Guest review from Natalie Axton, a dance writer in New York. Her writing has appeared in Dance Europe, Critical Dance Magazine, and the Weekly Standard. She was a 2010 NEA Institute fellow in classical music and opera. She is currently a fellow at the CUNY Writers’ Institute.
Dance has never been an easy life. Even the success stories bear the birthmarks of penury, if not suffering. When George Balanchine made his international choreographic debut he was a young man in the south of France, part of an international troupe of glamorous paupers. Money came with hard work; it left more easily. The young Balanchine was a man who enjoyed fast cars, good food, and beautiful women, and not in order. To him these things were not luxuries, but part of a well-lived life. They were also, like ballet, manners of appreciating beauty, the subject of his art.
As with the artist, so is the enterprise. Creating a luxurious production on a dance company’s budget is a challenge. Jewels, Balanchine’s three act plotless masterpiece, premiered in 1967, when the New York City Ballet, Balanchine’s artistic home in the United States, was expanding. The company had spent its formative years at the City Center for Music and Drama on West 55th Street. In 1964 it moved to a much bigger theater on Lincoln Center. In 1947 Balanchine had played with the idea of a ballet in chromatic partitions in his Palais de Crystal. There were sections in the colors of gemstones. Balanchine, who reworked his ideas and ballets as he saw necessary, must have liked the idea enough to reprise it. A three part rumination on the many aspects of ballet dancing, Jewels is a modern classic, and an audience favorite. As Lincoln Kirstein, the company’s executive once remarked, “It sounds expensive before the first step.” Rumor has it the idea of a jeweled-themed was a gimmick. Balanchine thought the jeweler Van Cleef and Arpels might foot the bill. Alas, that didn’t happen.
Balanchine did get the help of scenery of designers Peter Harvey the legendary Karinska. The visuals of each part of the triptych is simple, economical even, yet stunning. Audiences at the David H. Koch Theater, the New York City Ballet’s home on Lincoln Center, ooh and ah the opening tableaux of each dance, in each case the curtain rising on a stage set with dancers. Harvey’s scenic design is spare but effective, a setting for Karinska’s ingenious costumes. Together, the two elements reinforce the ballet’s chromatic theme. Emeralds appears as a lush jade. Its female cast wears romantic tutus composed of long, soft green skirts and darker green fitted bodices. Rubies electrifies the stage with angular patterns of deep red. Its women dancers wear short, wide-fringed skirts. The men wear white tights and red jackets. Diamonds basks in an ethereal white. The ballerinas appear in traditional white tutus. They are partnered by men in white tights and white jackets.
The differences in women’s costuming are key, because Jewels is a ballet about ballet. Its facets celebrate ballet’s Romantic, classical, and American periods. Costuming is usually a key to the type of ballet is being danced. A romantic tutu implies Romantic mystery. A short tutu corresponds with ballet’s classical period. The fringed skirt means all bets are off.
Commenting on ballet conventions, Jewels is brilliant in its kinesthetic achievements. It is Balanchine at his best — hesitant, acrobatic, imperial, both individually and sometimes all at once. It demands intelligence and courage of its dancers. On the night I attended the performance by the New York City Ballet, Sterling Hyltin and Andrew Veyette danced the leads in Rubies, a wild race with an erotic pas de deux at its midpoint. The music is Igor Stravinsky’s Cappriccio for Piano and Orchestra. Ms. Hyltin was convincingly uninhibited and Veyette charmed in the frenetic ballet. Elements of American vernacular dancing, including Broadway style jumps and tap dancing footwork, appear.
In Emeralds, the most obscure of the three ballets, Ashley Bouder and Sara Mearns danced the female leads on the night I attended. They were partnered by Jared Angle and Ask la Cour, respectively. Emeralds is a dance for two couples, a trio (two women and a man), and ten supporting women. Set to Fauré, the lusciousness of the melodic line in the music meets dancing rich with movement in the upper body. The ballet has a refined pastoral mood. It could be an abstraction on La Sylphide or Giselle, two of the surviving French ballet-pantomimes.
The dancing of Diamonds, the last section of Jewels, hearkens to the Russian classical tradition. Swan Lake is the most popular example of this style, something Balanchine knew well. The heart of Diamonds is a pas de deux in the form of Marius Petipa, the master choreographer of the Imperial Russian Ballet. In a Petipa pas de deux, the ballerina is presented to the audience by her partner, or cavalier. This is made possible by the pointe, or toe, shoe, a technology which had become more developed by Petipa’s era. After dancing together, the ballerina and cavalier each dance a solo. They come together to dance a final coda.
Although each ballet is different the through-lines in Jewels are elements of pointe work and port de bras (motion of the arts and head) — backbends and simple walks on pointe. The most famous of these are the walks in the Diamonds pas de deux. Combining the walks on pointe and the upper body, the ballerina walks across the stage, slowly bending over the arm of her partner. It is an iconic moment in the canon of ballet, and it summarizes Balanchine’s neoclassical approach. I saw principal dancer Wendy Whelan perform Diamonds. She was partnered by Tyler Angle. In this and every other step Ms. Whelan commanded the ballerina role without pointing to it. She let the choreography speak for itself, demonstrating restraint is the better part of artistry.
The richness of Jewels is intellectual. For those whose ballet experience has been limited to story ballets with large sets and numerous characters – The Nutcracker comes to mind — Jewels is a healthy next step. The ballet is in the repertory of the New York City Ballet, Paris Opera Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, and the Miami Ballet, among others. A film version of the Paris Opera Ballet performance is available on Amazon.
Review by Natalie Axton. Photos by Paul Kolnik.
