TONI BENTLEY (
"The Ballet That Changed Everything"): "When Balanchine was asked what "Serenade" is about, he said that it is just "a dance in the moonlight."
During class, while we were sweating bullets, he would hold his forefinger up in the air, and say with a gleeful little smile, "The body is lazy! That's why I am here!"
"It was very touch-and-go for these 19th-century gals: Aurora, the Sleeping Beauty, is already 116 years old at her wedding, while both Giselle and Odette, the Swan Queen, only achieve any kind of consummation—of the most platonic kind—with their beloveds in the afterlife, if at all. Trapped in love, by love, it is only love that will save them, the familiar Catch-22 of doomed romance. In "Serenade" Balanchine sets these women free—but not to be with their lovers happily ever after. He had something else entirely in mind, this man who loved women.
Yanking these beauties from their poetic, otherworldly suffering, a stance so suited to ballet's tender language, Balanchine thrusts them squarely—disregarding their objections, dragging petticoats, and protesting parents—into the 20th and, it would now appear, the 21st, century. Balanchine stripped his heroine—she will always be that—of her specificity, her wings and feathers and weighty crown, and of her impetuous dependence. And he sends this creature he finds, this real woman, to her destiny, to Eternity, alone, unadorned but for the echo in her loosened hair of Giselle gone mad. Underneath the elaborate camouflage he has uncovered an artist.
"Serenade" is one of the greatest works of art ever made about a woman artist—her sacrifices, her vulnerability, her work and her love affairs. (Balanchine told one of his favorite dancers that the ballet could have been called simply "Ballerina.") Balanchine's woman is no longer a creature yearning for her man, but an artist for whom men are transitory not primary. (It is worth remembering that "Serenade" was made nearly three decades before Betty Friedan published "The Feminine Mystique.") While she may well stand on the shoulders of men—as she does, literally, in the final magnificent closing of "Serenade"—she does not attain anything as pedestrian as equality. She attains transcendence, perhaps in life, perhaps in death, and her companions —her acolytes, her handmaidens, her mythic sisters, her fellow witches—are those of her own sex.
Where are they going as the curtain lowers and they rise? Into that light. To where it comes from. The journey of the dancer. I believe, having danced the ballet over 50 times, they have gone to a kind of Heaven—the one we can't see, can barely conceive, and yet so desire. In class one day, Balanchine said, "You can see Paradise, but you can't get in"—but then he never danced "Serenade.""
