Pacific Northwest Ballet: George Balanchine’s Jewels
$37-$187
Balanchine – Emeralds (music: Fauré)
Balanchine – Rubies (music: Stravinsky)
Balanchine – Diamonds (music: Tchaikovsky)
Emeralds is a romantic evocation of France. It is also Balanchine’s comment on the French school of dancing and its rich heritage. France is the birthplace of classical ballet and French is its language. With a score by Gabriel Fauré and dancers dressed in Romantic-length tutus, Emeralds can also be a window on the nostalgia inherent in much late 19th-century art, with its idealized view of the Middle Ages, chivalry, and courtly love. Balanchine considered Emeralds “an evocation of France – the France of elegance, comfort, dress and perfume.”
Rubies is the central ballet of Balanchine’s full-length Jewels, which premiered in its entirety in 2006 at Pacific Northwest Ballet. Choreographed for Patricia McBride and Edward Villella, two of the most vivacious dancers in American dance history, plus a supporting female lead and a corps of twelve, Rubies effuses glam wit and jazzy chic. The saucy leading couple plays and competes as equals, and a second, siren-like ballerina takes on the men of the corps de ballet, requiring all four of them to partner her at once. Former PNB Director of Education Jeanie Thomas wrote, “‘Capriciousness’ [referring to the title of Stravinsky’s score] might also be said to characterize Balanchine’s choreography, which is half elegant, half street-smart. With its jutting hips, flexed feet, show biz kicks and witty counter-rhythms, Rubies is a many-faceted example of the exuberantly distorted classicism that Balanchine invented to render Stravinsky’s musical idiom three-dimensionally.”
Diamonds is George Balanchine’s homage to his native St. Petersburg, Russia. The ballet pays homage to Balanchine’s youth: the grandeur of St. Petersburg, the Maryinsky Theater, and the Imperial Ballet, where Balanchine trained. Echoes of Petipa’s Swan Lake and Raymonda abound, and the centerpiece of the ballet is an intimate pas de deux, potent in its chivalrous reserve, for the ballerina and her cavalier. At its end, the entire cast joins the principal couple for a gloriously spirited polonaise.
Diamonds is the third and final ballet of Balanchine’s Jewels. At its New York City Ballet premiere in 1967, Jewels was touted as the first “plotless full-length ballet.” The story goes that Balanchine was inspired to create the ballet after a visit to the New York jeweler Claude Arpels of Van Cleef and Arpels. While each of its three ballets — Emeralds, Rubies, and Diamonds — may not follow any definitive narrative, like real gems themselves, each can be viewed in multiple ways and from a variety of angles. The great American dance critic, Arlene Croce, described Jewels as “unsurpassed as a Balanchine primer, incorporating in a single evening every important article of faith to which this choreographer subscribed and a burst of heresy, too.” Balanchine himself, in his typical non-committal way, stated, “Of course, I have always liked jewels; after all, I am an Oriental, from Georgia in the Caucasus. I like the color of gems, the beauty of stones, and it was wonderful to see how our costume workshop, under Karinska’s direction, came so close to the quality of real stones (which were of course too heavy for the dancers to wear!).”
Notes by Doug Fullington.