(343) The History of Balanchine's 'Serenade' with Alastair Macaulay
Today we are joined by critic, dance scholar, and former chief dance critic to the New York Times, Alastair Macaulay. We talk with Alastair about the incredible legacy of George Balanchine's 'Serenade'. Originally choreographed in 1934 for students at the School Of American Ballet, 'Serenade' has gone on to become one of the most beloved works of the 20th century. Alastair takes us through the history of the ballet, including the myths surrounding its creation, the many changes it has gone through over the years, and why we should really all be pronouncing it 'Seren-AYDE'.
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TRANSCRIPT
This transcript was generated automatically. It’s accuracy may vary.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:00:36]:
I'm Rebecca King Ferraro.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:00:38]:
And I'm Michael Sean Breeden. And you're listening to conversations on Dance. On today's episode of Conversations on Dance, we are joined by critic and dance scholar Alastair Macaulay to talk about the incredible legacy of George Balanchine Serenade. Originally choreographed in 1934 for students at the School of American Ballet, serenade has gone on to become one of the most beloved works of the 20th century. Alastair takes us through the history of the ballet, including the myths surrounding its creation, the many changes it has gone through over the years, and why we should really all be pronouncing it Serenade.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:01:19]:
Alastair, thank you so much for joining us today. We're so thrilled to have you back on the podcast. We've been always a pleasure. We've been going through a few old episodes that we were not able to transfer over when we changed our podcast feed. So one of the episodes that did not come over was an episode with you about Serenade. And it was always something that was very popular. And so we emailed you and we said, do you want us to republish it or should we do it again? And so we all decided to do it again. And so we're going to hit some of those points that we talked about before, but we're also going to find some new things that we know that you have discovered and uncovered. But before we start, I think the most important thing to talk about is, do we pronounce Serenade correctly?
Alastair Macaulay [00:02:02]:
I was about to say this. Well, as you know, the Balanchine world does pronounce it Serenade, and the Balanchine world is wrong because the Balanchine himself, from at least the 1950s, was calling it Serenade. And you can find him in 1964, it's included in the two part DVD Balanchine documentary that came out after his death, where he says, in front of the New York State Theater, and then I made Serenade as if the two words rhyme. And I think John Clifford also confirmed that for the rest of his life, Balanchine always said Serenade. I think he really thought that it should be pronounced according to the language of the country. How you say the word Serenade as in music? Because when he presented it in Latin America on tour in 1941, he was called Serenada. And when he presented it at the Paris Opera in 1947, he called it Serenade.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:03:01]:
Why do you think that the dancers or the Balanchine world, not including himself, have chosen to pronounce that? Do you think that they thought it was like a quirk of his accent, or like, I would guess that early.
Alastair Macaulay [00:03:15]:
On, when his English wasn't too secure, he began calling it Serenade because he was more French than English in his language very often. And I would think Freddie Franklin. And who is that long term ballet mistress? She worked with him at the ballet. Russo and Carlo. And then at City Ballet. I'm sorry, her name escapes me, but.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:03:34]:
She actually una kai.
Alastair Macaulay [00:03:36]:
No older than that. Vita Brown.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:03:40]:
Vita Brown. There we go.
Alastair Macaulay [00:03:42]:
I think they may have known him, say, Serenade, when he was more Russian and French than American. Maybe that's it. And they just kept it. I don't know.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:03:52]:
Very good. Well, we first recorded this episode in 2017. Well, we're thinking that we recorded it maybe late 2016, published it early 2017, so we just wanted to preface with that. But before we get into the actual history of Serenade, we want to talk about your personal history with the ballet. So tell us a little bit about that.
Alastair Macaulay [00:04:10]:
Gosh, I was 20 when I first saw it, and I'd been looking, I suppose, at ballet and dance for about two years. I saw it at Covent Garden with the Royal Ballet, and I now realized I saw a surprisingly prestigious cast. The heroine was danced by Georgina Parkinson, who many Americans will remember as a remarkable ballet mistress for 30 or so years at American Ballet Theater. The Russian dancer was Monica Mason, and she had always wanted to do the role the moment the Royal Ballet acquired it in 1964. She was a very strong technician and managed to get the role early on in the Royal Ballet's history with Serenade and went on doing it to about 1980, I think I could still see her execution of certain steps. Really fabulous. And the Dark Angel, curiously, was danced by Mel Dark, who became a long term director of the Royal Ballet School at the end of the last century. And a very important ballerina, I say, surprisingly, because usually the Dark Angel is associated with a woman with a wonderful arabesque. And I wouldn't have said that Mel Dark was the great arabesque kind. I later saw her do the heroine, which actually suited her a bit better.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:05:23]:
Isn't that funny how just like one thing but you're right, that's such a way that people cast us for that one moment in the promenade in arabesque. But there's just so much more to it.
Alastair Macaulay [00:05:33]:
Do you know, there is an interview in the New York Public Library with the original Dark Angel? I don't know if it was called The Dark Angel then, but Catherine Maloney, and one of the odd things about her is her name was spelt about ten different ways in the various programs, but she's Catherine with a C or a K, whether there's an E in the middle. There is, and Maloney is spelt different ways. Anyway, she chats in the new York Public Library on tape, her memory, and she said, it does need an arabesque.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:06:02]:
Well, I have a question about a different piece of casting that you saw. Is Monica Mason. How tall is she?
Alastair Macaulay [00:06:07]:
Well, she was one of the taller Royal Ballet dancers, but not as tall as her contemporary, Diane Bergs. My head says five foot six. I'm not sure. Generally, the Royal Ballet was a petite company.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:06:18]:
Right. I imagine to be taller. Maybe it's because of the context of the other dancers, but I find that.
Alastair Macaulay [00:06:27]:
If she danced beside, particularly Rudolph Nurev and maybe her frequent partner, David Waltz, she would be ballet than them on point. And they were such terrific men that they made it look heroic that they were dancing with this wonderful, powerful tall woman.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:06:42]:
I was just thinking that I very much love a tall Russian girl, but it's becoming less and less frequent, I feel. I mean, Colleen Neary obviously did it. Kira did that role. They were taller. But I feel like now we definitely see more pint sized Russian girls. So the Dark Angel casting might seem strange to you, but to me, I'm already thinking, like, oh, the Russian girl. I love it when it's a tall woman. It brings something different to it. I don't like getting boxed in in my Serenade casting.
