Serenade, page 10
A dancer’s feet (Courtesy of the author)
Our toe shoes are not like Taglioni’s. They are expensive, not least because so many are required, a pair often not lasting longer than a single performance of a single ballet—many hundreds of pairs a year. I have a pair of Suzanne Farrell’s used pointe shoes from the early 1980s beside me now. I can see her feet inside them and all that this very great ballerina wrought. They are dirty on the sides and bottom from the stage, but the tops still shine.
Toe shoes have no right or left: they are all identical tubes, and we each decide which foot goes in which tube, thus we also mix and match from different pairs. There are shapely slim shanks both inside and outside, the inside made of layered board, the outside of pale beige leather. The hardness of what dancers call the “box” of the shoe, where the toes live, is not made of anything hard at all, just layers of glue and burlap that, when dried, become fixed, like rock. New, they are hard, dangerously hard, a weapon if you needed one. It is this hardness—tap, tap, tap—that you often hear on the stage as a dancer runs about. Balanchine did not want any noise on the stage, so we spent a great deal of time and ingenuity softening the box to the point where it no longer made any noise upon hitting the stage but still remained hard enough to support the foot up there on Olympus. We aimed for the finest possible line between soft and hard, knowing, of course, that in performance the shoes would get quickly softer with every move.
What a totally off-the-floor invention is the toe shoe, surely the craziest footwear ever conceived that has actual purpose. Like in Chinese foot-binding, they must be fitted so closely on the foot as to be like a second skin; they must never, ever fall off despite all the action they see. The foot inside the shoe is squeezed so tightly from side to side, with the toes rounded under, that the same foot outside its shoe could be, literally, twice as wide. This binding helps make it strong, able to stand upright like a column of stone. The shoe is slim and round like a Pillsbury biscuit canister before you pop it open to unfurl the dough.
Pointe shoes are handmade, and a professional dancer gets her own particular maker, someone she will likely never meet but with whom she has an intimate connection. Every element of her shoe will be made to her precise specifications—the heel, sides, vamp, box, everything measured to within an eighth of an inch of her desire. Until she changes her order. She knows her maker only by their mark, stamped on the outside shank of each shoe. Mine was “AAA” until he died, and then I had “XX.” Farrell, I see, had “S.” This pair of hers is stamped on its sole with a date: “8 SEP 1983.” They were made for her four months after Balanchine’s death.
They have the satin cut out at the toe tips in a neat little circle. We all did this—the satin is too slippery to dance upon directly and if not removed, will inevitably tear during a performance from the friction with the stage, especially during pirouettes. The underneath outside shank has deep, gouged scratch marks as if it had been attacked by a lion cub. We bought heavy, metal, clawed scrapers from the hardware store for this vital operation, to gain traction with the stage. We would then place the shoes flat on the floor and stand with one heel on the round hard box with our full body weight to crush its roundness, or else close the front of the shoe in a door jamb, to make it flatter, more fitting to a foot.
So strange how a clean, smooth, shiny pair of new pointe shoes must be immediately attacked, scraped, cut, and butchered right out of their plastic bags before even being worn once. Then we hit the underside of the tip on the cement walls of the stairwell near the dressing room—Bang! Bang! Bang! They are loud, and we hit them until they are not so loud. Mr. B told us that our feet needed to be flexible and delicate like an elephant trunk, with the soft landing of a pussycat’s paw, so our toe shoes needed the utmost flexibility and silence within their support.
The ribbons and elastic are sewn on by hand by the dancer who wears the shoe. They are not pre-sewn. We all had a slightly different method for securing the ribbons and ankle elastics upon which our lives depended onstage. Farrell’s ribbons are sewn inside out, the shiny satin side against her ankle—most of us did this—the matte, wrong side, facing out so as to blend the ribbons into her ankles and pink tights. Farrell’s ribbons are very secure: multiple strong stitches around the three lower sides of the ribbon and several big long stitches along the top edge. But she, like all of us, was careful to not stitch through the inner drawstring that circles the entire inner edge of the shoe. The drawstring is tied in a tight knot, the long ends trimmed short and tucked into the shoe’s upper inside—but it must run freely so it can be adjusted.
