Serenade at Warburg estate

[sandik]

I'm trying to find an online copy of that rehearsal photo from the Serenade premiere at the Warburg estate, the one where they're in their swim suits looking disgruntled. I Googled "Serenade Balanchine Warburg" and didn't find it -- does anyone here have a link to a copy. I'm trying to show it to a colleague without having to xerox a text...

[SandyMcKean]

I'm not sure which photo you are referring to, but I remember a similar photo in Taber's biography of Mr B. I thought I had the book around here, but I must have borrowed it when I read it. If you have that book, there is at least one photo on the Warburg estate of Serenade.

[California]

I don't know if this is the one you're thinking of...

http://danceviewtimes.com/dvny/aloff/spring04/041904.htm

Here's the caption at the bottom of the page:

"Photo; The premiere of Serenade, given June 10, 1934 on an outdoor platform at Felix Warburg's estate near White Plains, New York. This was George Balanchine's first American work and was originally made for students at the newly founded School of American Ballet. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Jerome Robbins Dance Division. "

This turned up under Google-Images: serenade balanchine warburg

[Mme. Hermine]

no i don't think that's it, i recall it was in the daytime and they were kind of standing about scratching their heads...

[Mel Johnson]

Wasn't that in the first Balanchine/Francis Mason collaboration, Balanchine's Stories of the Great Ballets? What, ca. 1954?

[California]

I think I found it in a book I have: Bernard Taper's Balanchine: A Biography, p. 155. (Times Books, 1984)

caption: "The first known photograph showing Balanchine working with American dancers - June 1934, at White Plains." The women are scattered about, wearing bathing suits, daytime. According to the photo credits on p. 428: "Courtesy, Anatole Chujoy"

If you go to books.google.com, you can bring up text for the 1996 edition of this book and the same text appears on p. 155, but the photo has been removed as "copyrighted image." I tried searching google-images and regular google and nothing is turning up. You might have to head to a library to see if you can get the book. It's possible it's also in some of the other books people have mentioned here.

[Helene]

Marcie Sillman, an arts reporter on Seattle public radio station KUOW, wrote a review of PNB's "All Balanchine" program on Art Dish, and asked about "Serenade"

But watching the corps women, I couldn’t help but wonder how these blue sylphs looked when Balanchine created the dance. Were they more uniform in appearance and performance? I hope so.

About appearance, at least, I think the photo in the danceviewtimes piece above responds "no", and the photo that sandik is looking for says it more emphatically.

They weren't blue sylphs until later -- Doug Fullington mentioned tunics in the first NYCB performances in his pre-performance lectures -- I believe when Karinska did the current designs. According to the Balanchine Catalogue, Karinska is listed in 1964:

http://balanchine.org/balanchine/display_r...rchMethod=exact

That sounds like after the move to Lincoln Center, when Balanchine re-spaced and re-choreographed to fit the new space and chose more elaborate productions for the space.

[Mel Johnson]

The long dresses were there before that. I recall them back at City Center, before the company moved.

[Helene]

I apologize: I misread the entry and thought 1952 was the year for Jean Rosenthal's lighting.

The Karinska costumes were from 1952, the City Center days, and 1964 was when Ronald Bates redesigned the lighting, presumably for the new theater.

[sandik]

You have all been so helpful -- it is indeed the Chujoy photo I'm looking for, and had been hoping to find a copy online. I had a conversation with Sillman about the genesis of the work, and thought she would like to see that earlier look.

This

seems like an intermediary look, some time after the premiere but before the big shift to the romantic-style skirts. I wonder if Balanchine was avoiding them on purpose to discourage any comparisons with Sylphides...

[Helene]

I thought I saw the photo that sandik linked in a Ballet Russe article. Those costumes look quite dramatic.

The dancers in the Chujoy look like a motley crew -- they were by no means the sleek dancers that Balanchine spent years to create -- but the reason I hesitated to say that the photo to which California linked shows that they were not uniform in performance is that it is possible for any group to learn to move in a uniform way; back to the synchronized skating example. Even the corps that are chosen for physical similarity -- Mariinsky, Bolshoi, Paris Opera -- contain more of a physical range that it first appears, because their style, training, and practice/practice/practice makes them look like they came from a mold.

Because many of the dancers in 1934 were professional dancers from show dancing, it's possible that they had a similar performance quality.

