The cast of “Serenade” at the School of American Ballet’s Workshop Performance on June 11. The soloists were Maya Milic, Kylie Vernia, Kylie Williams, Hugo Mestres, and Alexander Perone
I love the understatement of the name. “Workshop Performance” suggests something rough around the edges, not quite finished. But the School of American Ballet’s year-end performances are anything but. Meticulously rehearsed and buoyantly danced, these performances are catnip to ballet aficionados. They hold so much promise. The students have been rehearsing their roles for months, determined to make the best possible impression in front of classmates, teachers, parents, and alumni who have gone on to dance for New York City Ballet. Last night’s audience included Jenifer Ringer, Damian Woetzel, Silas Farley, Ashley Hod, Tiler Peck, and many others, all products of the school.
For balletomanes and critics, the Workshop offers a first glimpse of dancers who may or may not become familiar faces. Everyone can remember the first time they saw a particular student and thought: that one will become a star. Mira Nadon, who performed in Balanchine’s “Scotch Symphony” in 2017, was one. But these occasions are rare; dancers’ artistic personalities tend to emerge over time. Still, that hope always hangs in the air. Six of the dancers who performed here will become apprentices at the company in August. Who knows what the future holds for them?
This year, the big news was the ninetieth anniversary of SAB, the school founded by Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine, originally on Madison Avenue, in 1934. Balanchine, fresh from his experiences with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, the Royal Danish Ballet, and his own pickup company Les Ballets 1933, had just recently been lured to New York by Kirstein, with an eye to founding a new company. The school was the first step.
That was also the year of the premiere of Balanchine’s “Serenade,” a foundational work, made on students, though not highly polished ones like these. It is beloved by both dancers and audiences, and it was the first work performed by City Ballet as the pandemic began to loosen its grip. I’ll never forget the moment the curtain went up that evening in the fall of 2021, revealing a stage full of women bathed in blue light, one arm outstretched as if reaching for something ineffable and precious. We were all so relieved to be back.
Here at the Workshop Performance, held in the smaller Peter Jay Sharp Theater, it was possible to see the choreography all the more distinctly and admire the surprises and mini-events Balanchine embedded in it: little solo moments for individual women in the corps de ballet, a sudden spin, a leap, an unexpected departure from the pattern. These are like gifts, to the dancer and the viewer. The ballet is also full of echoes of other ballets: A wave of corps women swooping offstage is like the movement of the Wilis in “Giselle”; the way groups of women hold their arms in a halo above the head, but at different angles, as the Muses do in Balanchine’s “Apollo,” from 1928; a man walking with his eyes covered by the hand of his partner, like the hero of Orpheus; a forward tilt, with one leg stretching back, similar to a pose from “Concerto Barocco,” which Balanchine would create a decade and a half later, in 1948.
In a small theater, one can also feel all the more keenly the rhythmic and energetic drive that is such an important quality of Balanchine, and of “Serenade.” The dancers accentuate the rhythms that form the music’s rhythmic backbone with taps of the toe, repeated paddle steps, and forward-moving jumps. There is a tautness, a tension—no time to waste, no moment to relax. At this performance, the same was true of the musical interpretation by the orchestra, under the baton of Andrews Sill. This interpretation may not be everyone’s idea of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings, but it was Balanchine’s.
At this performance, the section that felt the most alive was the opening, which ends with a line of women doing piqué turns in a large circle around the stage, all energy and forward momentum, long skirts swooshing around them so that they become almost a blur. In this section, and later in the ballet, the young woman who danced the role of the “Russian girl,” Kylie Williams, illustrated well the energetic thrum that runs through the ballet with her leaps, backward-moving piqués, and Giselle-like spins. (Williams hails from Ballet Academy East and did her last two years at SAB; she will be one of the new apprentices at New York City Ballet.) At the end, Suki Schorer, who has taught at the school since 1972 and who staged this “Serenade,” came out to take a bow with her pupils. She rightly beamed with happiness.
Suki Schorer takes a bow.
The only blot—and this was true throughout the evening—was the noise made by the dancers’ toe shoes against the stage. There
was also a sticky sound when they rose on pointe. Too much rosin? Overly hard shoes? A change in the acoustics of the theater? Whatever it was, the clatter was distracting.
Serenade was the main event in a program that also included a new work, “Tendu,” by the SAB alumna and former New York City Ballet principal Lauren Lovette; Christopher Wheeldon’s delightful but slightly over-long “Scènes de Ballet”; and the final movement of Balanchine’s “Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2.” Lovette’s ballet is set to Vivaldi’s Trio Sonata in D minor, a series of variations on a Baroque dance known as the folia. (She used a similar piece, by Geminiani, for a ballet she created for American Ballet Theatre’s Studio Company a few years back.) “Tendu” is a typical student piece meant to feature each member of the cast. (The theme and variations form works well in this context.) The ballet opened and closed with a single dancer (Jonathan McCray) standing in tendu croisé position in the middle of the stage. The pose was inspired by a famous photograph of Balanchine by Henri Cartier-Bresson that hangs in a hallway at the School of American Ballet. In between, the dancing was crisp, with a touch of contemporary laissez-faire in the way the dancers entered and left the stage. Small movement ideas came and went, like a shake of the shoulders mid-jump that echoed a trill in the music. But in the absence of sustained ideas or allusions, “Tendu” failed to develop into something more interesting.
“Scènes de Ballet” is a perfect showcase for students, despite the angularity and asymmetry of Stravinsky’s music. The conceit, sustained by Ian Falconer’s set, is that the kids are in an old-world ballet studio: onion domes loom outside the windows while indoors the studio is more reminiscent of the Paris Opéra. A barre runs diagonally down the middle and dancers on either side mirror each other’s movements, as if facing their reflection. The cast of 64 runs the gamut from very young to almost-graduates. The youngest perform age-appropriate steps—tendus, glissades, small jumps, port de bras—all impeccably. Their level of precision and alacrity is a wonder to behold. They also show elements of Balanchine’s style: the separation of the fingers of the hand that he preferred, the crossed poses and taut tendus. Later, as one little girl daydreams at the barre, a pair of more advanced students floats in, demonstrating partnering and pointework (as well as, at one moment, the perils of supported adagio). It’s all charming, even if it does go on for just a bit too long.
The cast of Scènes de Ballet, by Christopher Wheeldon.
The finale of “Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2” makes a good closer. As soon as the dancers run on, it’s off to the races, supported by fortissimo, hyper-virtuosic playing on the piano (by Hanna Hyunjung Kim). The steps—fast emboités followed by even faster emboités—are so quick they’re almost funny. There is so much happening that one can almost miss a female soloist as she does her fouetté turns in the midst of a crowd of dancers. In another passage, the corps performs a circle of fast-moving jumps (cabrioles) around the stage, as if they were riding a crazed merry-go-round. The principal couple runs on not once but twice, the woman perched on the man’s shoulder. In this quick but expansive pas de deux, Kate Bivens danced with exciting freedom and suppleness of the upper body. You could feel the way she leaned into the movement, trusting it to take her where she needed to go. It is a quality that reminded me of another very musical, very supple dancer, American Ballet Theater’s Isabella Boylston.
Bivens too will be an apprentice at City Ballet in the fall. I’ll be keeping an eye out for her.
The cast of Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2. The soloists were Kate Bivens, Corbin Holloway, and Becket Jones.