We sew the ribbons on the inside of the shoe, about halfway between front and back, leaving the two ribbons very long. The first time we wear the shoes, after we wrap the two lengths of ribbon across each other and then around our lower ankle, the ribbons meet on the inside of our ankle, the most invisible place for a small very tight knot. This knot must never loosen, else we are lost. Just lost. If your pointe shoe comes untied onstage, it is humiliation, total failure. Once the knot is tied, we take scissors and cut the ribbons’ two loose ends very, very short, perhaps one inch long or less, so as to neatly tuck and hide the ends invisibly, securely underneath the ribbons already tightly wrapped in layers around the ankles. After cutting but before tucking, one final step: we light a match and singe the cut ends of the ribbons so they will not fray.
The elastic loop, unlike the ribbons, is sewn onto the outside of the heel of the shoe, through the satin. If sewn inside the heel, it would be too bulky and counterproductive to the purpose: the short, tight-but-not-too-tight ring of pink elastic—Farrell’s are now faded, the decades-old elastic warped—is a loop whose sole purpose is to help hold the ankle of the shoe onto the foot. This is vital. It is not such a sure thing since the heel of the shoe is so shallow, rising around the heel so minimally, less than an inch. The whole purpose of the shoe, the tightness, the scraping, the cutting of the ribbons and elastic, is to make the shoe all but permeate the dancer’s foot, not a shoe at all but an invisible casing for the weighty work that the foot has to do not only to live, literally, pointedly, but to dance up on pointe.
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At close to two minutes into Serenade, we are still not yet up there. Still down here, with you, though not quite. Those extended right legs close in unison from tendu to fifth position. Fifth is our launching pad: both feet suctioned together, heel to toe, toe to heel, turnout tightly tucked underneath our core. From here, we can explode anywhere. But we don’t. Instead, we lift both arms forward, rounded, fingers all but touching, elbows softly curved to the sides forming a circle at heart level. We open them wide to the sides in a classic port de bras, with a twist: from the classical stance of forward direction to you in the audience, we drop our elbows slightly and rotate our curved palms upward while bending back and tilting our faces up, to the rafters of the stage. Here we pause, seventeen strong, young girls in a unified offering. It is a simple, harmonious image and an early harbinger too: the ballet’s first allusion to sacrifice, a surrender to the above. Minute 1:46.
We don’t move for six seconds, a long time for a dancer, time for the image to register not as transition but as end point, not as movement but as statement. For us, it is a public reckoning: we transform ourselves before your eyes from human to dancer, from parallel to turned out—ten years of work concealed in that single six-inch pivot that changes the world—in just over ninety seconds, so honed, so condensed is Balanchine’s mastery of time.
From the moment the curtain was raised until now, we have each remained an island, not moving from our assigned ground. Now we are ready: a battalion of female cadets.
Look. Look out.
8. THE GREAT RUN
Pow!
At minute 1:52, seventeen left legs shoot up onto pointe, rapiers to the ground, as seventeen right legs swoop fast, sharp, and high, straight side. Everything was not all with Balanchine. But it might be a start.
In class, Mr. B explained to us that when we moved any part of our body—a leg, an arm, a finger—it must be “placed” where it was going, and not simply land somewhere by chance. Total consciousness, total control. With our flexible bodies, our legs, after all, would fly up all too easily to great heights around our ears—but this kind of unaimed showiness was not what he wanted. It was not sufficient for a leg to rise and amaze with its athletic, gymnastic force. “It must be your leg,” he said, “from your body.” Without this self-knowledge and conviction in this knowledge, that high-swinging leg will be of little interest once it has arrived at its summit, however impressive. The limbs of a dancer’s anatomy contain the vocabulary, the alphabet, for communication, and just as the mind shapes consecutive words into meaning, the mind must shape our limbs, our movements. A leg must say, he said, This is my leg. Look at my leg—see my wonderful leg! It was a tall order to ask a still very young dancer to understand this concept, for it is, in fact, a quest of character, manifested physically.
