Heartbreak hotel

"Balanchine!" is all about men and women

by Jeffrey Gantz

"BALANCHINE!" Serenade, to Peter Tchaikovsky's Serenade in C; Divertimento No. 15, to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Divertimento in B-flat for Two Horns and Strings K.287/271H; and The Four Temperaments, to the score by Paul Hindemith. Presented by Boston Ballet at the Wang Center through March 28.

The good news is that this weekend you have a chance to see the 20th century's greatest artistic genius (that's my opinion, anyway) in creditable performances of three sublime works -- Serenade, Divertimento No. 15, and The Four Temperaments -- at the Wang Center. The bad news -- well, let's put it this way: the last time Boston Ballet performed Serenade, March/April of 1994, was also the last time the company programmed a full evening of Balanchine. In the five years since, Boston Ballet has presented exactly three Balanchine works, Who Cares? in 1995 and Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra (a/k/a Rubies) and Symphony in C in 1998. The point isn't just that the company has been neglecting one of its greatest assets, it's that you learn to do Balanchine by . . . doing him. This isn't like riding a bicycle.

Boston Ballet would do well to study Joan Acocella's latest warning shot across the bow of New York City Ballet, in the February 22/March 1 New Yorker. (Maybe it's just coincidence, but that 1994 Balanchine program was also accompanied by an Acocella fusillade, in the April 7 New York Review of Books.) Acocella writes of cornering a NYCB dancer (who'd worked under both Balanchine and current NYCB director Peter Martins) and asking about the company's faltering technique; the dancer answered by describing class in the Balanchine days: "Your muscles would burn. You'd feel awkward. It hurt. And you learned." Boston Ballet doesn't look to have hurt enough, or learned enough.

The prescription for NYCB would be higher standards and tougher classes, more works by Balanchine and fewer by Martins and company. And it's not so different in Boston. Balanchine programs may never fill the Wang Center the way Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty do, but if the company staged his works on a regular basis (and provided educational program notes instead of promotional fluff), it might be able to build the kind of audience Balanchine created in New York. It wasn't easy there, and it won't be easy here, but if genius isn't the goal a company aims at, why dance at all?

The current program is a dynamite start. Although it has the fiscal benefit of calling for a reduced orchestra, strings plus two French horns and a piano, I'm assuming it was assembled because its three components -- Serenade (last done here in 1985 and 1994), Divertimento No. 15 (making its company debut), and The Four Temperaments (last done here in 1990) -- form a triptych about men and women, partnership and solitude, with the Viennese sparkle and charm of Divertimento No. 15 serving as a palate cleanser between the Russian melancholy (it eventually descends into heartbreak) of Serenade and the ominous sexual displacements of The Four Temperaments.

Set to Tchaikovsky's Serenade in C, the 1935 Serenade was Balanchine's first American work, but you can hear church bells and Russian Orthodox harmonies and time stopping -- it's no accident that this theme returns unchanged at the end of the opening Sonatina movement, and again at the end of Tchaikovsky's Tema russo finale, or that Balanchine's tableaux-like creations here suggest ikons. Boston Ballet's rendition of the famous opening tableau -- 17 women standing with right arms extended at a 45-degree angle and wrists bent to ward off the light -- feels genial where it needs to be inscrutable; and in both the teetering-on-treacly second-movement Waltz (not as harmless as it looks: luckless corps member Melissa Ward slipped and broke her wrist opening night) and the folklike finale (which Balanchine initially omitted, then later inserted as the third movement) the company seems a little slow.

The heroine appears briefly in the Allegro and dances with her partner in the Waltz; meanwhile two other ballerinas appear, foreshadowing the tragedy of the Elegy (Tchaikovsky's third movement, Balanchine's finale). The heroine has been left prone at the end of the Tema russo; now there enters a different man followed close behind by the second ballerina, an "angel" figure (a rival? Death?) whose hands blindfold him. The painful ménage à trois becomes a painful ménage à quatre when the third ballerina enters; then all three women have to defend "their" man from the attentions of the corps ladies. There's also a moment, "anticipating" Divertimento, where four corps men have to partner eight women. As Tchaikovsky's elegiac theme returns, the man, again "blindfolded," and the angel move on, off stage, leaving the heroine to be (too easily?) comforted, and then exalted, by the female corps as she sails off into the light.

As in 1994, the Elegy is this company's triumph, the three ballerinas with their hair flowing both iconic and heart-rending. But in the earlier movements, Kyra Strasberg and Simon Ball made a handsome opening-night couple right out of Henry James, he the callow but attentive American, she the ever so slightly older gorgeous sophisticated European. And April Ball created an arresting moment Saturday afternoon when she stopped to transfix the audience before taking up her position toward the end of the Allegro.

