Balanchine's America

George Balanchine loved American culture because he loved America. He had lived through tyranny and chaos as a boy in the Russian Revolution, and though his displays of affection for his adopted homeland could border on silly (like the Western bolo ties he favored as fashion statements), he never took for granted the possibilities he found here, never stopped extolling America’s freshness and energy.

Performance

Pacific Northwest Ballet: “Square Dance” / “Stravinsky Violin Concerto” / “Prodigal Son” by George Balanchine

Place

Digital stream of performance in McCaw Hall, Seattle, WA; captured live on November 1, 2024

Words

Rachel Howard

Pacific Northwest Ballet in “Stravinsky Violin Concerto” by George Balanchine. Photograph by Angela Sterling

It was with a mix of grief and gratitude, then, that I watched the digital stream of Pacific Northwest Ballet’s “All Balanchine” program, recorded four days before the most consequential US presidential election of our lifetimes, and released nine days after. The program launched with “Square Dance,” arguably the boldest, most avant-garde of Balanchine’s Americana ballets. It was painful viewing given the shocking reality that, with an authoritarian returning to the White House, this is no longer the America Balanchine celebrated. But it was inspiring viewing thanks to the verve, clarity, and community of the Seattle dancers who—diverse not just in height and skin color but also in a spectrum of gender identity—represent the best of what our society can be.

That “Square Dance” is wildly avant-garde is not so apparent today. When Balanchine created the ballet in 1957 with the idea of mashing up classical ballet and American square dancing, he placed the ensemble playing Vivaldi and Corelli on the stage, like a barn band, and had the famous square dance caller Elisha Keeler in the corner, doing his thing. The results, which you can find on YouTube in a Bell Telephone Hour recording, were marvelously weird. “Now keep your eye on Pat, her feet go whickety-whack,” Keeler calls, as a cadre of ladies repeat Patricia Wilde’s gargouillades. Nearly 20 years later, reviving the dance, Balanchine took out the on-stage band and the caller.

Leta Biasucci with Pacific Northwest Ballet company dancers in “Square Dance” by George Balanchine. Photograph by Angela Sterling

I’m of the camp that thinks this was a mistake, muting a bold work of art and leaving us with just, you know, some garden variety genius choreography. But there are compensations: when Balanchine took out the caller he also added a stirring, soul-laid-bare solo for the male dancer, and Kyle Davis’s rendering of this, simultaneously dignified and vulnerable, was the emotional center of this staging by PNB artistic director Peter Boal. Walking across the stage with one hand to hip and the other extended, courtly, Davis was doing what Balanchine wanted: Just being himself, a dancer inhabiting the music. But by fully and openly doing so, he became a vessel for our feelings. His sudden big, flinging jump embodied emotion without melodrama, and the strange tick-tocking of his arms en haut above his head as he lifted a leg through passé seemed to show a sensitive mind in deep solitude contemplating a painful past episode, looking at things one way, and then the other.

Elsewhere in this performance, the dancers’ sensitivity to the shifts of relationship were thrilling. The pas de deux starts with the man extending a grand, almost solemn bow to the principal woman; into this opening Davis and Leta Biasucci let a whole unspoken story flow. As again and again she stepped backwards, blindly, into a retiré caught by his support, you saw a couple discovering trust with an undertone of seriousness—this kind of connection has consequences, and their slow partnering felt like vows. But with such trust comes joy and freedom, and as the Vivaldi Largo shifted into bright excitement, Davis and Biassuci gamboled for one another with the innocence of children, she flicking her heels, he taking some jazzy passés with the hip pushing out. Biasucci could not have been brighter, clearer, or purer throughout the ballet, her feet so pliable, her turnout so clean, and her center so secure that she became the proverbial hummingbird able to shift direction by pushing against the air. The women and non-binary dancers of the ensemble, too, moved with beautiful wholeness, though the men and non-binary contingent sometimes struggled.

Elle Macy and Lucien Postlewaite in “Prodigal Son” by George Balanchine. Photograph by Angela Sterling

It’s jazz influences that mark “Stravinsky Violin Concerto” with Balanchine’s love of American culture, although laced with Russian folk flourishes. The music is from 1931; the choreography is from 1972 (premiered at the mammoth Stravinsky Festival Balanchine held to honor Stravinsky’s death), and just as ever-fresh as the stunning logic of Balanchine’s ensemble patterns is the chance to see new dancers stepping into the two pas de deux at the center. In the first, with the circle of crawling backbends, Elle Macy was strikingly arachnoid partnered by Christopher D’Ariano, but too cheerfully confident to move me. In the second pas de deux, in which the man extends his arm over the woman’s shoulder and directs her gaze back and forth before closing a hand over her face, Dylan Wald was resigned but not predatory towards a touchingly regretful Angelica Generosa; I found the warmth in their relationship refreshing.

“Prodigal Son,” from 1929, is early, Ballets Russes-era Balanchine—four years before Lincoln Kirstein brought him to America. Macy, dancing with full command three years her promotion to principal, completely grasped the indifference of the Siren, who keeps a snake-like stare as she wraps her impossibly long legs around the Son in a consummation both abstracted and scandalously graphic. Lucien Postlewaite was musical, athletic, and touching as the son, as possessed by his naïve need for adventure as he was pained to break from his father.

The music is by Prokofiev, and a well-trod yet always fascinating bit of lore is that because Balanchine and Prokofiev had a huge falling out, Balanchine hated the composer’s music evermore. Less often noted is the fineness of the libretto by Boris Kochno, who in adapting the New Testament parable included a moment for the father (an excellent Miles Pertl), left behind after his son leaves in a state of stunned heartbreak. Of course the story isn’t really about one wayward child. More than any other time I’ve seen this ballet, I so badly wanted to believe in the father’s pain, so deeply hoped our bitterly divided human race could be welcomed back by a forgiving embrace.

Rachel Howard

Rachel Howard is the former lead dance critic of the San Francisco Chronicle. Her dance writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Hudson Review, Ballet Review, San Francisco Magazine and Dance Magazine.

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