Seventeen legs up and we are off, never unintertwined again. Quickly a kind of asymmetrical chaos ensues—“In order to make order,” Balanchine liked to say, “you make a mess.” Some mess. The right leg comes down, and we lunge onto it in a deep arabesque, body low, back leg high, we bend right, left, swooping around ourselves, arms trailing like half-moon comets. Suddenly two girls break rank and run in speedy circles around the rest of us before returning to their places as if they had never left. Anarchy sprung, the convent opened, our covenant sealed.
We plié, we lunge, we développé our legs, not high but with hips jutting forward, extending the leg farther forward, breaking, through literal extension, with all nineteenth-century classicism in a single, sexy move. We then roll up via bent knees onto parallel toe tips, hips leading the thrust forward yet again, in case you missed it before. It’s 1934, it’s swing, it’s jazz, and it had been five months since Balanchine had sailed into New York Harbor; nine years since he’d fled the Bolsheviks; five years since Apollo, his first masterpiece. He was on the move.
We quickly convene upstage left, our backs to you, while one girl, imperceptibly, runs offstage, though few if any of you see her leave. It is said in Serenade apocrypha—which is divergent and plentiful; it’s fitting to have so many unsolvable mysteries in a work about mystery—that this seventeenth girl “had to leave because she had a date with a man!” Man or no man, she is gone, and the pattern is changed.
Now a neat sixteen, we separate into four groups of four, bodies aligned directly behind one another, torsos and arms reaching, at graded angles, some sideways, some up, some in between. We are four eight-armed Shivas making consecutively higher circles, ring upon ring overlapping like the looped edges of a Hindu doily. Minute 2:27.
Separating again, we pace out but curl wrist around wrist until we are all hooked in a daisy chain, some girls sitting on the stage leaning, others standing in an arabesque par terre, four jagged, oppositely symmetrical, diagonal lines, everyone reaching, always reaching, never not reaching. Never quite here: purity resides in the reach.
Then she enters. Alone. Minute 2:39.
Rings of overlapping arms (from left: the author, Bonita Borne, and Barbara Seibert) (© Steven Caras)
She is another girl, an eighteenth in total thus far, if you’re still counting—though one of us has already departed, so with her we are seventeen again—but it is hard to tell if she is us or other, since she is dressed exactly like us, no differentiating costume or tiara or hairdo as is traditionally the case with solo dancers. This girl will become the center of Serenade, if there is a center, and I think there is—the heart-and-soul girl, the virgin, the love interest, lost, broken, and then leading, whole. But we just call her the Waltz Girl—since she later dances the Waltz section of the music. Just now she has no history but is happily jumping around with big sautés and high grand jetés, an exemplar of what Edwin Denby, the great poet of dance, wrote: “Ballet is a lot of young people hopping about to music in a peculiarly exhilarating way.” And of Serenade in particular: “The thrill of Serenade depends on the sweetness of the bond between all the young dancers.”
When she enters, this dancer cuts a path through us, from upstage left and then across the front of the stage and off again in a grand jeté into the first wing. You get only a brief glimpse of her, but she will be back. Oh yes, she will be back.
After she leaves we take off all over the place, bourréeing (tiny steps in rapid succession on pointe), chaînéing (tiny steps in rapid succession while turning in succession on pointe), soutenuing (two tiny steps while turning once on pointe) on the run, always on the run. We congregate again upstage left, backs to you, but in a different formation this time: a giant, diagonally situated triangle, each girl touching the shoulders of two girls in front of her, in five rows of descending numbers: six, four, three, two, ending in a single girl who is the triangle’s apex—and also its base.
But Balanchine has not finished his origami and takes this upright set of sixteen, interconnected girls and melts their verticality from above, so that the farthermost girls remain standing but each row behind them is lower, with the next lower still, until the last girl is lunging so low that her back leg is draping its length diagonally along the stage floor, an upside-down toe shoe tip extending out from her tulle. We are thus in multiple diagonals horizontally and vertically, at all angles. We bend as one, our torsos backward, heads vaulted up and then back, faces to you upside down. We are a pyramid on its head, melted by Dalí, imperialism razed to surrealism.