Divertimento No. 15's curtain rises on a chandeliered Maryinsky-blue ballroom where two ballerinas and a corps of eight women delight in their dove-gray tutus with red trim. They're followed in the opening Allegro by three cavaliers (in matching suits) and three more ballerinas; it's all very pretty, but when the corps rush out at the end of the movement, Balanchine's theme becomes clear: five ladies (to match the five chandeliers), three men. In the Theme and Variations (Mozart's Andante grazioso), these eight dancers impress one another with their solo chops. A Minuet for the corps follows, what should be a social triumph for these ladies, but without men it's just another girls' night out. The Andante (Mozart's Adagio) appears to be a series of romantic pas de deux, but it's all sleight of hand, as two of the three cavaliers have to double up and dance twice. The illusion is dispelled when everyone appears on stage at the end of the movement and the cavaliers have to scurry from one ballerina to another; at the end men and women retreat to opposite ends of the ballroom and exit separately. The corps returns for the Allegro finale (Balanchine having omitted Mozart's second Minuet), where the giddy rush of Viennese high spirits restores the illusion there's love for every woman -- or at least a man.

I had never seen Divertimento No. 15 before last weekend, and my initial reaction was disappointment. Just as with the Mozart bauble this piece is set to, I thought, style is content, and if you don't have precise, exquisite style, you might as well not bother. But by my fourth performance, it began to sink in that the music only looks like a trinket; it's really a jewel. And if the corps lacks panache (what's missing is training, not talent), the soloists do not. Paul Thrussell is the James Bond of the ballroom, light but not lightweight, the guy every girl wants to dance with -- not that she'd be disappointed with Simon Ball or Giuseppe Picone. Kyra Strasberg is insouciant, almost arrogant in the first variation and nuanced and dreamy in her pas de deux; April Ball has already incorporated so much of Balanchine's style (the way her body seems to be going two directions at once) that from a distance you could mistake her for Strasberg. There's organic flow from Marjorie Grundvig (also in the first variation), blinding speed from Jennifer Gelfand (in the sixth), and much more. By the Saturday matinee, even the lack of ensemble in the corps seemed less important than its joie de danser.

The Four Temperaments is a beast of a different color, an apache of a dance in which sexual warfare breaks out between men and women. Men seem to have the upper hand in the opening Theme section (the music, Theme and Variations: The Four Temperaments, was commissioned by Balanchine from Paul Hindemith), a series of three duets in which the man mostly partners, and manipulates, the lady from the rear. Still, there's something unreachable about these women, and once we arrive at the "temperament" variations, their impersonal, consuming sexuality has the men on the run.

The Melancholic man finds invisible walls and crushing burdens everywhere; he's hemmed in by the first two women who turn up, then paralyzed by the high-kicking, pelvic-thrusting female foursome whose scything grands battements suggest a castrating Grim Reaper. The Sanguinic couple evince an exuberant confidence, but they're undermined by the line of four women who seem to be picking their painful way through the burning sands of Dante's seventh circle. The Phlegmatic man is floored, then woven into his quartet of women; he becomes solipsistic. It all comes crashing down with the thunderous entrance of the Choleric woman, who's too much for her quartet of men (they eventually lose interest) -- yet when the partnerships from the Theme and Sanguinic return, some sense of sexual order is (again too easily?) restored. Balanchine fussed with the ending; Boston Ballet opts for an earlier version in which the Sanguinic lady is lifted and carried off last between two rows of dancers rather than running off stage front with her partner.

It's no surprise that Boston Ballet shows to best advantage in Temperaments: this company's ladies shimmy like your sister Kate. Neither does recourse to the videotape of the complete work from Dance in America's essential "Balanchine Library" series (in a volume that also includes the Andante/Adagio from Divertimento No. 15) suggest there's much lacking here. The "Egyptian" opposed up-down arm movements in the second part of the Theme could be crisper -- at one point I was uncomfortably reminded of the both-arms-down parody in Edward Gorey's The Lavender Leotard. On the other hand, the Sanguinic quartet look sharper and better articulated than their New York City Ballet counterparts do on the tape. Tara Hench exemplified the company's success opening night in the first part of the Theme: her body open to male inspection, her face closed to all but Mr. B. Giuseppe Picone (a guest artist who shouldn't be a stranger) is appropriately haunted as the Melancholic man; Nadia Thompson is forbiddingly impersonal as the Choleric dea ex machina, though without the mortal edge that Strasberg brings. There's fine work even from corps members like Karla Kovatch in the second part of the Theme.

Technical reservations aside (the orchestra under Jonathan McPhee is unacceptably squeaky in parts of Serenade and Divertimento but creamy for Divertimento's pas de deux and sharp-angled in Temperaments, with Freda Locker pounding a mean piano), this is still the best $60 ticket in town. Sit as near to the stage as you can (genius looks best up close), and if you see Boston Ballet director Anna-Marie Holmes, tell her you'll pay anything for more, and better, Balanchine.