Alastair Macaulay [00:07:13]:
I think Balanchine, more than any important choreographer, avoids casting people according to genre. If he would take a role that had been associated with petite dancers and give them to tall dancers and vice versa. I've known people in New York who consider themselves balancing an authoritative it should never be that type of dancer. And I think you haven't learned from Balanchine he would cast against type.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:07:39]:
Absolutely. Yeah. All right. We could just talk in circles about this. I could do, like, a whole podcast with just about that. Now you're distracting me. Alastair, can we have can we have a Serenade week? Yeah. Okay. So I guess I want to hear a little bit more then. So you saw that's your first experience with the ballet?
Alastair Macaulay [00:07:58]:
I saw it twice with that cast in 1976. And I wish I had been living in London, because I realized it was also danced that spring. The heroine by Natalia Mccaraver and also by Lynn Seymour, who I came to just adore so passionately. And she did do other balancing roles, but damn it, I missed her. And Mccarrava.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:08:18]:
Oh, my God.
Alastair Macaulay [00:08:19]:
She and hugely admired each other, and they were so unlike, and they were great fans.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:08:26]:
I can't even imagine Lindsay Moore, and that would be that's like a bucket list, like, time machine casting for me.
Alastair Macaulay [00:08:35]:
She also did Terpsichore and Calliope and Apollo, particularly. I saw her. She was my first Terpsichore. And she told me that in Berlin, she had danced second Movement Symphony and Sean. Can you imagine?
Michael Sean Breeden [00:08:52]:
Wow.
Alastair Macaulay [00:08:53]:
And she said, I thought I was a musical dancer, and Balanchine in really made me work on musicality, and because he absolutely wanted certain things to be on music. And the way she told it sounds odd because I would say Lynn was a wonderful dancer for footwork, but she said, for example, with the Envoy TASE at the end of second Movement Symphony and C, that Balanchine bullied her to be on the music. And he said, I don't care if you're on Half point, but I need you to be on the beat. I can't imagine Lynn needing to be on point. So that was the kind of step she could do easily to continue the Royal Valley. In late 1978, the Royal Ballet brought in Una Kai to rehearse rehearse serenade. And it was a really wonderful revival. And we had Robert Irving, the British conductor who'd been working for Balanchine for 1020 years, and it was his return to the Royal Ballet. He also conducted The Sleeping Beauty at that time, and he came back a few times after that. But that was his real return. And of course, he made sure that Tempe was strict and it was just a great revival.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:10:03]:
What about your first time you saw New York City Ballet do it or some of that conic?
Alastair Macaulay [00:10:08]:
Not many months later. And those days, I think Kay Mezo was the heroine, and I believe the young Kira Nichols was at least one of the Russian dancers I saw. I probably saw Maria Calagari as the Dark Angel, but I hadn't quite registered her then. And of course, the shock was that the hair was loose. So this was a period when Balanchine wanted his company to dance it with loose hair, but he didn't yet require that anywhere else in the world. And as far as I know, he didn't make that a rule at all for any other company during his lifetime. That just became the international fashion and the national fashion after his death. Some people, Francia Russell, who staged it often for Pacific Northwest Ballet, still prefer it with hair up. And I'm on the whole, I'm with her. I'm not anti hair, but on the whole, I like it with hair up. I like the greater anonymity of when you can't easily identify which heroine is which. But I realize as I've gone on researching the ballet, that Balanchine Sean himself changed his mind about whether the women in Serenade are recognizable individuals. And there were times when he gave them quite different costumes, even within the three leading women of the Elegy, or whether they are all dressed alike. I love the way it was between 1950 and 1976, when all the women you had to know which one was Diane Adams or Tanaquil LeClercq, Robert Trisha Wild, because they all were dressed the same way with the same hairstyle.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:11:47]:
Right.
Alastair Macaulay [00:11:47]:
And that's how it was with the Rob Adam and the Knife history.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:11:51]:
Right. We've been identifying these three lead women by the names that we all call them the Russian Girl and the Waltz Girl and the Dark Angel. But the ballet did not initially start with these, I guess, characters and didn't even have the final movement, if I'm correct there. Let's talk about how the ballet evolved into the version that we see today. What was the first show of Serenade like? Were there principals? What was the kind of overall look of the ballet in 1934?
Alastair Macaulay [00:12:26]:
Well, Balanchine was working with students, and that's why some of the Balanchine literature to this day says that the premiere was in 1935, because that was the first professional production. But in 1934, Balanchine staged it in White Plains as the debut of the School of American Ballet. Actually, it wasn't the first performance. He had wanted it to be there, and it got rained off at the first night. So the ballet that they did that first night, the only ballet for which the weather held out, was his Mozartiana, his 1933 Mozartiana, which, true to balance, she informed he had been rejigging. He was crazy about a number of the young women in the company, one of whom was Holly Howard, his first American muse. And he had given her a solo that I think he'd completely changed from when he had made it for Tamara to Manova a year before in Europe. And he did say to Kirsky around this time, I think she's greater than demand of her. Anyway, that happened that first night. Then the next day, thank God the weather worked and they were able to do the first performance of Serenade. We actually do have a few performances of it. There was no scenery, and they were wearing pretty short tunics. And we have the photographs taken from the audience, and I'm trying to remember the name of the woman who spent much of her life in Philadelphia, and she passed these photographs on to a scholar. But she was a member of the very illustrious original cast. None of them knew they were illustrious then, but it's amazing how many of them went on to have important careers. And the one whose name I'm trying to remember actually became I've used Joan McCracken, and she became an important Broadway star, and she sang as well as danced. But she always valued her Balanchine School of American Ballet background anyway. I mean, the cast, of course, included Holly Howard, whom I've mentioned. But Balanchine was also crazy about the original heroine of the Elegy, who was a woman called Heidi Vossela. It had the very young Marijan, who was about maybe 1413 years old, who later became central to Balanchine idea of Serenade and other ballets. It was for her that he more with her that he made concert of Arocu and Ballet Imperial and other works, ruth Anna Boris, who later danced this barijan version of Serenade, and others, too. It's lovely that these people who knew nothing, that they were really going on, most of them to have important careers. One of them, Annabelle Lyon, we'll talk about, and another one, leader or leader and truthina, I think, married Andrea Agilevsky and is mentioned in Balanchin's will.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:15:15]:
What did the first professional production look like then? How many changes were made once we got a professional company?
