Guarding the legacy

Mr. B goes to Washington

by Marcia B. Siegel

WASHINGTON, DC -- The most important thing you can do for great works of art is to preserve them -- but it's a vexing paradox of dance that preservation doesn't mean packing the work in tissue paper and sealing it in a vault. Dance has no complacent final option; you can't look it up and find it any time, safely on display in a good museum, or dust it off and expect it to perform with the turn of a key. There have to be dancers who love the strangeness of a past idiom and who have the unaccustomed skills to perform it. And coaches who can legislate stylistic essentials, fend off extravagance, reconstitute what's disintegrated since the last outing. You have to have institutions that honor the work and will accept its cost. You have to have audiences that care.

So though we all take George Balanchine for granted as the towering giant of 20th-century choreography, his actual work is known to fewer and fewer people now that he's been gone almost two decades. Which is why the Kennedy Center's Balanchine Celebration was such a gift to the nation. The festival brought together five American ballet companies and one from Russia, for four different programs, 14 ballets, choreographed during half a century. The unprecedented event, three years in the making, was dreamed up by Charles and Stephanie Reinhart, the Kennedy Center's artistic directors for dance, with the collaboration of the Balanchine Trust and financial and artistic help from too many sources to mention.

Probably any gathering of dance organizations focused on a single theme would invite comparisons. I saw the event as a confirmation of the Balanchine diaspora, an acknowledgment that the center for his work may already be shifting from his home company, New York City Ballet, to a diffuse network of interpreters. The choreography of the first two programs was quite varied, asking to be taken both on its own terms and as an arena for differing sensibilities. I tried to project myself a few more years into the future, when no one will have seen any performances Balanchine himself directed, when there's no little nagging voice inside us that misses Patricia McBride's wit or Gloria Govrin's statuesque developpé or the long history of dancers who are imprinted on favorite roles. There's no doubt in my mind that his ballets will stand up then, and also that they will have escaped the restrictive stylistic notions we may have about them now. This won't be a good thing or a bad thing; it will happen, and I'd rather have different tones of Balanchine than no Balanchine at all.

How could this diversity be otherwise? The six companies came by their Balanchine inheritance in a wide variety of ways. New York City Ballet, his most direct heir, developed with him in a symbiotic 50-year artistic inquiry. City Ballet didn't participate in the Celebration because of its prohibitive musicians'-union contracts, but three of the companies that did are direct spinoffs, with a heavy emphasis on Balanchine in their repertories. The directors of Miami City Ballet (Edward Villella), San Francisco Ballet (Helgi Tomasson), and Suzanne Farrell Ballet were all notable NYCB dancers, and very different Balanchine dancers -- Villella the virtuosic extrovert; Tomasson the reserved, impeccable aristocrat; Farrell the expressive feminine muse -- but all of them were superb classicists. The Joffrey, the Bolshoi, and the Pennsylvania Ballets maintain their Balanchine connections within more eclectic agendas.

The four companies I saw last week did seem to have distinctive ideas about Balanchine. (San Francisco and Pennsylvania Ballets will perform this week through Sunday afternoon.) Perhaps it's only another reflection of Balanchine's remarkable range that he can supply many different directorial objectives.

Miami City Ballet dominated last week's programs, with four major ballets that showcased the company's energetic, personable dancing. Rubies (Stravinsky) was choreographed in 1967 on Edward Villella and still has the spirited flamboyance I remember from its early days: the strutting, circusy promenades; the galloping chases; the daredevil movement feats; the pas de deux with the unexpected balances, sudden falls, and tricky, almost accidental embracings. There's even a moment of mystery, like a suspenseful magic act, when the secondary woman stands still and lets four men steer her around into a web of intricate positions.

Stars and Stripes (1958) also features Balanchine the showman, but his references here were Busby Berkeley and the American marching band. In three of the five sections, squads of 12 women or men with their leaders simply parade on into a wedge shape and go through various formations, mostly in unison. The leaders all have special tricks -- baton twirling, pointe work, complicated turns -- building up to the principal man and woman, who get the stage all to themselves and have the flashiest moves. All the squads return at the end for a big chorus and a dramatic presentation of the flag. This ballet was made as an outright audience pleaser; Balanchine never apologized for his appropriations of popular culture.

