Milk and roses

Mass Youth's Balanchine

by Marcia B. Siegel

More than any other art work, dance is constantly changing its appearance, even in the most stable, protective environments. I don't mean that the Massachusetts Youth Ballet's program of George Balanchine ballets last weekend, in the Eleanor Casey Theater of Regis College, was inauthentic. Far from it. The three works carefully replicated the great choreography, but they had their own look.

Balanchine's work used to define what was most contemporary in ballet. It challenged dancers with the hardest, fastest, most intricate choreography, and respectable ballet companies would maintain Balanchine in repertory, with specialized classes and coaching to prepare for them. This is no longer true. The ballets remain the hardest, fastest, and most intricate ever invented, but "contemporary" and "challenge" have acquired new meanings. Even New York City Ballet, Balanchine's house, does his works only about half the time. At Boston Ballet, where Balanchine training and repertory have been carefully tended over the years, there'll be no trace of him this season except for some music that's been rechoreographed by others.

Probably one reason Balanchine's repertory started to wear away after his death in 1983 is that it's so distinctive. The choreography makes demands that other ballets don't, and it can bleach out when treated as an isolated novelty. The Massachusetts Youth Ballet, the performing unit of the Hopkinton-based Ballet Workshop of New England, has been cultivating the Balanchine tradition, and its latest performances offered some new insights into what I suppose we have to call the Balanchine dynasty.

I've realized that Balanchine style is becoming more and more diversified as the ballets settle in with a few receptive institutions. Earlier choreographers -- Michel Fokine, for instance, and Marius Petipa -- have undergone similar species-refinement in the worldwide cultural diaspora. Massachusetts Youth Ballet's teenage dancers are technically excellent, but their Balanchine gives off a certain innocence, almost a perfume, I never saw at New York City Ballet.

The program went in reverse chronological order, beginning with the 1956 Divertimento No. 15 (Mozart), then backtracking to Concerto Barocco, from 1941 (Bach), and finally Serenade (Tchaikovsky), Balanchine's first American ballet, from 1934. This interesting selection sampled the range of Balanchinean sensibilities.

Divertimento, suggesting the elegance and decorum of the French courts where ballet began, is a showpiece for five solo women, three men, and an eight-woman ensemble. Barocco has the same size corps, with two female soloists and a male to partner one of them. It's so tightly and ingeniously structured that it could be the source of Balanchine's false reputation as merely mathematical. Serenade is an essay in ballet's basics -- the precision and utility of the step vocabulary, the extremes to which that vocabulary can be stretched, and the poignant images it can suggest.

As pointed out in a pre-performance talk by New York dance critic Nancy Goldner and former NYCB dancer Sandra Jennings, who staged all three ballets, initially Balanchine was working with students, who were probably less accomplished than the MYB dancers. The increasing demands he made on them and their successors resulted in a repertory of astonishing sophistication, a technical ante that was forever being raised. These are the real hallmarks of Balanchine ballet, not the pathological body types we read about or the artfully curled fingers and broken wrists.

Serenade begins as a demonstration piece, with a classroom formation and a litany of ballet positions, then zigzags into a dream, with one surprising design after another. But in a way, Divertimento No. 15 is also a recital piece. Unlike the deliberately egalitarian Serenade, it makes a clear distinction between the ensemble dancers and the soloists, who rework a theme six different ways and then show five different ways to make a duet. Yet two of the five female soloists appear in the first movement at the head of the corps, creating an overt link between the secondary dancers and the principals.

Concerto Barocco is much more sparing of material than either Divertimento or Serenade, but more exacting in the way the material is deployed. The female soloists volley movement phrases back and forth in precise, changing rhythmic repartee while the corps play their own witty games.

Rather than import big-name stars to handle featured roles, MYB cast its own dancers, plus Emily Waters, an MYB alumna now apprenticing with Pennsylvania Ballet. The male roles were taken by guests from Boston Conservatory and the corps of Pennsylvania Ballet. A small ensemble from New England Conservatory played the Bach. The decision to use these young visitors actually validated the company's pre-professional status, giving a clear example of how many satisfactions there can be on the way to the top.