Alastair Macaulay [00:15:21]:
Well, as far as I know, the 1934 version, textually, was pretty much like the 1935 one, which was danced by the company called the American Ballet, and most of the dances were the same. By the time it became the American Ballet, they now had proper costumes which were roughly knee length and patterned not lower than the knee. The women wore 30s hairstyles that ended above the shoulder, but seemed to be more or less loose. Maybe they wore braids that kept the hair in place so it didn't wave around too much, and something about braids across the hair, keeping the hair in place, became the main look of Serenade for quite a few years, of course. There we are. We've already started to talk about loose hair in Serenade. Balanchine began to experiment with that in the early 1940s. And some of the early film we have of Serenade, a silent film from 1944 of the Ballerina Monte Carlo. And you can see it's just excerpts from all four movements, with Ruth Anna Boris doing the leading role, and she and the others are wearing their hair with these braids. But then suddenly, in the final movement, the Elegy she and the Dark Angel of that time, who is Mary Ellen Moylan, have suddenly loosened their hair. So it is now flowing over their shoulders. But it's not the way we have loose hair now, because they sort of have permed, frizzy hair, and it doesn't look as satisfying as the straight hair we now tend to see so curiously. This is filmed from a prompter's box in the Chicago theater by Angel Boiselle. And you can see Balanchine in the wings. And then she filmed something from the very next performance. And guess what? They've now keeping their hair up. So Balanchine loves it. You're not a good idea. Let's change. But it was in his mind, and then 30 years later, 1976, he asks them to lower the hair. People tell it slightly differently, but probably he was rehearsing it for a week, just the allergy with Karin von Deroligan, who was his best friend on the company. And she had this beautiful dark blonde hair, very full, and he had already used it loose as the opening movement of Chaikovsky suite number three, with the whole core around her of other women with loose hair. And apparently she fell to the floor at one elegy rehearsal, the hair came loose, and he said, oh, I love it. And either that day or the next day got Maria Calagari as the dark angel, and I think Colleen Neary as the Russian dancer to loosen their hair. And then, of course, he realized three different hair colors, dark, blonde and red. And so he said it's like a CLarol ad. And sometimes he also said it's like Charlie's Angels, which he often said was his favorite program.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:18:20]:
I love that.
Alastair Macaulay [00:18:22]:
I love the way that Balanchine you could just make light out of that. I'm sure Serenade had lots of dark and fateful significances, actually, for him, but he kept things light. He made rehearsals jolly well.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:18:35]:
Let's not keep things light, let's explore. I'm curious because obviously Balanchine famously was not eager to give away his secrets of what maybe he thought some of those kinds of elements of his works were. He wouldn't sit there and tell you that this is a direct reference to, I don't know, some Greek myth or whatever he was mum on details like that, but doesn't mean that it never happened. And one thing that you sent that I don't remember you talking about last time was that in 1959 he had talked told Bernard Taper that the LG shows how a man has his fate attached to his back. Can we talk about that?
Alastair Macaulay [00:19:24]:
Look at the Bernard Taper biography of Balanchine, and he is watching Serenade with Balanchine, I think, in 1959. And Balanchine goes out for a drink with him afterwards and said, you know, that ballet is 25 years old. It's lasted. That's not bad, 25 years. And then he says calmly, that final movement, it's like fate. A man goes through his life with a fate attached to his back. He meets a girl, he cares for her, but his fate has other plans for him and he has to move on. And of course, he's referring to the dark angel blinding the man as she leads him on stage, then allowing him to see this girl he cares for. And he has this loving relationship with her, but it's also a conflict because he's torn by both women and finally the dark angel leads him on. And this is Balanchine would sometimes talk about the story of Serenade to a number of people, but normally he kept it light. This is the only one where Balanchine Sheen seems to be talking from the gut. And Bernard Taper said, this is fascinating. Do you ever tell this to the dancers and Balanchine? Heaven forbid. So I think he is thinking in terms of a ballet about fate. Now, the image of a man being blinded connects it to the legend of Orphuse, which Ban Sheen told and told and retold throughout his career. You know, the Stravinsky Orphuse that he made in 1948, Shakhan Is Waltz orphuse music. He had staged the Complete look orphuse for the Metropolitan Opera in 1936. I could go on with other Orphuse things he'd created. He was thinking of Orphuse around the 1930s. It's in Lincoln. Kirsten's diaries. And I think when he has the man coming on, blinded by the dark angel at the beginning of the Elegy and Serenade Orphuse is again in his mind. He's not telling about literal story of Orphuse. I think he's just giving us a refraction of the Orphuse myth. Suddenly there is the man who's, blinded, doesn't know where he is going. His fate allows him to see this woman. He dances. It's a sort of long moment at a time with this woman he loves. The reference really is to Orphuse, who has lost his wife. He is the poet, he is the singer, he's the musician. He regains his wife. But then his fate has other plans for him. It's actually to do with Greek mythology. He makes the mistake of looking at her in the Greek myth. Balanchine doesn't tell us quite that bit in Serenade. But obviously sight and then blindedness again are important parts of the allergy. Now, I now think that Balanchine was thinking of Orpheus throughout Serenade, and that this makes sense of some of the famous accidents that happened during the 1934 rehearsals. Maybe this is me being fanciful, maybe this is me being pretentious. But we all know that Balanchine Sheen choreographed in this ballet in a way that he seems never really to have done before or afterwards. A girl turned up late and Balanchine said, let's keep that. Actually, he didn't quite that. He just later on said, oh, a girl arrived late. Let's work that in. And he didn't do it to this bit of music. They'd been rehearsing at the time. He found the right bit of music and the right bit of choreography. A girl fell over. I think that's this is the most significant moment of all. By the way, a man, she said, oh, we'll keep that in or. He put it back in later on. Actually, when you look at the way those things happen in the choreography, they are at two of the most choreographed moments in the whole ballet. When the woman falls over in the middle of the sonatina, it's not the later fall that we see. It's the first fall. Often danced today by the Russian dancer wasn't in those days. The quarterballey of 15 come in and in rows of three deep, and they take the shape of a Greek theater and a semicircle behind her. It's an extraordinary piece of choreography there, and they just stand or kneel there and do port de bra exercises. It's the most choreographed moment, in a way, we've seen so far, while she is there, lying in this strange position on the floor. And as you know, when we first did this talk, however many years ago, I had just done a presentation on Serenade in the New York Public Library. The reason why I wanted to do this presentation, indeed have a seminar, is that I had just found film of the 1940 film of the Valley Rooster, Monte Carlo, Silent Points, another Chicago performance. And when the girl falls down at that moment in the sonatina, she lies on her back as if she is a corpse with her arms folded across her chest. And the new public library also found lots of old photographs. And one of them, she's lying there, I think, with her arms stiffed by her side. It's not lying on her side in the more accidental way, we now see. And the formation around her of 15 girls is very close. It's as if they're absolutely close, eavesdropping on this intimate moment. Balanchine she really meant, well, possibly death, that a girl falls over and dies. What is he thinking of? I think he's thinking of Orpheus's wife, Eurydice, who was truly playing with her girlfriends, when suddenly a snake bitter and she fell over and died. By the time Orpheus reached her, she was dead. Balanchine, of course, would never tell the story of the uridity, but I think that's what's happening there. As for when the girl arrives late, which happens at the end of the sonatina first movement, he's already shown us these 17 dances at the beginning of Serenade. Now he gives us that image of them all again. And I think the whole of the sonatina is introducing us and I'm sounding very fanciful here, forgive me, to the world of women as the world of the dead. And I think that's what we see at the beginning of Serenade that these women are holding out this fateful gesture and gradually, in that wonderful ritual that we all know at the beginning of Serenade, the nine point ritual. That begins with the gesture and ends with turnout. That takes us from first position to tendu, side to fifth position. That they are going through a transformation of the self that is like what happens with death. If you believe in another world, which, of course, man, and she certainly did, the real world is not here. So I think we see at the end when the girl arrives late, eurydice entering the world of the dead, and you can see her sort of thinking, oh, where's my place? And she needs a place. Oddly enough, it's interstate.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:26:25]:
When you're talking about world of the dead, it's making me think of Giselle. And one of the notes that we passed back and forth was talking about some of the echoes of other ballets within Serenade, one of which you mentioned is Giselle. Can we talk about some of those that you have observed?
