Serenade, page 7
“He was looking for a way to begin,” Boris said. “He started talking about Germany.”
I was there with Diaghilev. There was an awful man there [Hitler]. He looks like me but he has mustache. The people know him, they love him. When they see him all people do like that for him. [Balanchine put his arm up in the Heil, Hitler salute.]…I am not such an awful man, and I don’t have mustache. So maybe for me you put together this. Your hand is high.
If one believes Boris—why fabricate such a strange story?—Balanchine derived the signifying opening arm in Serenade from having seen the Hitler salute when still in Europe the year before. What to make of this? Was Balanchine simply doing as he always did, taking things from life to use in his ballets? He said that he found the open-shut, open-shut hand motion of Apollo in Apollo in the flashing lights of Piccadilly Circus in London.
While the extermination camps were still years away in March 1934, Hitler was already making inroads toward his final solution. On the first of January that year, all Jewish holidays were removed from the German calendar; the next day, “non-Aryans” were barred from adopting “Aryan” children. During the next few months, Jews were arrested with increasing frequency for a variety of reasons, the Nazis published a new version of the Psalms of David excising all references to Jews, and the film Catherine the Great—starring Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Elisabeth Bergner, a Jewish actress—was banned in Germany only four days before Balanchine began making Serenade.
We will never know about this exactly, and it becomes just one more Serenadian obscurity, though, in the light of history, one of the more intriguing ones. Balanchine’s ballets were never political, always classical, and he never made any direct references to politics in his dances. When he became an American citizen in 1939, he was thrilled and proud. He was conservative, Republican, and dancers during the 1960s recall him telling them all not only to vote but whom to vote for. But only rarely did he assert his patriotism publicly. When the Iranian hostages were released in January 1981, he arranged a special performance of Stars and Stripes. I was in it, and it was a fantastic night, with Mr. B in his front wing looking quite pleased.
After the Hitler speech, which, Boris reports, both confused and bored most of the young girls—“I still didn’t know who ‘Mr. Hitler’ was”—Balanchine asked the girls to put that right arm up there, palm facing out.
There was a second young man besides Kirstein at that rehearsal. Edward Warburg, a son of the Jewish financier and philanthropist Felix Warburg, had been convinced by his Harvard classmate, the brooding Kirstein, to pay for Balanchine’s passage to America from Europe. Eddie didn’t know much of anything about ballet at the time, but he knew something about world politics, and he was concerned when he saw Balanchine put the girls’ arms up at this rather alarming angle. After considerable whispering between the two young men, Mr. Kirstein, a mammoth figure, lumbered over to Mr. Balanchine, a wisp of a man, and told him that Mr. Warburg thought the girls looked as if they were hailing Hitler. Not perhaps a good way to begin an American ballet, like a Third Reich rally.
Did Balanchine, in fact, intend to appropriate Hitler’s choreography of fascism and hate and reshape it, convert it, into one of beauty and freedom? Was he seeking, in part, to make a ballet to counter that “awful man”? Was this the “sin”? Balanchine told the girls to “soften” the arm, to bend the elbow ever so slightly and move the arm a little more to the right, fingers apart. And there it remains today.
Fifteen days later, on March 29, Balanchine invited “an enormous crowd of people,” according to Kirstein’s diary, to a rehearsal, a good indication that in two weeks a significant section of the ballet was polished enough that even Balanchine welcomed viewers. By April 7 it appears that three movements were completed, “very ragged,” wrote Kirstein, “because abt. 10 [dancers] were missing.” It would be unheard of now to have more than half the cast of a ballet missing from rehearsal, but these were the scattershot early days.
On April 24, some “dark blue uniform practice costumes” arrived at the rehearsal studio. “They didn’t fit very well,” Kirstein reported, “because Bal. as usual had wanted them cut low over the breasts and they were cut too low and consequently they had to be worn backwards.” Oops. Thus began the ensuing twenty-year saga of Serenade’s search for her appropriate apparel.
