by Leigh Witchel
New York City Ballet’s opening All Balanchine program invited your eye to wander past center stage to the corps, but also past what you were seeing onstage to imagine how each ballet started, how and when it changed, and where it is.
“Haieff Divertimento,” originally just “Divertimento” but renamed to prevent confusion with “Divertimento No. 15,” has a complex history. It was choreographed for Ballet Society in 1947 and dropped from repertory by 1952 because nobody remembered it well enough to restage. In 1985, after four years of work, principally by Francisco Moncion, who led the original cast with Mary Ellen Moylan, the ballet was revived at State Ballet of Missouri (now Kansas City Ballet) under Todd Bolender’s direction. New York City brought the work back into repertory for the 1993 Balanchine Festival, with Wendy Whelan and Nilas Martins in the leads.
From reports at the time, Moncion felt that his revival was largely accurate, the small parts that he didn’t recall were patched from vocabulary within the work. It’s a reconstruction after several decades without performance, yet so are many other dances accepted as canon, including Graham’s “Chronicle,” and for that matter, “Giselle.”
Peter Walker and corps member Christina Clark made their debuts in the leads, and the ballet seemed like a tender but strange mix of courtliness and awkward adolescence. Four couples were arrayed in a rectangle with Walker in the center, looking up and out at nothing in particular as if it were a Justin Peck ballet.
Clark arrived at the end of the first movement, and the corps left to let the two dance alone. She’s tall, angular, wristy and long-legged, which was accented as she did endless pas de chevals round and round to the back. She pawed as she faced Walker, their arms reaching past one another, fists clenching and unclenching. A slow, pensive solo for Clark became about the looseness of her body and how high her legs went.
The ballet brought the corps front and center, first with four short and lovely related solos for each man, Victor Abreu, Jonathan Fahoury, Jules Mabie and Andres Zuniga, each one ending with a pirouette where the working leg dipped down and back to retiré.
Later on, the women, Jacqueline Bologna, Lauren Collett, Baily Jones, and Alexa Maxwell, also got short solos but the symmetry and balance felt neither inevitable nor too obvious. The ballet ended suddenly with the woman prancing off and the man reaching longingly after her.
“Haieff Divertimento” is a lovely work, bringing forward a little-heard composer. Alexei Haieff was a neoclassicist like Stravinsky, born in Russia but educated at Juilliard and with Nadia Boulanger. He was respected and recognized in his time, including with a Rome Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. But it’s been longer now since the ballet was revived than it was lost.
With all the callowness, it felt as if it had been made – or coached – by Jerome Robbins or Peck. And so the mystery: Is it that Balanchine did sometimes make ballets like this, but they didn’t survive? That dog has not barked before. Martha Ullman West, who literally wrote the book on Todd Bolender, said in conversation that Bolender never mentioned that aspect. In Nancy Reynold’s “Repertory in Review,” an essential compendium of contemporaneous opinion on Balanchine’s work, many reactions to the ballet were that it was a gem, and a few mentioned youth or teen-agers, but in the context of high spirits, not adolescent emotion.
The featuring of the corps was another unusual aspect to the ballet, and contemporary writers did mention that. Anatole Chujoy praised those solos for the men, “who for once had something to dance.”
There was a logical reason for Balanchine to beef up the parts: the original corps was Gisella Caccialanza, Tanaquil Le Clercq, Elise Reiman, Beatrice Tompkins, Todd Bolender, Lew Christensen, Fred Danieli, and John Taras These dancers had all done soloist and principal roles; it was a corps that ought to have been featured.
I wish I could recall my own reaction to the ballet in 1993; unfortunately I can’t. Still, the most likely explanation for the ballet’s winsome tone is that this is something the ballet acquired, and it makes it look as if it were not by Balanchine’s hand. [Postscript March, 2023. Per this article, the revival was done by the company’s repertory director, Christine Redpath, and termed a reconstruction.]
“Donizetti Variations” has also had a twisty performance road including a name change after its first season, but “Donizetti Variations” is an improvement on the original “Variations from Don Sebastian.” The piece was originally made for Melissa Hayden and Jacques d’Amboise, but another fine technician, Jonathan Watts, went in for d’Amboise at the premiere.
The ballet had a longer life than expected, getting a new production with new costumes in 1971. And unsurprisingly it changed. Though Hayden mentions in “Repertory in Review” that she preferred the new costumes, she noted that, like the costumes, with the new production the ballet itself became more pastel.
Sources note that there were also some new steps for the principal dancers, but there’s a change for the corps that wasn’t documented in “Repertory in Review” or the Balanchine catalogue raisonné. There was a joke Balanchine made in one of the corps dances. Nowadays, it’s that the corps rushes in and freezes, the dancers covering their eyes dramatically. Then, on a trumpet cadenza, one of the women comes forward and seizes the moment to do a solo. In her enthusiasm, she stubs her toe and limps back to place, as the dance continues. It’s a camp, Trockadero moment, and company dancers from recent eras I’ve spoken to think of the ballet as camp.
