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By Root 929 0

bells either. I remember enjoying it, in a self-consciously “appreciative” manner, as if my eyes were set forward a fraction more than usual, the music holding me more than the dancing, which seemed subordinate to the costuming and a folk-legend storytelling that relied on a lot of portentous gestures prophesying terrible weather heading in our direction. The Firebird herself was performed by Karin von Aroldingen, whose tall, vanquishing presence lived up to her imposing name, but dancing-wise she didn’t have that much to do under all that Vegas-red howdy-do. Afterward I felt a bit yawny, and no one ever truly yawns alone. History is made at night, as the movie title goes, and the afternoon dip of the audience’s biorhythms and the energy-conservation mode of many of the dancers, who had perhaps danced the night before or were scheduled for that day’s evening performance, made for a bit of a Valium drip. I didn’t mind. I figured it was all part of the induction process, easing me into the wonder of it all with gentle massage. At intermission I went out to the viewing tier and looked down upon the promenade, where clumps of conversationalists and solitary figures were moving like Hitchcock miniatures in a high-angle shot or positioned like map pins, the rink book-ended by the Elie Nadelman marble statues that seemed smug in the rich plenty of their fertile hips. Also on the program that afternoon was Afternoon of a Faun, which had the tender intimacy and caressing delicacy of a recital piece, Debussy’s piano notes strung like little drops of dew on your eyelashes. Nice, but nothing to write home from camp about.

My Song of Bernadette moment, my face bathed in miracle light, may have been Balanchine’s Serenade, which I’m hesitant to admit since it has been the portal-opening ballet for so many converts, the dropped panel that divides Before and After, and I was so hoping to be different. It was the first ballet Balanchine did in New York, and from the opening tableau—the dancers in tulle skirts raising their palms in unison to salute the blue night—to the closing processional, the ballerina held aloft and carried off, her arms and back arched in rapt surrender, Serenade serves as an annunciation. Unlike the other early ballets I saw, it didn’t have paraphrasable content, origin material; it seemed to have dreamed itself into existence, its seams and struts invisible. Proof that the pure products of modernism refuse to die! And it didn’t depend upon a star dancer to send it through the uprights; everyone onstage seemed equally ensouled, answering the same votive call. Or could it have been Symphony in C that cinched the romance—its exhilarating marshaling of forces at the end, the small attack units of the corps, employed in slashing diagonals, uniting in a ranked surge, rallying to an excelsior finish? It may have been the stereoscopic power of both: the Rapture Vision and the Victory Romp.

After a couple of more incursions, I bought a matinee subscription to New York City Ballet, something affordable then even for a low-income, hardworking unpsychotic loner like me, and became a semi-semi-regular, seeing Balanchine’s Agon and Four Temperaments and other T-shirt ballets whose names I couldn’t pronounce and still couldn’t pronounce if you pop-quizzed me, such as Cortège Hongrois and Divertimento from “Le Baiser de la Fée.” I saw Jerome Robbins’s work for the company, including his insensibly maligned Dybbuk with beating music summoned from the bowels of the earth by Leonard Bernstein, which finally got its just due when it was revived in 2007. I began referring to dancers familiarly by their first names, as if we were the chummiest of acquaintances, hearing myself say things like, “I saw Patty last week in Coppélia”—Patty being Patricia McBride, one of my favorite principals at the company, the only ballerina who made Coppélia seem more like a candy factory. And Suzanne, referring to—well, there was only one Suzanne, as we shall see, make the sign of the cross when you hear her name. I should have known I was a goner once