Alastair Macaulay [00:26:38]:
Yes. It's odd because Balanchine probably had mixed feelings on Giselle. I think he actually liked it, but he hated what Giselle did to dancers. He would talk about Giselle Lightus, and Alicia Markova, who had interested him so much early on, became the most precious contrived Giselle later on and would monkey with Tempe, which Balanchine Sean hated. He had admired August Besitiva as Giselle, and he later actually staged Giselle with Tamara Tomanova in Paris. And Maria Torchief once told Darling Crochet that it was extraordinary to watch these rehearsals because there was Tomanova, a fairly mannered dancer, usually, but Balanchine had always been wild about her. She was simply a very beautiful woman. And Torchief said in about 1980, you know, it was so fantastic to watch these rehearsals because Balanchine worked and worked to Manova, and you saw a whole new Tamanova and you saw a whole new Giselle was so exciting. And then it came to the performance and Tamanova dropped everything that Balanchine had taught her performance that she'd done before. And Balanchine was even crazier about that than he had been about the one darling Gretchen. He was in love with her. He's still in love with her. He wasn't going to criticize a woman when she'd done the performance. He'd just be supportive anyway. So I think he was interested in Giselle in the right context. He had actually also supervised, I think, in 1946, briefly, the American Ballet Theater production. And he had taken pains to bring the old ending of Giselle, where Giselle disappears not behind her grave into the cross, but into a grassy knoll into the ground in the middle of the stage that mattered to him. I've seen that shazam in two or three productions, but most shazelles don't quite end that way. She doesn't go back to the cross, she goes into another part of the ground.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:28:37]:
Wow, that's very interesting.
Alastair Macaulay [00:28:40]:
Odd to think that Balanchine cared about a detail like that, isn't it?
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:28:44]:
But it also makes sense.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:28:47]:
Well, I think when you think about when you're talking about Balanchine being someone who does believe in another world, it makes sense that that would be important to him because he wouldn't have wanted that the protagonist to end up back in the same place. That's the way that the story arc.
Alastair Macaulay [00:29:05]:
Needs to and he just gives us little refracted. Echoes of Giselle in Serenade the most striking one is that diagonal of women where they peel off into the wings of Giselle. Sometimes the way that at the end of the Russian dance, the heroine falls over with her hair now loose, can remind us of Giselle at the beginning of the mad scene. And sometimes the way that she in the elegy goes to this strange woman who has just come out of the wings, the corner backs, downstage left. She's often known as the mother in Balanchine circles. We members of the audience don't normally know that she is called the mother. I discovered this only when I had a ceremony symposium. I loved it. And one of the women we had for the City Ballet was Gwyneth Muller, who said, I'm the mother.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:29:58]:
It's a very nice moment. For the other thing I'm thinking about when we're talking about things that happened in rehearsal, then were brought into the ballet, some things that some audience members might not realize is just little instances where there are less dancers on stage, right? Sometimes there's just a couple of dancers that are off. Sometimes there's just one dancer that's off for different moments. And what do we know about. That was that also just a necessity from who was in rehearsal at the time rehearsing with students? Do we know anything about that? Or maybe it's not even that important.
Alastair Macaulay [00:30:31]:
Balanchine she said that at one point there were six women, and another point there were nine women. And I just choreographed that. I reckon he moved those bits around cleverly. And there are times when you see six meeting nine two. And because Balanchine is such a genius of arithmetic, he can make these numbers matter to you. And you almost begin to wonder if there isn't a mysterious mathematical significance to them. We've opened up so many subjects, and I'm sure I'm going to jump into something that you wanted me to talk about 10 minutes down the line, but.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:31:06]:
Let'S talk about totally fine.
Alastair Macaulay [00:31:08]:
Let's talk about the fuette terms.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:31:10]:
Oh, yes.
Alastair Macaulay [00:31:11]:
The weirdest thing of all in researching Serenade, and I'd known this for ages, back in the 80s, when I first started to give any lecture or presentation in England about Serenade, I found Lincoln Kirstein's 1939 ballet alphabet and under F for fuette. He describes a fuette very clearly, fuetti turn, that is. And he talks about how Pierina Lenyani amazed the Russian in St Petersburg in 1890, 518 93, actually, with her first lot of 32 fuette turns. Then he says how the fuette turn became a standard enough step so that Balanchine could have two of his baby ballerinas doing fuetes at the same time in, I think, 1932 or 1933. And then Kirsten says casually, in Serenade, 1934, Balanchine Sean had 16 women doing 32 fuettes perfectly. And you read that and you think, lincoln Castein, are you off your meds? Can't be true. And I remember reading this bit to the Serenade symposium that we gathered, which had a lot of very distinguished Balanchine dancers and scholars and musicologists and so forth in 2015, and everybody just said, oh, this is Lincoln being mad, and dismissed it. And they would all start to tell you stories of Lincoln's madder behavior. And then a few months later, I was going through Robert Gottlieb's anthology, Reading Dance, and he has an account of working with Balanchine Sheen by Annabelle Lyon. And she says, Balanchine Sheen had this company or school of women who could all do things, but he got them all doing fuettes. I was the one the guy was trained by folkin, I had other strengths, but I couldn't do fuettes. So Balanchine Sheen sent me off stage just before that bit.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:33:06]:
That's why there's one less girl, right?
