Balanchine's Four Temperaments, Symphony in Three Movements
A New York dance diary, Part II

As its sole all-Balanchine program for the winter season, the New York City Ballet offered a diptych of The Four Temperaments (1946) and Liebeslieder Waltzer (1960), which is a diptych in its own right (we'll get to that). Symphony in Three Movements (1972), Ballo della Regina (1978), and (not on my dance card) Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux (1960) made appearances on mixed bills.

Four T's, Three Movements: Mr. B by the numbers

The Four T's—for the record, "Melancholic," "Sanguinic," "Phlegmatic," and "Choleric"—elaborates a set of thematic variations by Paul Hindemith that was completed under a commission from Balanchine himself. Symphony in Three is set to a score Igor Stravinsky composed late in World War II and recommended to Balanchine, though he didn't live to see the blockbuster Balanchine was to make of it. Choreographed a quarter century apart, The Four T's and Symphony in Three compare in scale and in impact. What with all the men in white T's and black tights, neat as a pin, and all the women in leotards (mostly black), the pieces look a lot alike, too, superficially. Yet the differences between them are profound.

Jules Mabie, anatomist of "Melancholic," leader of the Four T's pack.

Rigorously structured, Four T's builds stepwise from first principles to harmonious completion, like a cathedral, if you will, or a theory of everything. The cast numbers 25—an odd number, in both senses of the word, since in ballet ensembles tend sooner or later to bond in pairs.

In a prelude, three couples ranked as soloists lay out the three themes of Hindemith's score. The four main sections follow. Of these, the first three are modular, with separate casts consisting, in each case, of a principal dancer (or, in the case of "Sanguinic," a principal couple) backed up by a small ensemble. In the grand finale, all return, joined by a lone new ballerina whose fierce presence crowns the dance.

Symphony in Three fields a slightly larger cast of 32. Three principal couples top the cast list, the ballerinas popping in nonmatching leotards of solid salmon, raspberry, and rose. The middle tier of dancers includes five soloist couples, the women in regulation black leotards. Listed last but first out of the gate is a corps of 16 Amazons in nonregulation white.

In keeping with the triumphalist, indeed awesome tenor of Stravinsky's opening movement, Balanchine deploys his three dancing units—the principals, the soloists, and the Amazons—as evenly matched rivals for supremacy on the stage, bursting with athleticism (watch for lots of jogging). The mood softens in the central movement, a pas de deux the critic Zoe Anderson has aptly described as "both sensuous and remote." Then it's all hands on deck again for the third movement, which culminates in a crushing Cartesian tableau of straight lines and right angles, the entire company glaring straight out into the house, the men propped on their hands, the woman kneeling or standing with arms straight out or straight up, all at a standstill. (Compare and contrast the controlled fantasy of flight at the close of The Four T's.)

As seen on February 15, those 16 women at the top of Symphony in Three, lined up on the diagonal like fighter jets ready for takeoff, served notice that this would be an electric performance. And so it proved, even if the principals in the second movement—Ashley Laracey and Adrian Danchig-Waring skewed less mysterious than scrupulously correct.

Ashley Hod and Peter Walker excel in the "Sanguinic" pas de deux.

The Four T's, seen February 16, landed with like force. The corps, again, was in fighting trim. The fast-rising Jules Mabie hit his marks in the "Melancholic" variation, but the climax—with its sprints up and down the central axis of the stage, arms wildly flung back at the turns—lacked abandon. Several minutes later, Davide Riccardo's impulsive muscularity in the moody "Phlegmatic" section closed the gap. The courtly but sassy "Sanguinic" pas de deux that forms the ballet's centerpiece fit Ashley Hod and Peter Walker like the proverbial glove. And Mira Nadon flew through "Choleric," the symphonic finale, focusing flamboyance with laser sharpness.

"Regulation" practice clothes

In passing, I've touched on the black-and-white leotards, T-shirts, and tights that since the mid-20^th century have been synonymous with the progressive "abstract," "pure dance" wing of the Balanchine canon. The exceptional color splash in Symphony in Three noted above only proves the rule.

Authentic the look may be, but it's not altogether "original" in the sense of historical. Apollo (1928), the oldest surviving Balanchine ballet, was born with elaborate décor, but time has erased all that, leaving the stripped-down torso we know today.

The Four T's premiered in costumes by the Swiss-American surrealist Kurt Seligmann, who tried to give pictorial representation to the ancient theory of personality to which Hindemith's title alludes. But that theory was a red herring—as much for Hindemith himself as for Balanchine. Whatever ideas Balanchine may have entertained about the psychosomatic texture of melancholy, choler, and the rest, he sublimated them into charged choreography. Seligmann's striking but unwieldy outfits effectively obliterated the movements of the dancers, and the dancers hated them.

Small wonder, so did Balanchine. Reviving The Four T's five years after the premiere, he tossed them for the studio look we know today. Even so, the sketches are worth a glance, if only for their curiosity value. (How about Choleric, with her hair on fire?)

All that said, there's no end of Balanchine repertory in which theatrical craft and artifice are not frills but of the essence.

No way to treat a ballerina. The American flamingo (Phenicopterus ruber) shoehorned into John James Audubon's Procrustean layout.

Has anyone stated in so many words that the closest and longest-lasting partnership of the choreographer's career was with a costumier? She was, of course, the tireless émigré costumier Karinska (1886-1983), who dressed her first Balanchine in France in the 1920s, reconnected with him in America, and remained a fixture at City Ballet for decades. She dressed 70-plus of his pieces over the years, not to speak of projects they only dreamed of, like the unrealizable Birds of America, after Audubon. Karinska's costumes, Balanchine once said, accounted for fifty percent of the success of the ballets she dressed for him.

His assessment applies with special force to Vienna Waltzes (1977), a perennial crowd-pleaser in five scenes that is out of the rotation this season. The grand finale of Karinska's City Ballet career, it builds to its own finale to end all finales with a stageful of beauties swirling in glamorous white satin that reportedly cost a fortune. Balanchine would accept no substitute. More on the Karinska connection in my next post, coming soon.

Ballet photographs by Erin Baiano.

Coming soon: Liebeslieder Walzer and more.