But that wasn’t the original joke. As both former NYCB principal dancer John Clifford and Victoria Simon, who was in the original cast, recall it, once all the dancers froze dramatically, one woman walked around them, befuddled. Then she shrugged, gave up and went back to her place. As Walter Terry reported in the New York Herald Tribune, “In a delicious tongue and cheek aside, there is a brief moment when the company strikes a dramatic pose, and one girl wanders around to investigate, as if to say, ‘What happened to you?’” Clifford called it a touch of “theater of the absurd.”
Memories from friends in the audience suggest that it was changed to the current version in Balanchine’s lifetime, before the late 1970s. Simon added details: “The original lady who walked around was Leda Roffi. She had this wonderfully expressive face and big eyes. I think Balanchine just wanted to use her and her sense of humor. I do not know when it got changed or why. Probably no one else could carry it off like Leda.”
Back to the present. Though the full corps was nine, the dancers most often worked in trios, so again, this was a ballet with good visibility. The first dance for three women is particularly rhythmic and lovely, with fluid enchaînements, rushing through poses and darting in and out towards the center.
The principals had a bit more trouble. Tiler Peck felt constricted in her first variation, particularly in extension and arabesque. It was as if she was resorting to Peck-isms. Andrew Veyette pushed and just made it through a series of air turns. In the coda he varied the speed of repeated turns in retiré but crumpled his axis on the slower ones.
Still, give Peck a solo like her second, which was about balance more than extension, and she looks like herself and not a caricature of her mannerisms. She torqued lightly as she walked past the three corps men, flirted with them and snatched her hand away from each as if she weren’t doing fouettés while that was happening.
Indiana Woodward and Roman Mejia danced “Valse-Fantaisie” backed by Olivia Boisson, Meaghan Dutton-O’Hara, Olivia MacKinnon and Mimi Staker. While this corps works more as an ensemble, it’s a plum quartet to dance. Mejia is talented, hungry and on the rise. In his solo, two brisés covered a good quarter of the stage. He gamboled round on a meandering path and made it literally seem like a walk in the park. He’s also developing his own manner and character as a cavalier. When each woman came up to him and took a pose, he changed his demeanor and pose slightly to greet each woman so they were four individuals he met rather than “the corps.”
Mejia was developing the musicality in the role, first done by Clifford. Clifford has made it clear the part was staccato, but it’s gradually become more legato. Mejia seemed to be restoring some of that precipitous quality without losing the volume of movement. He moved slowly in long notes, filling out the pose so that he didn’t get stuck, then came to a sudden sharp pose and burst into the next phrase.
He and Woodward also moved to restore a detail Clifford and Mimi Paul had mentioned in Balanchine Foundation tapings. When the leads met and touched, they did it with a small vertical motion rather than a horizontal brush.
The part is a cakewalk for Woodward and she did it very well. There was little there to challenge her, and it’s only a small portion of her workload, which keeps increasing. Still, there was nothing in it to challenge Mejia either – he challenged himself.
There’s a funny detail that reappeared from “Donizetti” in “Stravinsky Violin Concerto”: the dancers also cover their eyes in the same way in the final, folk-influenced movement. Though it was the largest cast work of the evening, “Violin Concerto” also gave many moments to the corps. The opening divided the 16 members of the corps into phalanxes of four, each led by one of the principals. Balanchine gave a featured moment to one woman emerging out of the corps, here Boisson, to do a short cakewalk with Taylor Stanley.
Emilie Gerrity delicately picked through the opening, followed by Unity Phelan. Stanley and Phelan paired well in the first duet, having similar fluid qualities. The semi-circle of back bridges for Phelan didn’t look great, or seem to feel great on her. It may have been a question of proportion; the role was built on Karin von Aroldingen, who had a long torso that gave the shape to the bridge.
Unlike Peter Martins and Kay Mazzo, Gerrity and Russell Janzen are both tall, so the second duet became less about contrast or even imposition, but about trust. The two made walking away from one another into a moment. He hesitated; her arm lingered, Gerrity fell into Janzen and put all her weight in his hands. He cradled her carefully and flipped her over and over. They concluded as Janzen put his hand on her forehead and brought her head back ever so gently.
Janzen has written before about not feeling comfortable with aggressive partnering. This was a reinterpretation – the kind we didn’t get to see as it happened in “Donizetti” or “Haieff Divertimento.” But it wasn’t invalid, at least not on Gerrity and Janzen. The more time passes, the less you can expect the original intent to remain. This unalterable truth is incredibly and rightfully painful for those who actually knew the original intent. But holding on to that can turn into a religion.
There are two factors at play: performance – what an individual dancer does that specific time, and text – what’s supposed to happen every show. Performance is supposed to have latitude. The complications and conflagrations arise when someone’s performance threatens to become the text.
copyright © 2023 by Leigh Witchel
“Donizetti Variations,” “Haieff Divertimento,” “Valse-Fantaisie,” “Stravinsky Violin Concerto” – New York City Ballet
Lincoln Center, New York, NY
January 18, 2023
Cover: Christina Clark and Peter Walker in “Haieff Divertimento.” Photo credit © Erin Baiano..
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