Alastair Macaulay [00:33:08]:
And she adds, that's why they later to PK turn. So it's at that very moment that we now see with PK's King in a circle. I still cannot imagine how you can get 16 girls to do 32 fuettes. I wonder if this isn't an exaggeration, if he didn't have them in pairs doing there's a bit of remander variations where women do fuety turns at the same time in opposite directions. Maybe he had a couple and then a couple and then a couple. You can keep it going if they're only doing four or eight turns at a time.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:33:42]:
Right.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:33:43]:
Well, the other thing I'm thinking is that I think it's I'm trying to remember now, it's either 14 or 16 PK turns, so the music only allots for that much. So maybe it was fuentes, but it was like a hair less maybe than 32.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:33:56]:
Just talking about Lincoln and having to kind of sift through what's real or not, just through that one person's perspective and account of history. That's just one example. But let's take something like the hair down, right? So that's more recent history than the creation of Serenade. That's 1976. You might think it's, like, not too difficult to get all those people, especially once you're putting together your Serenade research, which you've been doing for this point many years. So all those people are still alive, minus balancing. You can easily contact them, but it's not the same account. How do you sift through that? How do you get to a historical truth, whatever that is?
Alastair Macaulay [00:34:50]:
Well, you just keep on king people. And as I think I said to you, seven how many years ago, when you're the chief critic of the New York Times, people will answer your emails, which is a pleasant if you are a PhD from New Mexico, they might ignore you. But I was very lucky those days. So many people in the dance world would reply, and of course, a few more people were alive then. So I, for example, was in email contact with somebody who couldn't come to the symposium. But I had already knew, as a wonderful woman, she is now dead. And that is the first Pat McBride who became Lady Lucida. Pat McBride, Lucida, wonderful woman. She was a founder member of New York City Ballet, a close friend of Tanakille LeClaire throughout her life. I think she died around 2018, 2019. But when I was doing Serenade research around 2016, I wrote to her, and she was the original Dark Angel in 1948 for New York City Ballet when they were doing short tunics. And she said, I can send you to the photographs of the dresses we wore then. And curiously, I've interviewed people this is interesting about memory. There are people who are in that cast in 1948 who swore they wore Karinska Frocks down past the knee, and they absolutely didn't. The Karinska Frocks didn't come until 1952. There was an interim version in 1950, but in 1948, they were all tunics that ended or very short dresses that ended just beneath the hip. And she sent me to the coffee table edition of New York City Baliban Lincoln Kirstein that has remarkable photographs in it. And she'll said, you'll find there are three photographs with Melissa Hayden as the heroine, the waltz dancer, me as the Dark Angel, and is it Frank Omen I forget the man in the Elegy.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:37:35]:
So when you did the symposium, were you kind of crowdsourcing a little bit with everyone, talking with them, exchanging memories? How how did that work?
Alastair Macaulay [00:37:45]:
Well, for actually, I better to clinch the hair thing because Michael's going to lose sleep if I don't tell everybody in New York associates that with Allegra Kent. Because Valentin gave her the first New York performance of a revised version in which, at the end of the elegy, she loosened her hair. And because Allegra Kent, who was very much loved and a very great ballerina. But by that point, she had acquired a reputation for eccentricity, shall we say, and gave remarkably few performances per season. There she was doing Serenade, a big event. The house is full of people who knew who Allegra Kent was, and suddenly she loosened her hair as she fell at the end of the third movement and did the whole of the Allergy with loose hair. Well, I know two people who are there and then said, allegra has gone mad in full view of the audience. This is it. David Vaughan, who adored allegra kent. She said, Riley, in Allegra's presence at our symposium in 2015, I was expecting Giselle's mother to come in and Allegra, of course, roars of laughter and love her own reputation for eccentricity. But she was also very practical about it. She said it should be done very, very simply. I'm lucky I have light hair. So it's very simple for me to loosen my hair in one stroke. That's the important thing. But now it has become more elaborate because people have started to wear much longer hair and they have to have their hair quaffed before the performance. And that is so elaborate, and that's particularly New York City Ballet. But I think Balanchine wanted it as simple as Allegra made it. He first did it with Karen Valerodigan in rehearsal in 1976. As I said, the Charlie's Angels Claire Rob story. And I forget, I think I had I couldn't get in touch with Karen, though she did come to the presentation I gave with Robert Greskovic at the library and was very thrilled to see it. But I think I really established the story from Maria Calagari and Colleen Miri.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:39:50]:
Why do you think Sarah resonates with audiences to this day? So many ballets from that time especially one that I guess underwent so many revisions, it could have just easily been left to the wayside. Obviously, Balanchine cared enough to continue to revise it, but it's impacted audiences and dancers so deeply. And I'd like to hear a little bit about why you think that is.