This off-center centerpiece that I have always thought of as a kind of balletic barracks marks one of the few moments in the ballet where we, en masse, gather tightly before taking off again in our constant pursuit.
We bend as one. (© Steven Caras)
The story of Serenade is told through running more than through any other single move—it is the great run. We run here, run there, run upstage, run downstage, run offstage, run onstage, run to each other, occasionally run into each other, run from each other, run around each other, run forward, and run backward to our fate, eventually knowing that, like sand pouring through an hourglass, running is the place itself, time itself, running.
How strange that this is a dance of the young, by the young, many still virgins—I certainly was one—when they take that opening stance. Innocents dancing a wisdom they do not have. But it is in our bodies, our limbs, our fleet feet, and the way we run and run and run through this ballet. The way we run to a destiny we do not yet know, but will.
Serenade is like a labyrinth that Balanchine has constructed to guide us, gently, but with no recourse but to proceed. To where? To our lives? To love? To beauty? To joy? Perhaps—but existentials have no place, no expression, onstage. We are simply back to that first pose. The beginning of the labyrinth is the end, back to parallel to start again, the eternal return. For a dancer to dance Serenade really is, you see, everything, not as metaphor but as fact. Not art imitating life. Art is life. Minute 3:15.
9. JOHN’S GEOMETRY
John Taras was one of a small, unchanging group of people who helped Balanchine do his work, live his life. This group was very much not an entourage; each was devoted, quiet, in service—Balanchine had no time for ego indulgences, his own or others’. There was Betty Cage (general administrator), Eddie Bigelow (manager), Barbara Horgan (Balanchine’s personal assistant), Leslie “Ducky” Copeland (who oversaw men’s wardrobe), Mme Sophie Pourmel (who oversaw women’s wardrobe), all the Russians who ran and taught at the School, and various balletmasters over the years, of whom John Taras was one of the longest lasting. He first came to work for Balanchine as an assistant balletmaster in 1959 and he remained until Balanchine’s death twenty-five years later. Despite his British accent, John was born in New York in 1919 of Ukrainian heritage and by age nine was dancing for a Ukrainian troupe. His busy résumé is indicative not only of his extensive experience but of the itinerant nature of the dance world. John trained with Michel Fokine and Anatole Vilzak and at the School of American Ballet, and he worked variously over the next decades as a performer, stager, regisseur, and choreographer with eighteen different companies, including the Monte Carlo Opera, de Basil’s Ballets Russes, the Paris Opera Ballet, La Scala, the Royal Ballet, Dance Theatre of Harlem, and the Bolshoi Ballet, and, after Balanchine’s death, as a balletmaster at American Ballet Theatre. His long and winding career exemplifies the art form itself—dancers ever in search of the elusive, and expensive, stage, in the struggle to establish the art of the ephemeral.
In 1963, John choreographed Stravinsky’s Arcade, which showcased the young Suzanne Farrell in her first solo role—likely at Balanchine’s suggestion, and certainly with his approval. It premiered just months before Meditation, Balanchine’s first public declaration not only of his love for the eighteen-year-old Farrell but of her future in his oeuvre: the yearning of an older man for a mystical young beauty who blesses him only to leave him, as in a dream: his muse.
John staged Balanchine ballets for both NYCB and other companies around the world, and Serenade was one of the ballets he staged numerous times, its being then, as now, the piece most in demand. John taught company class frequently during my own years in the company.
John Taras and Balanchine (© Paul Kolnik)
For the wildly complex comings and goings of the dancers in certain places in the ballet, John created a fascinating series of diagrams for his own reference. One of these sequences charts a few minutes in the first movement, including the aforementioned pyramid. Twenty-two drawings—two per page, each in a sharply drawn rectangle denoting the stage—cover one hundred bars of music totaling 2:35 minutes of the 33-minute ballet—from minute 2:14 to minute 4:49. Each detailed image denotes a mere 10 seconds of the ballet and the individual placement of the dancers, providing a unique hard-copy, aerial view of the three-dimensional density of Balanchine’s imagination.