At the request of their son Eddie, for his twenty-sixth birthday, the Warburgs had agreed to present the new School of American Ballet’s debut performance (in reality, a recital) of three ballets by Balanchine—Mozartiana, Serenade, and Dreams[*]—outdoors, on a small erected stage, at their estate called Woodlands in Hartsdale, in the town of Greenburgh, New York, near White Plains, twenty miles north of New York City. The date was set for Saturday, June 9, and 250 guests were invited. It took two performances for the three ballets to finally make it onstage.
As the date was fast approaching, the costume quest continued: “Hunted for bathing suits for the boys in Serenade,” wrote Kirstein on June 5, and the following day: “Hours spent more or less fruitlessly with Bal. at Bloomingdale’s…while he tried to make up his mind abt. costumes for the Boys in Serenade. He has a spoiled boy’s vanity which makes him at once refuse any given suggestion. One must approach him always from behind. Even this no cinch as there are always more than two alternatives….” The day before the performance suitable shirts for the men were found “at last at Abercrombies.”
That same day, at 3:00 p.m., the unlikely troupe set out for Hartsdale to set up the stage and rehearse for the premiere, but, as Kirstein recorded in his boots-on-the-ground unpublished diary, things were touch and go every step of the way. “The Warburg mansion, when we arrived,” he wrote, “had the air of a castle deserted before the onslaught of invaders. No one was around…. Frances Mann, one of the important 2nd line dancers, hurt her foot. Caccialanza tripped and fell. Another girl wept and was suspected to have female ills…The students looked peaked and were cold and hungry and I feared a revolution…Vladimirov [Dimitriev, Balanchine’s volatile Russian manager] was in all his states: Voila vôtre Ballet Americain. [“There’s your American Ballet.”] I said ‘Nôtre Ballet Americain.’” [“Our American Ballet.”]
Serenade rehearsal, Balanchine right of center, on outdoor stage at the Warburg estate, June 1934 (Source: The New York City Ballet by Anatole Chujoy)
The following day the plein air premiere was all but entirely subject to the weather forecast while recalcitrant dancers and difficult costumes added to the tension. There was much prayer all around, not so much for success or recognition of the arrival of a new art form on American soil but for the rain to not moisten that soil—or the makeshift stage perched precipitously upon it. Or the piano that was hidden in the nearby bushes for the music.
“I made myself as boring as possible,” wrote Kirstein, “by asking & praying & wondering abt. the weather.” The pianos were covered and uncovered with tarps repeatedly and the stage dismantled and reassembled three times under the threat of a downpour. “Balanchine wholly indifferent,” wrote Kirstein, “went off in his car into White Plains to get some decent food. Fair weather came & Dimitriew searched in vain for him to rehearse.” By evening: “more rain: Bal. said calmly God’s will be done. Around 8.40…I got nervous & screamed at two of the boys to hurry & Dim. came in & roared at me. General apologies afterwards. Mozartiana looked lovely: went off well. Ridiculously stupid audience…Serenade was prepared. But then the rain set in, in earnest.”
“With the music of Tchaikovsky, the lights went up,” wrote Eddie Warburg, picking up the story of this now legendary non-premiere, “on the assembled group of dancers, each one standing with an arm outstretched, looking up towards the heavens. It was a moving moment. I can never look back at that scene now without remembering the White Plains performance. No sooner had the dancers become visible when, as if in answer to their raised arms, the heavens opened up, and it poured!”
The show was shut down, the audience ran for cover, and Serenade’s world premiere did not happen. “A more agonizing and inauspicious occasion,” said Kirstein, “could scarcely have been planned by the Devil himself.” The audience agreed to return the next day, a Sunday, for a redo.
Kirstein’s jottings the next morning continue the weather surveillance:
A little sun when I woke up—but considerable heat and the threat of rain increasing as time went on…at 5 o’clock in spite of threats we again completely embarked for White Plains with an added cargo of husbands, mothers, friends, etc…. Rehearsal of “Serenade” on the sticky stage. The weather seemed to clear. Blue skies with holes in dense cloud. I looked for every slight change of wind. It seems to split 2 ways over the house. Nelson Rockefeller called up from Pocantico [Pocantico Hills, the Rockefeller estate] to say there’d been a cloudburst on the Hudson but it had passed…it started a light rain just as they were going up for “Serenade.” I’m glad to say however it was pushed through—with little enough confusion—although the piano keys were so wet that Mikeshina and Kopeikin [sic] cd hardly play…“Serenade” looked very lovely, the boys OK in red pants and brownish polo shirts. Laskey’s make-up left something to be desired…Conditions were very difficult & everybody behaved extremely well.