Alastair Macaulay [00:40:17]:
Well, my guess is that it's what hit me when I first saw it. I was new to dance. I'd just been watching two years, and I'd understood that there were wonderful ballets that were plotless and that there were wonderful ballets that were narrative. And I was happy to watch both. And suddenly I was watching what I thought was a plotless ballet that turned out in the elegy to have a narrative. And there was no doubt that my heart was in my mouth as I was watching what was happening to the heroine. And I don't think you can watch the elegy without having ideas of death and love and transcendence. And when she is carried away at the end, you're going somewhere with her. You certainly are watching her being carried into the beyond, whether you think it is the world after death or just transcendence. That's your own interpretation. But it certainly is a different kind of being, I believe. I think the allergy takes you through a great many kind of feelings, and then when you know Serenade, you see that some of these things have been there all along. And I now find what I am most crazy about with Serenade is that it is the echo chamber, barely that it is full of things that are happening for the second time. And Balanchine probably had a bit of this in 1934, but I think he began to develop it as he reworked the ballet during the in 1940. He had now worked with Rogers and Hart, and I can't help but think he must. He was great friends, particularly with Lawrence Hart, the lyricist, and I think he'd worked in Babes and Arms in 1937, their musical, which began with the song and so it seems that we have met before and laughed before but who knows where and when some things that happened for the first time seem to be happening again. And I think Balanchine must have thought that's my life I've been in Europe, now I'm in America. I've loved one woman, now I'm in love with another. And sometimes I'm meeting the first woman again. By the way, Tamara Java, his first wife in maritime Russian. They'd come to the west together. She moved to America apart from him. Now he meets up with her in 1935, and she is part of his first season of The American Valley. So there are echoes throughout his life of the woman he had lost, the one he regained, and the heart moving on the way he has. For example, five women making a line in the middle of the Sonatine, and you see them traveling along often the horizontal line in the original waltz, it began with five women, another line of five women that's now changed. But of course, we now have the Russian dance, which he added in 1940, that has five women at the beginning. So I think balance and that's just an echo. I don't know that it had a meaning for him, but it's serenada's full of things. We think, didn't I see this before? And like the mother who comes on at the end of the elegy, we've seen a mother earlier on, on the Sonatina, and we kind of seen this before. Is it the same dancer? And I know when I watch it to this day, I try to work out if it is the same dancer. It isn't, actually, but it's a puzzle and fun.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:43:31]:
Yeah. I'm wondering, we've talked about so many changes that have happened over the years. Can we talk about any changes that happened to the music?
Alastair Macaulay [00:43:39]:
Good question. First of all, we should say that Balanchine was staging a score that he knew as a ballet score when he was in Russia. Folkin choreographed this in 1915. We don't know if Balanchine saw the original, but certainly he saw the 1923 revival, when Ferkin had moved to the west. And some of Balancine's best friends, like Lydia Ivanova, were in this 1923 revival. And Folkin's valley to the first three movements of the serenade for strings is called Eros. Eros or eros the God of love. And it had an angel in it. It had the idea of love and death. And there's in, I think, the last movement, the idea of a woman on the floor kind of doing a gesture as if to say, was this a dream? Now, all of these are things, of course, that happen in serenade. I do not know if they happened at the same moment in the music, but I think all of that is going around in Balanchine mind. Maybe he was just thinking, oh, Folkin doesn't hurt a choreograph, I could do this better, and did do it better. But he did it for the same three movements, the first three movements of the music. For whatever reason, Folky never choreographed the Russian dance, the Tim aRusso, the final movement of the music. Now, Shaikovsky knew what he was doing. He knew that the fourth movement is how the music should end. And he's king a statement about not just music, but about Russian music. He was very proud that he was the first internationally successful Russian composer, and he often conducted serenade for strings when he conducted abroad. So he loved the idea that he had composed a serenade for strings that ended with a Russian theme, a Russian dance. Balanchine sean ignores all that. When he adds it, he thinks, I've got to end with the allergy, because that's I presume. He was very proud of that ending. It is such a moving, wonderful ending. He saw how he could sneak in the Temarusso russian dance as the third of the four movements, instead as the fourth. Brilliantly done it's at that moment. I think that he sees that what has been three separate movements and I think his stage serenade, the program suggests, as three different scenes, three different, almost stories, shall we say. Now he can see how to work it into one continuity. And he does it for this wonderful, still young dancer, Marijan, for whom he makes Baroco and barely imperial. And for her, he collides the roles of the Russian dancer and the waltz dancer so that all the solo opportunities we associate with those two women now were done by Marijuan, and they were then done by the Baleristo Monte Carlo ballerina, Natalie Krasovska. And we have silent film of her in all four movements doing them, and then done by Ruth Anna Boris. And we have film of her doing it in 1944 with a Balarista Monte Carlo. And then Balanchine rethinks the ballet and thinks, let's go back to having sharing these roles among a greater number of dancers. And he went on fiddling, really, with this throughout the 50s, maybe around 1960, he finished. He settled on more or less the version that we now know with three main women doing the three main roles. But even after that, he would occasionally change. If you look, I'm embarrassed to say, it took me years before I spotted this at the 1973K Mazo New York City Ballet film. I think it's a wonderful film. In color of serenade. There are four leading dancers, not three. I'd always lazily looked in butter. It's kane meso as the heroine. It's Karin Wander Rolligan as the dark angel and it is Sarah Leland as the Russian dance. Actually, there's one movement in which it isn't Sarah Leland. I believe it is Susan Hen.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:47:44]:
Right, yes. When you were talking about the Russian movement being added. Well, for one, I can't imagine how hard the ballet would be for that woman because Russian Girl already, as it stands today, already a famously difficult role for that principal dancer. But I'm wondering if we know anything about how the transition would work from the waltz to the elegy. Because right now you have the waltz ends and full company on stage, and it kind of dissipates until finally they're only left the five women. But that, obviously, is not how the elegy starts. The elegy starts with the waltz heroine having fallen to the floor.
Alastair Macaulay [00:48:28]:
I think it was a separate scene. I think no man came on at the end of the Sonatina. I don't quite know how it did end, but perhaps just with Ulysses, shall we say, entering the world of the dead. And maybe it just did that without a man ending. I don't know. But I somehow suspect that the waltz began with one. I think we have some account that it began with five women and then it ended, I think, with five women, which would be a very neat parallel.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:48:56]:
Again, parallel.
Alastair Macaulay [00:48:58]:
And that's then the blackout. I think the blackout is probably between each of the movements. And then suddenly the lights go up on a woman lying there as if in grief or as if dead on the floor. And then we go into the Elegy. If you think of the structure of suite number three, chakowski suite number three, we have three different scenes. I think that's how Serenade probably was. I'd been looking at casts for the original 1930s programs for ages before I realized what they were telling me. That Balanchine gives you. First movement is danced by these women and names them all. Second movement is danced by these women, and it's not all the same. And the third movement, he introduces two women who haven't been in the first two movements, and that's Heidi Vossler and Catherine Maloney. And they're just there because they are the heroine of the Elegy and The Dark Angel. And the man, of course, is only there in that version. He was Charles Lasky. And I think at the very premier in 1934, there were just four men. He didn't bring in four extra men. I think Charles Lasky doubled and went into that partnering exercise bit. And it's only 1935 that balance. Sean actually has five men and can refigure that the way we know.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:50:13]:
I have one other question about the music that you put in our notes, and I want to make sure that we talk about it really quickly, that you mentioned that there was maybe a repeat in the music that Balanchine added that Cheikovsky didn't originally have.
