Round and round with Balanchine
Spring at the New York City Ballet

What genius looks like. Tiler Peck and Roman Mejia, model interpreters of Balanchine's resonant "Divertimento from 'Le Baiser de la Fée,'" danced to the Stravinsky score.

According to a hoary mantra, dance is the ephemeral art—not one of any number of ephemeral arts of performance, but the Platonic quintessence of the fleeting. The choreographer George Balanchine seems not to have expected his ballets to survive him for long. Yet since his death in 1983, his repertory has remained the New York City Ballet's cornerstone, indeed its institutional raison d'être. With every season, Balanchine titles pass in and out of rotation, opening fresh perspectives no less for new audiences than for lifers like me who came of age when not a season went by without a Balanchine novelty or two that is a staple now.

It speaks volumes that fresh perspectives or even new decorative elements are the vanishingly rare exception rather than the rule. Whereas the world of major-league opera would grind to a halt without a steady stream of deconstructions meant to "interrogate," "contextualize," or flatly contradict the canonical repertoire, Balanchine's ballets are what they are. Yes, the original story ballet Apollo of 1928 hangs on chiefly as a repeatedly revised archaic torso. By and large, though, when the curtain rises on a Balanchine ballet, we see the picture previous generations would see, a historic artifact, yes, but new minted in the moment, not passé but timeless. (Recommended readings: Ode on a Grecian Urn, by John Keats; Among School Children, William Butler Yeats.)

A Romantic triptych

A singular pleasure of the City Ballet's spring season, April 22-June 1, was the chance to revisit glosses on a Romantic archetype that took hold of Balanchine early and never let him go. Scotch Symphony (1952), set to Felix Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 3 in A minor, op. 56 (minus its first movement), evokes the Scottish Highlands of La Sylphide (1832). Divertimento from 'Le Baiser de la Fée' (1972) harks back to Hans Christian Andersen's bleak fairy tale Iisjomfruen ("The Ice Maiden"), in Igor Stravinsky's eyes an allegory of tragedies implicit in the artist's calling. To Scotch and Baiser de la Fée, we might add the lighter-hearted Ballo della Regina (1978), the intermezzo routinely excised from Verdi's Don Carlos (1867), where the scenario involves a fisherman lost in a magic grotto among dancing pearls.

A Sylphide no less enchanting for her lack of wings. Ashley Laracey in "Scotch."

However intricate or sketchy the narrative associations, what Balanchine distills is the magnetism between a regular Joe—prince or pauper, doesn't matter—and the ballerina, who belongs to some transcendent realm. She enchants him, she may play with him, but in the end, as a rule, she returns to her blissful bubble. His happily-ever-after, if he gets one, lies in the memory, as suggested in the endings of Scotch and Ballo. In Baiser de la Fée, the loss destroys not only his world but hers as well.

With different musical and literary associations to inspire him, Balanchine could work out his Romantic idées fixes in any number of imaginative stage pictures. In Scotch, the sylph-ballerina has a security detail of eight Highlanders who step out two by two when her Highland laddie tries to follow her into the privacy of the wings. Elsewhere, the whole cohort forms a palisade around her, watching with her as the youth pours his heart out—a scene redolent of Edward Gorey, writer, illustrator, absurdist, and Balanchine fan extraordinaire. Yet the bodyguards aren't always running interference. At certain moments, having raised the ballerina aloft like a figurehead, they control her fall into the intruder's waiting arms. In Baiser de la Fée, it's the all-female corps de ballet, all in a line, who visualize the porous yet ultimately impassable barrier crisscrossed in vain by Regular Joe and the ballerina.

As seen on May 16, Baiser de la Fée came across a masterpiece of the first rank, from the cut-crystal opening ensemble to its somber yet not lugubrious ending. In the principals' extended pas de deux, Tiler Peck and Roman Mejia put invincible technique in the service of pristine poetic suggestion, transitioning from joyous innocence to hopeless yearning as invisible force fields draw them apart. To a degree more common among modern dancers, yet without the slightest stylistic distortion, these two emphasize plastique, sculpting movement through the torso simultaneously in multiple dimensions even as they etch flawless schoolbook figures in high definition. There's a dissertation to be written, or perhaps a sonnet, on Mejia's turns, whether in the air or par terre, clockwise and counterclockwise in alternation.

