jonathan Sandler
Quartet (Op. 56, No. 1):
Molly Brush, Megan Wacha, Megan Furman, Alissa Zingman
Solo (Op. 17, No. 4): Danielle Fein
Duet (Op. 59, No. 1): Megan Furman, Jonathan Sandler
Finale (Op. 30, No. 3): All

Battlefield (2001)
Choreography: Robert Battle
Music: Bronx Sound Machine
Staging and Direction: Elisa Clark
Rehearsal Assistant: Tyler Gilstrap
Costume Design: A. Christina Giannini
Costume Assistant/Construction: Lis Deutsch
Dancers:
Jessica Backus, Jessica Bauer, Shannon Barrows, Molly Brush, Elizabeth Coker, Diana Crum, Charlotte Dean, Eileen Farrell, Johanna Kirk, Natalie Mauro, Allyson McGrath, Lucia Plumb-Reyes, Ariel Poster, Betsy Rigsbee, Christina Saratsis, Kathryn Struthers, Mariah Twigg, Stacey Warady, Devika Wickremesinghe

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Photo;  The premiere of Serenade, given June 10, 1934 on an outdoor platform at Felix Warburg's estate near White Plains, New York. This was George Balanchine's first American work and was originally made for students at the newly founded School of American Ballet. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Jerome Robbins Dance Division.

Originally published:
www.danceviewtimes.com
Volume 2, Number 14
April 19, 2004
Copyright © 2004 by Mndy Aloff