[Jack Reed]

For what it's worth, besides the Taper biography already mentioned, Jennifer Dunning's book, "But First A School" (1985) includes this picture eight unnumbered pages past page 84, but Google Books doesn't show this one, either. So there's another one to look for in a library. (My 1977 edition of Balanchine's Complete Stories... doesn't include it either.)

It's a good picture -- actually, only one girl has her hand on her head, as though wondering, as Taper puts, "Now what was I supposed to do...?" The value of it for him and me anyway is here, at the end of his paragraph about the picture: "Balanchine is to be seen in the midst of this forlorn, chaotic scene, tugging at one of the young women in an effort to haul her approximately into position. He is the only person in the picture who does not seem to be aware of the manifest hopelessness of the whole enterprise."

Those who have seen (or heard) some working rehearsals will recognize the situation, and maybe even remember their delight when in the eventual public performance, if "the whole enterprise" is in the right hands, what they see completely transcends not merely the mess they witnessed before but all the prosaic activity of our daily world of appearances and shows us a glimpse of something which could be eternal -- something which already disappears before it ends. Chaos becomes beauty. Sometimes.

[Helene]

It's a good picture -- actually, only one girl has her hand on her head, as though wondering, as Taper puts, "Now what was I supposed to do...?" The value of it for him and me anyway is here, at the end of his paragraph about the picture: "Balanchine is to be seen in the midst of this forlorn, chaotic scene, tugging at one of the young women in an effort to haul her approximately into position. He is the only person in the picture who does not seem to be aware of the manifest hopelessness of the whole enterprise."

The problem with the photo is that to contemporary eyes, the women in it do look hopeless, as if random people with a vague interest in dance dropped into the school to check out what this ballet stuff was all about. In Doug Fullington's pre-performance lecture for PNB's "All Balanchine" program, he reminds us that many of the early students at SAB were professional dancers who were there to clean up their technique. They might not have been ballet dancers, and their bodies more like ballet dancers from earlier decades, if at all, but if they were paid to dance, it's likely they were used to being in the equivalent of the corps, they could move, and they were used to being given direction.

[bart]

Jack, I loved your post. Ever since I first saw the photo I have thought of the disorganized, even shambling quality of an early rehearsal where steps have to be redesigned and blocking figured out for a new space. My favorite has always been the slim girl in the center, standing there in correct position, waiting patiently for the others to get their acts together.

"{T}he manifest hopelessness of the whole enterprise." That's just what the photo suggests. It's also ... as it turned out ... so wrong. The "whole enterprise" took a while to get off the ground, but what an enterprise it has turned out to be.

[Jack Reed]

My favorite has always been the slim girl in the center, standing there in correct position, waiting patiently for the others to get their acts together.

Who is she? The first cast of Serenade is listed in a few places, but have the dancers in that picture been identified exactly, "left to right", as in a picture caption?

Fullington's remark sounds more like it applies to SAB as it soon was in New York rather than to the presumably more amateur and suburban group we see in that picture from that afternoon in White Plains, don't you think?

[Helene]

Fullington's remark sounds more like it applies to SAB as it soon was in New York rather than to the presumably more amateur and suburban group we see in that picture from that afternoon in White Plains, don't you think?

I'm pretty sure that I remember the context correctly, and that he was speaking about the students who were at SAB at the creation, and it was those students for whom, after a year or so, Balanchine decided to make a ballet.

[sandik]

The world of the professional dancer was most likely very different at the time Balanchine arrived in the US. Some of his first 'students' already had extensive training, but from a wide variety of sources, and some had already been performing, again with a variety of outlets. The distinction between student and professional was much more permeable at that time.

I've always liked deMille's description of an audition she ran for one of her first Broadway shows, several years after Serenade, where she had to eliminate the 'showgirls' who could walk and wear costumes, but couldn't do anything like the ballet-based choreography she was trying to create. We look at the Balanchine repertory today, at the influence his work has had on the development of ballet (no matter what you think of Sarah Kaufmann's point of view) and it's difficult to remember that early on he certainly was not recognized as the artist we know him to be now.

[SandyMcKean]

Fullington's remark sounds more like it applies to SAB as it soon was in New York rather than to the presumably more amateur and suburban group we see in that picture from that afternoon in White Plains, don't you think?

I'm pretty sure that I remember the context correctly, and that he was speaking about the students who were at SAB at the creation, and it was those students, for whom, after a year or so, Balanchine decided to make a ballet.

I heard Fullington's talk twice last week. He made this comment in both instances of those pre-performance talks. I remember the remark in the same way Helene does. (Note: Helene heard the talk on yet a different performance than the two I heard.)