I caught Ballo della Regina in the unusual context of a "sensory-friendly" program at 11:00 a.m. on Sunday, May 18 designed, in the words of the season announcement, "to provide a relaxed, inclusive environment" for "individuals with sensory processing challenges including autism." Most repertory performances are in three parts, with two intermissions; this one was in two parts, with just one intermission, but each selection was danced in its entirety, with a top-drawer cast. Ambassadors were stationed around the lobby to help with any questions, patrons were enjoined to keep the auditorium a "shush-free zone," and house lights were kept up for late arrivals and early departures. None of this compromised the occasion in the least; imagine Saturday-night audiences on Broadway behaving with such consideration.

Ballo della Regina received a characteristically frothy performance. The ballerina role, precision-tooled to the diamantine talents of Merrill Ashley in her glittering prime, fell to Emma Von Enck, a hummingbird who seems to possess no physical mass at all. Registering in flashes, her movement held the house spellbound. A soloist's tribute to Scottish sword dancing in the first movement of Scotch, the work that brought the matinee to a close, demands the same panache. Done up in a kilt, Argyle socks, and red toe shoes, Emma Van Enck's elfin big sister Claire Van Enck never put a foot wrong; there was no missing the family resemblance in exuberant world-class allegro. As the principal couple, the petite Ashley Laracey and Jules Mabie—tall, willowy, a fashion plate in his Balmoral bonnet—delivered neoclassical clarity with all the requisite Victorian fragrance.

Perspectives on the waltz

From Serenade to the flowers and snowflakes of The Nutcracker and on to love songs by Johannes Brahms, there's no shortage of three-quarter time in the Balanchine catalogue. This spring, City Ballet revisited La Valse (1951) and Vienna Waltzes (1977), his two most elaborate treatments of that glamorous ballroom sensation.

Getting to know you. The ingenue of "La Valse" (Unity Phelan) "in conversation" with her respectful cavalier (Jules Mabie), clueless that Death hovers in the shadows.

Idle as it may seem to spell it out, La Valse evokes Paris, first in dances set to the now splashy, now pensive miniatures of Maurice Ravel's suite Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, then in the spiraling delirium of his eponymous tone poem. In the brief early segments of the ballet, show-pony ballerinas in charcoal-and-rose tulle and snow-white opera gloves, all bent wrists and elbows, paw the floor with their pointe shoes, calling to mind the fashion spreads of Richard Avedon (think Dovima With Elephants, shot in Paris in 1966 for Harper's Bazaar, minus the elephants). For show, there's a Jacques for each Belle, but at heart these dancing princesses are all alike, too pleased with themselves even to jockey for position.

That changes with the eighth and final waltz of the noble-and-sentimental set. Here, attention shifts to an ingenue in white and a partner with whom she conducts a "conversation" (that's what the dancers call it) of swooping turns and interlocking gestures of their hands and arms. That leads straight to the ballroom Rite of Spring that is La Valse, in which Death singles the girl in white out as his Chosen One, flinging her around with shocking abandon like a puppet or a paper doll. Next come gifts. First, a jet necklace, which she momentarily refuses but then quickly fastens, only to recoil when Death holds up cracked mirror. For the finishing touches, he offers black opera gloves, a sheer black peignoir, a purple bouquet (deadly nightshade?). Time to whirl her to her doom, scarcely 90 seconds later. The ghastly climax is prefigured in the score, written in the immediate aftermath of World War I, driven by the uncertainties and disillusionment of the moment.

The musical patchwork Balanchine assembled for Vienna Waltzes bears no such weight of postapocalyptic association. As spelled out in the online Balanchine Catalogue, each of five sections "suggests a different mood."

"The first three [set to music by the Waltz King Johann Strauss II] take place in the Vienna Woods: a formal dance [G'schichten aus dem Wienerwald, 1868], wood spirits [Frühlingsstimmen, 1885], a comic polka [Explosions-Polka, ca. 1848]." Of all the vignettes of Vienna Waltzes, that formal dance stands out as the gentlest and most warm-hearted. The wood-spirits episode, which is the only part with ballerinas in toe shoes rather than pumps, is the breeziest and nimblest.

On to part 4, in which, as noted in the catalogue, the scenery "evolves." "The trees develop tendrils of decor to form the dancing room of the Merry Widow [set to Franz Lehár's Gold und Silber Walzer, 1905]." Theatrically, the sequence has a soft-focus, after-hours glamour epitomized in the train of her dress to which the leading lady pays such incessant attention. "In the finale, the roots of the trees become the chandeliers of a mirrored ballroom for Waltzes from [Richard Strauss's] 'Der Rosenkavalier.'"

