ALTHOUGH New York City Ballet is happily engaged in a grand celebration of its 50th anniversary, in actual fact its roots extend back rather further.
The company had its true beginnings in 1933, when Lincoln Kirstein brought George Balanchine from Europe with the mission to create a great American ballet company. Balanchine accepted the job with one memorable stipulation.
”First,” he said, ”a school!” And so it was that in Hartford, Conn., in 1934, the School of American Ballet opened shop – moving, perhaps understandably, to New York the year after.
From the school arose all the various Balanchine/Kirstein companies that preceded the naming in 1949 of the final troupe, New York City Ballet, and its finding its first home at City Center.
The link between City Ballet and its official school has never been broken – they are halves of the same apple. It was therefore important for the school to play a part in the 50th-anniversary celebrations, and, of course, children from the school appear in a number of company productions, such as the new ”Swan Lake.”
Yet something more was called for, so Peter Martins commissioned the young choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, a City Ballet soloist, to create a work commemorating the school and the vital and integral part it has played in the development of the company.
Wednesday night at the New York State Theater, Wheeldon took Stravinsky’s 1944 score ”Scenes de Ballet” and used it for an idealized classroom piece, which had a little something in common with the classroom scene from Bournonville’s 1849 Danish classic ”Konservatoriet.”
It used – very adroitly – 64 students of all ages, placing them in a classroom (set in Balanchine’s own St. Petersburg, very beautifully, yet very cutely, by scenic designer Ian Falconer) with a ballet barre and an invisible mirror.
Except for one pas de deux, seen as a child’s fantasy and elegantly danced by Isabel Vondermuhll and Jan Burkhard, all the dances were choreographed in double mirror-image, a smart device that lent credibility to the simplistically symmetrical ground patterns essential to getting the young dancers on and off in organized cohorts.
It’s a neat piece of work, and a lively tribute to the school. My only doubts were about the use of the music.
The problem was not the music’s suitability, for it worked well. But in 1948, to this same score, Frederick Ashton created one of the great neo-classic ballets of the 20th century, the acquisition of which would be a permanent treasure in the company repertory. Of course, it is still not too late for that – and this school work might serve as a reminder.