Alastair Macaulay [00:50:25]:
Well, I wish I could check this out. I don't know if you saw in The New York Times I was able to interview Andrew Litton, the conductor for New York City Ballet. And it's so interesting talking to a musician who knows Shaikovsky and knew Balanchine but had not conducted the ballet Rapidry. So he comes really, I suppose, in his 50s originally to New York City Ballet as an outsider. And he loves what he's conducting, but he can absolutely talk, should we say skeptically about some of this. And he pointed out there was a repeat in The Wolf that he said, there's no indication Psychovsky ever wanted this repeat, but it's always done at New York City Ballet. And he said, and it's fine. It really is satisfying. It doesn't musically trash anything that seems to be instilled by Balanchine. I'm sure Balanchine always had a problem from 1940 onwards of how do you connect the sonatina into the waltz? Because the SONNETINA ends beautifully, and then suddenly it has this very loud Marcato chord. And Balanchine was always recharographing that. If you look at films, just the position in which we see the heroine in the man's arms changed from 1973 to later on, and blah, blah, blah. If you watch it in the 1957 film with Diane Adams, you don't hear that loud chord. Balanchine Sheen fades the music away, so you just hear it all in the diminuendo, and she actually ends the movement in near silence. And Andrew Listen said, I've always found the connection of the, shall we say, the drama of the Sonatina jarring as an introduction to the drama of the wolves. And suddenly this Diana Adams 1957 Montreal film works so much better. So I brought in this revised version of the score in 2019, but I think other balancing authorities said, no, we believe we should keep the final version of Serenade that Balanchine approved in his lifetime. But it is true, Balanchine, that's one of the moments that Balanchine went on reworking again. Arlene Kreche told me the story that she went to Saratoga around 1972, 71, I forget when. And Balanchean's fiddling with the ending of The Sonatina, and Melissa Hayden, who'd been dancing for it for over 20 years. She said, who would have thought? It is still working out. How the choreographed funny.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:53:00]:
I love it.
Alastair Macaulay [00:53:01]:
So that's one of the things, I think when he added the Russian dance, he didn't add the entire Russian dance. He took a cut within it and he did the cut version of the Russian dance for about 26 years. And around 1966 he opens the cut. And if you look at the Diane Adams 1957 Montreal film, which is on DVD, you'll see the old version of the choreography and it has one or two things that one or two people still miss, actually. But that had to go as Belichicking worked out the new version. And of course, as I've said.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:53:43]:
He.
Alastair Macaulay [00:53:43]:
Did change the score radically by moving that final movement into the penultimate movement. And that makes you wonder a lot about Balanchine Sheen, the supposed master musician. He's, of course, so musically satisfying in so many ways, and would often say to his dancers, I have to get my Chaikovsky ballets into a state where I can meet Pyotra ilit Chaikovsky with a clean conscience. When I meet him in the next life, as he would with all these composers. He would talk this way. They were going to be his friends. He almost had a hotline Chaikovsky, told me to do this, that kind of thing. Well, actually, I think Tchaikovsky would have met him and said, I've got a bone to pick with you. When you think about it. He moves Chaikovsky's music around in four ballet, important ballet. He does it in The Nutcracker, where he brings in something from sleep and beauty. He misses out the Prince's variation and he moves the Sugar Plum variation. He uses a text of Bally imperial Piano Concerto number two that we know that Tchaikovsky disapproved of. It was done by his student. Silottikovsky did not like that version of his score. Balanchine stuck to it. He took Shaikovsky for the symphony. Number Three Diamonds did the very unusual format of making a symphony with five movements. Balanchine lops off the first movement and makes it a much more conventional four movement structure. I don't think Pyotri Irrelevant would have been very pleased with this. Curiously, he made two bigger changes to or big changes, anyway, to Stravinsky scores after Stravinsky died. Of course, you know that he lopped off the beginning of Apollo. He took away the prologue people still argue about hugely, rightly? What very few people have spotted is that he jigged around the devetimenta from Bezo de la Fe. And when he just did the divertismor in 1972, patricia McBride and Helgita Mason, that wonderful, great variation of the Helgita masan, isn't part of the devetimenta. Balanchine had taken that in from elsewhere as Gypsy music from elsewhere in the ballet. And that's why it is so dramatic and so beautiful. Because Valentin is actually not doing a Devetimenta, he's doing a drama from Bezie de la Fe. And because he's already going on that on in that amazing male variation, which, by the way, Peter Martins himself said, that is the greatest single variation Balanchine ever made for a man. And you can see with that going on in the ballet why Balanchine then adds in 1974, that a staggering ending to jivetimento from Basic Lafe, which, again, takes us deep into the drama of that ballet. The jivetimento is the wrong word. It's a great ballet, but he should be calling it, as I say, drama from Bassizilla.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:56:44]:
It's just interesting thinking about these changes that we know from all of these famous ballet, right? We're talking about Apollo, the birth scene going away, we're talking about these changes to Sarah Nod. One thing, we just saw Square Dance in Miami City Ballet and they had a caller, and that was something that was taken away at some point. And so I just like, of course, there have to be these rules for the Trust, where it's like we want to abide by the last version of what was there. But I find it interesting to hear that there are these other versions that are worth experiencing or worth knowing about as well. I don't know if there's a question there, it just made me think of it.
Alastair Macaulay [00:57:24]:
No, it's a very good point. I hope we should do it like Shakespeare, where all these versions are known and companies can choose which version they stage. I think there are a few where people should get their balancing version right. What we now see in Libisle Devouts, which for many people is one of the top two or three greatest, most adult, most poignant of all, Balanchine ballet isn't quite what Balanchine gave the choreography, is there? But Balanchine made the second half of the Libus leader Valzi. He not only made the room transparent, he had stars in the sky at the background. So we're really seeing a special kind of transcendence, and it's not the same as you see it now at New York City Ballet. Wonderful. I'm not seeing it with great cast. But when you see it with stars, which is how I first saw it at the Royal Ballet, again, it's like what I was saying about the Elegy and Serenade. You're moving through into another realm almost so many balancing ballets are to do with a journey from one world into another. That's really what the ending of Apollo is about. It's sort of implicit even in the final image. I think of Prodigal Son, but when you think of the end of Serenade, you think of the end of Luster number, the old Luster number. You very much saw the light taking off, not just into the upper chamber, the sleepwalker's light, but it then went off up into the sky. My friend Brown, who was in the original cast, all she remembers about the ending is that she had a cricket her neck, because you, as a spectator, stood looking at this light going up and up and up when you were on stage.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:59:08]:
That's funny.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:59:09]:
I loved that moment. That was such a beautiful thing.
