Do you really know a piece of music when it’s only heard and not seen? With Stravinsky, possibly not.
The composer always had an instinctual sense of three-dimensional physicality in his pieces, so much that even his Violin Concerto has been choreographed and his Three Pieces for String Quartet are partly based on a dance piece titled David that he worked on briefly with Jean Cocteau. So when I had a chance to experience the original George Balanchine choreography to lesser-known Stravinsky dance scores in the New York City Ballet’s current season — pieces whose music I’ve lived with for years — I jumped at it. Decades ago, when living in Muncie, Indiana, I read longingly about Balanchine’s original Stravinsky Festival with no hope of ever seeing these pieces or visiting New York City. Suddenly, there they were, across the river from where I live in Brooklyn. At the May 15 performance at Lincoln Center, a new world revealed itself — mostly for better but sometimes for worse.
Apollo, Orpheus and Agon were preceded by the short instrumental-only Suite No. 2 for Small Orchestra, showing Stravinsky in one of his most playful, quirky modes; it was brilliant programming, setting the stage for the music that was to follow and reminding you of what lurked beneath the chic surfaces of later works. Now, decades removed from the world that spawned these pieces, I feel like I need all the context I can get, and this piece’s bits of this-and-that were a less-filtered look at the composer’s psyche. You might describe it as a Stravinsky garage sale.
(Full disclosure: I’m not a dance critic and, for lack of time, only access the art form occasionally.)
Originally, Apollo had a deluxe production by the Ballets Russes in 1928 with costumes by Coco Chanel and sets by painter André Bauchant. But in revising the work during the years that followed, Balanchine explored the artistic value of economy. The NYC Ballet program notes talked of his paring back the costumes, scenery, and even the narrative elements of Apollo. Smart idea. Few of the antique gods are as godly as Apollo: he doesn’t lend himself to human complications. He inspires artists to create things for themselves and is often used in theater as the deus ex machina, descending at the end to make everything right and save the day. Imposing a narrative on Apollo himself can seem false. So Balanchine’s ballet has come down to us as almost pure dance, with four characters: Apollo and the Muses Terpsichore (dance), Polyhymnia (sacred poetry and music), and Calliope (epic poetry and song).
So what do we have here? The relationship between music and movement.
Some choreographers treat the music like a film score, using it as a backdrop for their own storytelling. Others feel the dance must be a literal presentation of the music’s gestures. Balanchine, in contrast, is in-between: He follows the music’s general contour, sometimes specifically with the rhythm of the movement and other times just in spirit. The inner life of the music and the manner of the ballet were one and the same.
Balanchine’s singular sense of invention took off in ways impossible for me to describe because this is perhaps the ultimate non-informational art. The movement is without meaning in the usual sense, but, miraculously, becomes meaningful — something which runs counter to our information-stuffed world. You’ve experienced something deep but can’t put a name to it. I’ve often wondered why, during Broadway musicals, audience start chatting when the dialogue stops and the music begins. Perhaps because the nature of music is non-informative and some listeners don’t know what to do with it? But that’s where the magic lies — if you’re able to let it in.
Orpheus, in contrast, is informational. It has a story and clearly drawn characters. As much as I love the score, I enjoyed the dance the least of the three on the program. The piece takes the story of Orpheus’s near-rescue of Eurydice beyond his re-emergence from the underworld to his being torn apart by the Bacchantes. Apollo appears at the end to more-or-less canonize Orpheus as the god of song. I “got” it — but, though that kind of understanding is nice, it wasn’t what I wanted after Apollo.
This piece hails from 1948, a time when the gods of antiquity were a more immediate presence for portions of the general public: a so-called “classical education” was not yet rare, and Edith Hamilton’s Mythology was a bestseller. These gods weren’t alien beings; their histories and relationships were familiar. However, the iconography with which they were portrayed — a set consisting of three misshapen rocks, etc. — now seems as distractingly stylized and dated as numerous Martha Graham dance pieces from the same general period drawing from similar mythology.
Agon, the piece I most wanted to see (it’s desert-island Stravinsky for me), held the biggest and best surprises. Written in 1957, it’s considered Stravinsky’s last masterpiece but is seldom heard live in concert, perhaps because of its unorthodox instrumentation that includes harp/mandolin duets.
Rest assured that Agon is not some antique god that has escaped your attention. The word apparently means “contest,” but Balanchine’s Agon is truly a not-about-anything ballet. Individual sections are inspired by a 17th-century dance manual, but that’s basically scaffolding.
The choreography was considered a Balanchine breakthrough in a production that was so pared back that the dancers performed in plain leotards, still uncommon back then. Black-and-white films made during Balanchine’s lifetime suggest something severe, stark, almost impersonal in its refusal to deliver what we might now call information. How wonderful to discover quite the opposite onstage.
The production’s opening tableau had a distilled sense of color: A deep blue backdrop with male dancers wearing white t-shirts and black trousers. If there’s any sense of narrative, it’s the quartets of segregated men and women eventually coming together and being joined by others.
The biggest surprise, though, is all of the wit and humor. Odd as it sounds, Agon is a crowd-pleaser. From the beginning, the choreography sets up expectations with typical balletic grace and poise. Then, within seconds, out of nowhere and with hair-trigger timing, comes an angular twist of the ankles or wrists. Some sections of Agon are extremely short — only a minute or so — and Balanchine embraced that quality by defying expectations with ever-greater brinksmanship. One section ended with a flourish, a grand lift between two dancers, that was caught in mid-movement, having not made it under the wire by the end of the section. I laughed out loud.
Okay, this is still ballet, but the wit broke the fourth wall. Without physical or psychological artifice, we were invited into the world of the dance in a way that doesn’t often happen. The voyeuristic separation was gone. We might as well have been onstage with them. The dance not only winked at us, but gave the audience a joyful embrace. And it’s that kind of playfulness — not in terms of movement but in spirit — that was set up by the opening Suite No. 2 at the start of the program.
Stravinsky’s early influences included humble country carnivals; his first musical memory is said to have been a man making sounds with his armpit. Those are the qualities apparent in the Suite No. 2, suggesting that, for all his artistic heights, the composer remained refreshingly devoid of pretension. Yes, he lied about The Rite of Spring not being based on folk song (it was, very much so), but that was probably a business decision made to enhance his mystique. And anybody who wore two pairs of glasses on his head, as Stravinsky did in later years, clearly hadn’t embraced the self-presentational qualities of his contemporary Coco Chanel.
A key element in the New York City Ballet program was conductor Andrew Litton. This is one of the few instances of a “name conductor” (he’s held music director jobs from Dallas to Bergen) leading a ballet orchestra, and what a difference it made. These are tough scores, but the performances had not only solidity but great cognitive understanding and, on top of it all, a surface sheen. If you’re going to present a Stravinsky festival, such qualities are essential.