For the record, though the Rosenkavalier concert suite heard here dates to 1946, the opera premiered in 1911. Was the coming disaster of the Great War already in the air? Contemporary concept directors sometimes pour that Kool-Aid. I can't believe Balanchine would have drunk it, but many have been struck by the hallucinatory element in his Rosenkavalier sequence, Might the careening melodic contours and lush postromantic orchestrations had him channeling La Valse?

Apocalypse mit Schlag? The finale of "Vienna Waltzes."

Vienna Waltzes is a five-ballerina show, and in the day, it felt like one. In the first movement of the performance I attended on May 11, Isabelle LaFreniere's shy heroine kept her quiet hopes and disappointments rather too much under wraps. As the wood nymph and her cavalier in the second movement, Indiana Woodward and Daniel Ulbricht made perfectionism look like a piece of cake, I thought Brittany Pollack and Sebastián Vellini-Vélez, who led the polka, could have used an extra shot of rambunctious show-biz pizzazz, and Miriam Miller, with her phenomenal wingspan, seemed wasted to me parading through the Lehár.

Ultimately, though, Vienna Waltzes crystallizes around the solo of ballerina number five. A loner in white, she wafts through her mirrored ballroom wrapped in thoughts all her own, oblivious of the partner who may exist only in her imagination. Yet before the curtain falls, the whole stage—seemingly the whole universe—fills with ballerinas just like her, each in the arms of a rapt cavalier. Who in this maze of reflections or projections is real? And who is an artifact in Balanchine's kaleidoscope?

Originally Suzanne Farrell at her most mesmerically inscrutable, the woman of mystery was danced this time by Unity Phelan, who also led La Valse on May 15. In her musically impeccable, knowingly phrased performance of La Valse, Phelan caught the ingenue's willful, self-destructive streak. What might have been going on in her head in Vienna Waltzes, where her dancing was hardly less exquisite, I couldn't venture to guess.

Ravel remembered

A shadow spun of light. Sara Mearns in "Pavane."

La Valse appeared as the finale on a program honoring the Golden Anniversary of the City Ballet's Ravel Festival of 1975. By general agreement, the celebration was no great shakes—but then, the creative explosion of the Stravinsky Festival three years before had set an impossibly high bar. Of the bonbons unveiled five decades ago, the company brought back the Jerome Robbins trifle In G Major, based on Ravel's piano concerto in that key, as well as the Balanchine shorts Sonatine, Pavane, and Errante (originally Tzigane). Between Erté's Gallic day-at-beach décor and Mira Nadon's easy-going, unforced radiance in the ballerina role, the Robbins gave real pleasure. Indiana Woodward and Joseph Gordon rendered a graceful account of the will-they-won't-they courtship dance for two Balanchine whipped up as Sonatine.

Into the maze. Domenika Afanasenkov explores "Errante" (formerly "Tzigane").

The solo Pavane (as in Pavane Pour Une Infante Défunte) found Sara Mearns in translucent form, like a shadow spun of light, morphing from mourning Mary to bayadère and back again in tandem with a billowing veil. The gypsy fantasy Errante saw role debuts from Domenika Afanasenkov, a member of the corps de ballet, and Chun Wai Chan, a ranking principal. With its spiky, off-center variation at the top of the piece, hers was by orders of magnitude the more exposed assignment, and she aced it. The partner who joins the ballerina in the finale doesn't have much to ace, but Chan is one of those performers for whom there are no small roles.

And a word for the musicians

At the theater, dancers fortunate enough to perform with live music are generous in sharing the glory. In notices, recognition of the players is rare. It won't settle the score to give a shoutout here to the City Ballet's music director Andrew Litton, maestro for all the performances under discussion here except the sensory-friendly event, which was led by the guest conductor Harrison Hollingworth. Juggling rep that also took in fare from Mozart (Balanchine's Divertimento No. 15) to Leonid Desyatnikov (Alexei Ratmansky's Odesa), the band sounded at home in every style, generating the songfulness, atmosphere, and pulse that give dancers wings. A tip of the hat, too, to the numerous, indispensable soloists: the fiddlers Kurt Nikkanen (Odesa) and Lydia Hong (Errante), as well as the pianists Janna Hyunjung Kim (In G Major), Elaine Chelton (Sonatine). Bravi, tutti!