Alastair Macaulay [00:59:12]:
I'll think of the end of The Nutcracker. How amazing that those children are taking off into the sky.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:59:17]:
We don't quite know where well, maybe for our last question or thought, I just waltz to hear serenade is approaching its 90th anniversary next year, and I just want to hear where you think Serenade sits in the history of ballet. In the pantheon of ballet.
Alastair Macaulay [00:59:41]:
I'm on record as calling it the most rewatchable of all ballet. I have no hesitation about that. That doesn't mean I quite call it the greatest. How do you choose the greatest Balanchine ballet? But separate is certainly up there. It is so important as an open sesame to the world of Balanchine. I think it is also so fascinating that it both gives us plotless dancing and plot full dancing. We keep on seeing meanings, and then we just see dancing movement running, tearing us away into just the joy of movement or the pleasure, the rapture of movement. I don't want this to be the final question because there's still so much to talk about. And so, for one thing, I think we know that is that balancing was rude about Isidora Duncan. But I think the idea of Isidora Duncan, who greatly inspired Folkin is there in Serenade just the way that women walked and ran. That's what Isadora is about Folkin just said Isidora taught us that ballet doesn't have to be about virtuosity. Ballet can just be the most simple movement. But taking off to the music and becoming poetry, I think every dancer who's ever been in Serenade just thinks of that joy of just running, running, running across the stage, running as you don't do almost any other ballet. One of the revelations, but it's not a revelation, it makes total sense, is something Kieran Nichols said at the symposium in 2015. You know those amazing jumps in the Russian dance? That is not the virtuoso. Jump that probably was originally a Baloney batu. But later on she the leading dancer. And the four demis cross the stage with this concave shape where the leg aims forward and the arms and the torso bend forward and then they bend backwards.
Rebecca King Ferraro [01:01:45]:
Ballet the flies. We call it the fly, the concave.
Alastair Macaulay [01:01:48]:
Jump, convex jump, alternating. Kieran Nichols said Balanchine wanted a modern dance quality to those jumps, and it made complete sense the moment she said it. And by the way, I should add that the moment Kieran Nichols made her debut in that, which I think is 1980, I might be a year out, arlene Crochet, the great critic, at once said that those jumps have never been danced better.
Rebecca King Ferraro [01:02:12]:
That's interesting. Yeah, it's something we would never do otherwise. I think that step, now that I.
Alastair Macaulay [01:02:21]:
Think about it, there's also, again, Arling Crochet pointed out there's a moment that comes out of Jesse Matthews. Now, you Americans may not know who Jesse Matthews was, but go and watch her 1934 film, Evergreen, and it's an adaptation of something she had danced in 1930 on the London stage. Balanchine sean had seen her. Balanchine she had even been, I think, of a Cochrane review with Jesse Matthews. She was probably one of these charming dancers who had about six steps and she did them to death. I'm guessing that from something in that book. I remember Balanchine, where I think Balanchine, Sheen's wardrobe master, says how he and Balanchine, she used to laugh about Jesse Matthews. But one of the charming steps and Jesse Matthews in this film, Evergreen, is adorable. And one of her things is throwing up a leg and then she pushes the air forwards while she's doing a massive backbend, and that is called a Jesse Matthews backbend. And balancing it's, the whole core doing it at the end of the wall. So they go, push, push the arch backwards. It's a fabulous gesture. And I don't think there's any film where they do it quite ideally. But people remember that in the 1960s that really was a very rapturous, thrilling moment.
Rebecca King Ferraro [01:03:37]:
I love that.
Alastair Macaulay [01:03:39]:
And another echo, I think, is from Najinska. You know, one of the most amazing formations in the Holocerinade. You hardly notice it. It's in the sonatina. And it's when I think, is it the Russian dancer or the dark angel comes on for the first solo. And this formation up in the upstage left corner where balance gets them in four rows, the women, and they all go into rows of backbends, so they're looking away from the audience. And it happens so suddenly. If you look closely, I think this is a Najinska formation because he balanced sheenwood nagenska staged something very similar for four rows of men in Leinos. But of course, when you watch it in Lenos, it has this monumental powerful dark effect. Suddenly, there it is, almost out of sight in the corner of the stage and serenade. It's an ajinska formation.
Rebecca King Ferraro [01:04:34]:
And it's not out of sight for that girl that's doing the deepest backbend for so long. I always oh, that's the worst spot to have.
Alastair Macaulay [01:04:43]:
It's fabulous. Stereo is so full of wonderful choreographic details. So they're just there and you can miss them, but they are there for you to watch. And that your hundredth time of seeing the ballet. Sometimes you niche for the first time. Wonderful.
Rebecca King Ferraro [01:04:58]:
It's so true. The ballet is very rewatchable.
Michael Sean Breeden [01:05:01]:
Now I just have to go watch it. It's not going this season, but I think it's going in the fall. And our favorite dancer, well, I don't like to play favorites, but we may as well just be real here. Serenade on did the Waltz girl in Spain, so I need to see her in that role.
Alastair Macaulay [01:05:26]:
That's wonderful. There is one change at City Ballet where Serenade has changed for the worst since Balanchin's death, or just since even Peter Martins's departure, which is the costume man Mark Happel. The problem with those Karinska dresses is that they tear. I'm sure any of you have done serenade will know that there's always fabric that comes off, and this goes back to 1950, but guess what? Put up with it instead. Mark Happel tried in run 2019 2018, making a rather stiffer kind of fabric. And it also meant those almost invisible cream panels at the front of the dresses became almost a bright yellow lemon color, which is wrong. And originally the dresses were too long, so it looked as if they were dressed in lemon bombazine. Awful. Now the length is now better and the stresses are getting a bit softer, but they're still a bit too stiff, that fabric. And the lemon yellow is too striking.
Rebecca King Ferraro [01:06:31]:
Right. The flow of the skirts are just so important to the choreography. Right. There's so many moments where just gets caught up in the perfect way. We used to call it skirt choreography. You get your arm caught and you flip it. It's just an extra fun thing. Well, Alastair, thank you so, so much for chatting with us today. It's always a pleasure to have you on and we always learn so much, and we know that our audience does as well.
Alastair Macaulay [01:06:56]:
Thank you very much. Love to speak to you.
Rebecca King Ferraro [01:07:03]:
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