Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

The great choreographers have all been more than dancemakers, none more so than George Balanchine. He was in truth one of the supreme dramatists of the theater, but he specialized in plotless ballets with no named characters or written scenarios, and so this aspect of his genius has gone largely unexamined. Instead, everyone accepts the notion — it has become the greatest platitude about him — that he was the most musical of choreographers — a notion that, for all his musical virtues, should be qualified in several respects. Even at this late date, there is much about Balanchine that we still need to under-stand. He belongs in the small august company of modern artists who shattered the distinction between abstraction and representation. His work renders such categories useless. Balanchine’s dance creations often eliminate ingredients that others regarded as the quintessence of theater. The performers of his works are verbally and vocally silent. Facial expressions and other surface aspects of acting are played down. In many of his works, costumes are reduced to an elegant minimum: leotards and tights, “practice clothes,” often only in black and white; or simple monochrome dresses or skirts. In particular, he pared away layers of the social persona of his dancers, so that on his stage they become corporeal emblems of spirit. Liebeslieder Walzer, for example, his ballet from 1960, has two parts. In the first part, the four women wear ballgowns and heeled shoes; in the second, they dance on point and in Romantic tutus. “In the first act, it’s the real people that are dancing,” Balanchine told Bernard Taper. “In the second act, it’s their souls.” Serenade, one of his supreme creations, made in 1934 to Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings, is a masterpiece for many reasons. No ballet is more rewatchable. (If you don’t know it, there are at least two complete versions on YouTube.) Several of its configurations and sequences are among the most brilliantly constructed in all choreography. Pure dance is threaded through with threads of narrative, suggesting fate and chance, love and loss, death and transcendence. It consists almost as much of rapturous running as it does of formal ballet steps. Classicism meets romanticism meets modernism: it is all here. The opening image is justly celebrated, a latticed tableau of seventeen women who, in unison, enact a nine-point ritual like a religious ceremony. At its start, they are extending arms as if shielding their eyes from the light; at its end, their feet, legs, torsos and arms are turned out, open to the light like flowers in full bloom. This has often been interpreted as transforming them from women into dancers. Taking Balanchine’s point about Liebeslieder, we might go further and say that the opening ritual of Serenade transforms them into souls. Serenade also has an important place in history as the first work that Balanchine conceived and completed after moving to the United States of America. A serial reviser of his own work, he kept adjusting it for more than forty years. Only around 1950 did it begin to settle into the form we know now, with its women in dresses ending just above the ankle. (The nineteenth-century Romantic look of those dresses is now definitively a part of Serenade: it remains a shock to see photographs and film fragments from the ballet’s first sixteen years, with the women’s attire revealing knees and even whole thighs. Still, if you see the silent film clips of performances by Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo in 1940 and 1944, you can immediately and affectionately recognize most of their material as Serenade.) For more than fifty years, Serenade has been danced by non-Balanchine companies around the world; in the last decade alone, beloved by dancers and audiences, it has been performed from Hong Kong to Seattle, from Auckland to Salt Lake City. Even so, for musical purists it is unsatisfactory. Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings, composed in 1880, was a score in which this notoriously self-critical composer took immediate and lasting pride: he conducted it many times, not only in Russia but in many other countries too. He made it in cyclical form: his opening movement, called Piece in the Form of a Sonatina, opens