Balanchine: Jewels suite: music by Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Faure
Watch the video of Balanchine’s Jewels suite first! It’s 14 minutes long.
I didn’t grow up with ballet but somewhere along the way I became addicted to it any way, just as I did to modern dance. On our honeymoon, we saw The Nutcracker Suite in New York, George Ballanchine choreographing it and Peter Maartens and Suzanne Farrell as lead dancers. It was magical!
A year later, we attended a performance at the Lincoln Center of Karl Orff’s Carmina Burana done with orchestra and chorus, soloists and dance group. It wasn’t that good, neither the music nor the dancing.
We’ll be attending a live performance of Carmina Burana again later this summer at Blossom Center, south of Cleveland, but not, I pray, with dancers.
At Yale –was it in 1968 or 1969?–we saw Julian Beck’s and Judith Malina Beck’s Living Theater, an anarcho-communist company that presented an amalgam of acting, dance and music in tutelage in equal parts to Brecht, Marx and Artaud. The company’s restating of Frankenstein was brilliant but didn’t quite make it as theater: too static and too episodic. On a scaffolding at the back of the stage, the actors slowly built up the monster’s parts while in front, other players played out the narrative.
The other performance we saw by them, Paradise Now, worked better somehow, in part because though it was theater, it was transparently not a play. As we were finding our seats, the company was pout in the audience, cajoling, urging, even insulting us in order to get us to go up on stage, where we were expected to help them “act” the performance. The line between actor and spectator was blurry. We went with our friends Sherm and Jan Cochran, who elected to stay in their seats when I virtually dragged Esther on stage.
This was the day of mini-skirts, short short SHORT mini-skirts, and Esther had great legs and body, which meant she looked great in one. But on stage was a different matter. The actors urged us to fall on top of each other in an amorphous heap of wriggling bodies in the middle of the stage, but with your bottom up and wearing a mini-skirt, as Esther was, who knows what the people still out in their seats would see. So we compromised. I lay on the heap while Esther watched.
In the spring of 1978, my friend Jack and I saw a stunning performance by Sarah Rudner’s dance troupe at Cornell: it was a recreation of a piece they had originally done in an abandoned factory loft in Greenwich Village, the dancers wandering among the many rooms and separating, meeting, separating again and coalescing in different groups and densities of performers. It was great.
In New Hartford, 1989-92, with Jeremy away, we started exploring the state’s riches with day and overnight trips. We went to Glimmer-glass to see Jonathan Miller’s restaging of La Boheme. It was a good production but it still left me restive. Later, we saw HMS Pinafore there, or was it Pirates of Penzance, with Jeremy, home for the summer, singing and acting in the chorus. And later still, that’s where we saw Benjamin Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, with a counter tenor lead.
At Williamstown, we saw Joanne Woodward and Karen Allen in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. (Twenty-five years later, I would get my chance to act in a Tennessee Williams play, playing Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.)
And we saw 1776 there, a musical of the early Revolution which has only one female role in it –Abigail Adams in correspondence with her husband John. Both performances were excellent, as was everything done on that fine stage.
SPAC (the Saratoga Performing Arts Center) was three and a half hours’ drive from us. It was the summer home to the Philadelphia Philharmonic under the direction of Eugene Ormandy and the New York City Ballet with George Balanchine as director and principal choreographer.
One glorious summer, we saw four dance performances at SPAC. Two were on the main stage, which was open to the stars. We sat on the grass up a gentle slope. After dark fell, bats swooped from the rafters above the stage and circled above us. The other two were by visiting companies in an adjacent building. We saw Twyla Tharp’s dance company and the Hubbard Street Company, a muscular troupe of young dancers out of Chicago. Both performances were memorable. That’s when we saw Tharp’s Sinatra Songs. Also a performance done by dancers dressed like toreros dancing on top of a raised wood surface so that when their hard heeled boots hit the floor, it sounded like castanets.
Twyla Tharp Hubbard Street
The best, though, was the New York City Ballet revival of Balanchine’s Jewels suit, choreographed to music by Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky and Faure’, and originally premiered in 1967. Suzanne Farrell was still one of the premieres danseuses of the company and we saw her dance again.
And of course, there was my own personal experience of dance, having attended a Halloween party in the mid-’80s dressed as a ballerino. A touch of cheek blush and some lipstick, a blue black leotard, pink tutu, fluffy pink bedroom slippers on my feet and a garland of baby’s breath woven into my hair. (I still had hair back then.)
When I was at Wells College, Esther was co-opted to sing a suite of children’s songs for a student dance concert.
ADDITIONAL LISTENING