The big, unfolding symphonic ballet form, which Stars and Stripes typifies despite its glitz, actually solidified in the 1940s, before New York City Ballet was permanently established. Balanchine created some of his most enduring works as a freelance choreographer -- Symphony in C, for example, was made for the Paris Opera Ballet. Four Temperaments (1946) predated NYCB's official debut by two years. You could say it's the first modern restatement of his big-ballet format. Again, it has four sections with entirely different casts that lead into an ensemble finale. But here the soloists are the main subject and the corps is reduced to a scant 14. For additional variety he introduced the whole process with three couples who illustrate the structure of the music, Paul Hindemith's Theme with Four Variations, for piano and strings.

Agon (1957) explores the corps-and-solo form even more adventurously, according to Stravinsky's sparse, atonal score, with angular movements and quickly shifting linkages among the 12 dancers. Agon has the same tightrope riskiness as Rubies, though one dance is high art and one is show biz.

It was great to see how eagerly the Miami City Ballet dancers worked at conquering these truly difficult ballets, almost as if they were creating something new. The Joffrey performances were smoother and maybe more accomplished, but the ballets it chose were admitted crowd pleasers. Balanchine was no slouch at producing an old-time, hit-'em-between-the-eyes pas de deux (Tarantella, 1964) when he needed one for the repertory. And it's astonishing to realize that the same year as the groundbreaking Agon, he made Square Dance, with its self-conscious nod to American folk traditions.

The Joffrey Ballet revived Square Dance in 1971, complete with its original square-dance caller urging on the dancers and reminding the audience to watch their feet go wickety-wack. When New York City Ballet took the work back into the repertory five years later, it was probably no longer necessary to point out the relationship between square dancing and ballet dancing: the caller was dropped and we simply saw seven sets of partners dancing balletic squares and contras to the Baroque composers Arcangelo Corelli and Antonio Vivaldi. The Joffrey Ballet in the 1970s made its fortune as a trendy company geared to young, unsophisticated audiences, but now the caller seems a bit condescending. His insistent patter distracted me from the surprising ways in which Balanchine connects the hoedown with its refined European ancestors.

Seven dancers from the famed Bolshoi Ballet of Moscow offered the dark and fateful Mozartiana. I thought the exacting footwork and rhythms were beyond ballerina Nina Ananiashvili that night, but the two male dancers, Dmitri Belogolovtsev and Sergei Filin, managed well. Balanchine reworked Tchaikovsky's tribute to Mozart four times, and this final one (1981) is an old man's reverie -- nostalgic, intense, almost randomly dazzling.

It was in Divertimento No. 15 (Mozart) that I saw the closest thing to my ideal Balanchine dancing. The choreography, like parts of almost every Balanchine ballet, elaborates on graciousness and civility, showing you how harmony can be worked out among even an unsymmetrical group: three men, 13 women; three principals, five demi-soloists, and eight corps de ballet.

Performed by Suzanne Farrell's company, the work had the long, languid phrasing, the certainty of balance, the commitment to risk, that characterized NYCB in Balanchine's last years. Farrell has gathered together a small ensemble of young dancers and soloists from other companies -- Philip Neal of NYCB and Christina Fagundes, formerly of American Ballet Theatre, were the principals. The greatest pleasure to me in this performance of this wonderful ballet was how unassuming the dancers were, their familiarity with it. They didn't dramatize the choreography's dramatic implications -- it's largely about how individuals can work together in different kinds of pairings -- or try to impress the audience with its difficulty. As with NYCB in its glory days, this was what they did, and they were superbly going about doing it.

Farrell is obviously a fine teacher and coach -- she staged several other works on the Celebration programs as well. I don't know anything about her intentions, whether Suzanne Farrell Ballet is an ongoing company or just a pick-up group. There have been other appearances, and it seems to be taking on some kind of continuing role. Farrell is not into hanging onto her own superstar status but is devoted to keeping Balanchine's work alive. The ensemble she's directing seems to understand his most profound lessons.