Less than two years later the “red pants” were dropped while “red wigs” were added, and the curiosities of Serenade’s clothing continued.
The mishmash of costumes remained, understandably, uncredited, though Kirstein did provide an interesting program note for the audience, something of an artifact not least because for the ensuing decades there has been no program note at all, in keeping with Balanchine’s edict to explain nothing. Notably, Kirstein deemed the ballet a “tragedy,” a female one.
Without an implicit subject, the music and its thematic development indicate the tragic form of this primarily feminine ballet. Its lyricism is the large, fluent sentiment of Tschaikovsky shifting from the fresh swiftness of Sonatina, the buoyant accumulating passage of the Waltz, through the sustained adagio of the Elegy. The classic dance has been used here in conjunction with free gesture, developed logically for the whole body’s use. The corps de ballet, as such, scarcely exists. Each member is inseparable from the schematic design in personal individual meaning. The soloists crown the action alone, their tragedy prepared by the frame of the previous dances.
The audience at this, the actual premiere, comprised not only more people than the previous evening but many of note, including Nelson Rockefeller and Alfred Barr, the young director of the newly founded Museum of Modern Art—and money was pledged toward the struggling venture. “Alan Blackburn [assistant treasurer of MoMA] looked at me,” wrote Kirstein, “as [if] I had deflected the Warburg millions from the Mus. of Mod. Art. A group of fifty repaired to a banquet at a New York restaurant [Chestney’s] where “toasts of all were drunk including the weather, the City of Philadelphia etc…. Bal. read a little speech sober and comic ending with ‘we only have one Dollar…but soon we hope to have many dollars.’” And soon they did—at least enough to push through to 1935, when, on August 19, Kirstein recorded the uncertain progress of the fledgling enterprise: “The Ballet had a great success in Philadelphia though Helen Leitch fell into the cymbals.”
Skip Notes
* Both Mozartiana and Dreams (formerly called Les Songes, and with different music) had been choreographed by Balanchine the previous year for Les Ballets 1933 in Paris.
6. TURNOUT
After one minute and five seconds[*1] of Tschaikovsky’s strings, we are still palms up to the lunar light, and then gravity wins a round and wrists release, lifting imperceptibly as upheld palms drop down. “Maybe the hand is tired,” said Balanchine to one dancer. It is the first actual movement of our stilled bodies since the curtain rose. Just this: seventeen wrists bending, both rising and falling, the first breath. Seventeen statues come alive. Ah!
The broken wrist pulls to the forehead, palm still down, but now flipped away from the head as the head turns away and slightly down from this hand. This stance is repeated later in what we have long called the “Aspirin” dance, as in, “I have a headache and need some Bayer.” Dancer humor—and Mr. B always joined us in these inside jokes; he made many of them himself. They were a quick, simple way to identify exactly where we were in the ballet, much faster than saying “four full phrases and sixty-four counts after the second high note.” Navigating within a ballet during rehearsals is not a science but a name game.
Our heads then turn to the other side—our right, your left—forehead lowered and eyes too as the hand pivots and drops to a cradling, a crescent moon around our hearts, not a flat palm as in allegiance to a cause but more a cause of heart. But so briefly that the sentiment does not settle—just registers, perhaps, and passes.
All this time the left arm has been still, but now it moves into action as the heart hand drops down to the center of the lower body and joins, both palms curved inward, which now is also upward. Our heads, too, are now bowed before you. Our feet in their tight sheaths, tense and ready, are still pressed in parallel. Still.
The chord we are waiting for arrives at one minute thirty-three seconds, and with it—not after it; we anticipate it—my 10 toes and 160 others flip out 180 degrees. It is sudden. Boom. Seventeen flat lines land facing the audience, infinity sideways. Parallel provides forward and backward direction, perhaps with a pivot to a different forward and backward, and up and down, but boxed. Turnout offers all directions, any direction, every direction. When parallel splits open, the world splits too. A spherical realm appears. Possibilities explode.
The unexpected sudden parting of those thirty-four parallel pointe shoes in Balanchine’s first American ballet was the implantation, albeit a shaky one, of all that followed, not just in Serenade for the next thirty-one and a half minutes, but for the next fifty years, during which he established the highly improbable: America as the “home of classical ballet.” A most unlikely arrival in the land of dancing bears, Calamity Jane, Walt Whitman, Mae West, the Ziegfeld Follies, and that curiosity, the “right to pursue happiness.” Lincoln Kirstein liked to ask in a rather wild manner, “Happy? Happy? What is that? Who’s happy?” Ballet dancers do not pursue the vagaries of happiness; we pursue excellence—though happiness can be a random result. Classical ballet, in its essential evanescence, presents a larger panorama than a cursory feeling or hinted-at pleasure: on occasion, it offers grace—via actual corporeal grace—an action of salvation where physical beauty in motion denotes a celestial domain.
A crescent moon around our hearts (© Steven Caras)
When our toes rip apart, heels locked, turnout is instantly asserted, and each dancer connects to herself like a plug to a socket, her spine the motherboard, head to toes, mind to soles, moral to amoral, and she is born alive. This unnatural swiveling of the hips, legs and feet out, simultaneously, signifies the source from which ballet originates, and Balanchine showed it here to the audience as the very first motion of the legs and feet after the curtain has risen. But it had never been shown before as an end, a place unto itself: first position! Ta-da!
Rarely seen onstage at all and even then as a transient place, as its name indicates, first position is, and remains, the very foundation from whence all—all—ballet movements emanate. Its openness, aroundness, announces in no uncertain terms that turnout is ballet’s most fundamental, defining, and distinguishing characteristic. One might say, in truth, that turnout is the very core, the uncontested essence, of the art form. While first position is seemingly the simplest and most basic, and perhaps the most famous, of ballet positions, even to a layperson—who hasn’t on some occasion wiggled themselves into it, often for a laugh—any professional dancer knows that its perfect achievement requires not just the feet, legs, and hips rotating in unison but also symmetrical alignment of the entire body, both horizontally and vertically. First’s open declaration was, is, revolutionary: this is an art founded on a subversion of Mother Nature herself. Human hip sockets are not skeletally designed to rotate externally, away from each other.
When we split open to first position at the start of Serenade, we connect to our deeper selves, selves before unknown. To understand anything about ballet in general, or about Serenade in particular, one must understand the tension, the insanity that is turnout.
This flip open of the feet converts the body, in an instant, into a quiet, defiant new definition of oneself. This, I believe, is why little girls everywhere, unknowingly, have always and will always want to study ballet. Verticality, from first position on, endows us with a dignity, a singularity, a pride, a grace, even a nobility that life so rarely otherwise proffers.
But the focus on turnout is always in training, behind the scenes, in class, in rehearsals, with teachers and balletmasters, a backstage obsession. Never before Serenade had such intimacy—the rotation of a woman’s legs outward from their centered summit—been presented to the audience so explicitly, so sweetly. No other form of dance—modern, hip-hop, jazz, tap, jig, ballroom, striptease, flamenco, whirling dervish—is sourced in the remarkable notion of turnout. Though each inevitably employs its effect with passing frequency, none worship as completely, devotedly, and dependently at the great altar of turnout as does classical ballet. She is our mother goddess, Terpsichore wound out.
This physical requirement is why we begin training at age four, or five, or eight, when the body and mind are both still pliable. Otherwise it is too late in a child’s development for them to function well, much less naturally, in this other dimension. Too late for the brain to conceive that it is possible, or for the body to master it without cheating (which involves swiveling the feet alone outward while ankles, knees, and hips remain parallel).
