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George Balanchine, by his own admission, always admired jewels, a quality he attributed to his Georgian roots. \u201cI like the color of gems, the beauty of stones,\u201d he wrote in \u201c101 Stories of the Great Ballets.\u201d<\/p>\n
When, in 1967, the curtain rose at New York City Ballet on his opulent triptych, known as the first full-length plotless ballet, it had no unifying title. But there was a unifying idea: precious stones. \u201cEmeralds\u201d possesses the fragrant earthiness and secrecy of nature; \u201cRubies\u201d is heat and playfulness, with the games and posturing of a summer scape in New York City; and \u201cDiamonds\u201d casts a dazzling spell of cool refinement that wavers between soft and hard.<\/p>\n
\u201cJewels,\u201d as it came to be called, is an occasion as well as a ballet. On Tuesday, it opened City Ballet\u2019s 75th anniversary<\/a> at Lincoln Center, which included a special tribute to the dancers<\/a> who have been part of the company since 1948 when it was formed by Balanchine and the writer and philanthropist Lincoln Kirstein. (The music was performed live, though before the show, members of the New York City Ballet Orchestra held a rally in front of Lincoln Center\u2019s plaza to protest delays in contract negotiations.)<\/p>\n To see so many dancers fill the stage after \u201cDiamonds\u201d \u2014 more than 350, including a few from its 75-year-old beginnings \u2014 as well as inimitable stars like Suzanne Farrell, Allegra Kent, Patricia McBride and Edward Villella \u2014 made for a poignant, physical statement. These were jewels in the flesh.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Yet you also thought of the many dancers who weren\u2019t there. Ghosts were in the air. As the \u201cPomp and Circumstance\u201d march played \u2014 maybe something else would have been better? \u2014 Farrell, amid the cheers and waves, pressed her fingertips together and cast her eyes downward. Her solemnity was striking.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n As for the performance? Certainly, joy was in the air \u2014 though perhaps, in the case of \u201cRubies,\u201d an unfortunate overflow. \u201cJewels\u201d loosely references three schools of ballet: French, American and Russian. During the evening, the sections\u2019 different looks and sensations were apparent, but most clearly felt was the singular choreographic hand stringing them together. \u201cJewels\u201d is a banquet of Balanchine starting with \u201cEmeralds,\u201d the evening\u2019s most subtle, most mysterious and, because of that, most fragile ballet. Saturated in green like a dewy forest and set to Faur\u00e9, it pays homage to French Romanticism.<\/p>\n Leading roles included debuts for Indiana Woodward and Tyler Angle. His elegant, able partnering sets a dancer free, and Woodward \u2014 French, like Violette Verdy, the originator of her part \u2014 was transcendently herself, glowing with her own indelible perfume.<\/p>\n Dancing cleanly and clearly, Woodward used her imagination to great effect in a solo focusing on the arms as they curved and parted the air, swooping to linger by her face or reaching behind to form a kind of innocence meeting ecstasy. In their pas de deux, Angle and Woodward shaped the notes as they came together and separated like easy, rippling waves. Less seamless was Emilie Gerrity who, with too much anguish in her expression, wavered between control and hesitation, in a solo of her own.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In \u201cRubies,\u201d set to Stravinsky and instilled with a jazzy swagger, Mira Nadon, the statuesque female soloist, stretched and splayed her limbs with abandon as she glided through extensions and balances with a blend of sensuality and risk. But something went haywire with Megan Fairchild. Dancing with Anthony Huxley, she was overly jovial as an uncharacteristically hammy quality seeped into her performance. Huxley, for his part, stayed the course, dancing with humor, ebullience and good taste.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The elegant, crystalline \u201cDiamonds,\u201d set to Tchaikovsky and evoking imperial Russian ballet, came as a relief \u2014 though its gleaming blue set is the biggest eyesore of all the \u201cJewels\u201d d\u00e9cor. (It reminds me of an empty high school swimming pool.) But that could hardly diminish the sophistication of its pas de deux, danced by Sara Mearns and Russell Janzen. They instilled the ballet with an impeccable, understated grandeur. And making their connection even more emotional, more vulnerable, was the knowledge that time is ticking: On Sunday, in the season\u2019s final program of \u201cJewels,\u201d Janzen, a standout principal, will give his farewell performance.<\/p>\n After they walked toward each other, meeting at the center of the stage with slow and steady steps, their bodies continued in a pattern of sweeping together and apart. They shaped movement \u2014 difficult balances and changes of direction with tricky partnering \u2014 with patience and ease, even as decorum slipped into sudden and surprising bursts of feeling. When Janzen finally dropped to a knee beside her and kissed her hand, she looked down at him in surprise \u2014 as if the action really was<\/em> a surprise. Nothing felt premeditated, not even their tearful mid-show bow.<\/p>\n \u201cJewels\u201d may be referred to as a story-less ballet, but that has never seemed entirely true. Mearns and Janzen\u2019s performance felt like proof that it\u2019s not. There are unspoken stories in each ballet \u2014 streams of them \u2014 in which the dancers are not characters but heightened versions of themselves, using a language embroidered with steps, musicality and Balanchine\u2019s way of highlighting precisely etched, unaffected dancing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n How does a dancer move through space and time, and how does that create conditions for energy to flow? Ballet, as Kirstein once wrote, depends on dance and \u201cthe dancer, dancing whatever is calculated to raise public and performer to some transitory terrestrial paradise.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Watching the ebb and flow of Balanchine\u2019s choreography \u2014 the patterns and pathways of his \u201cJewels\u201d \u2014 and inside of that, a dancer\u2019s instantaneous and intentional response to the music, is like a transference of energy. It\u2019s a physical sensation not only to watch but to feel how the internal reverie of \u201cEmeralds\u201d moves into the pleasure and play of \u201cRubies\u201d and lands in the unflappable world of \u201cDiamonds.\u201d Can a dance change the world for the better? With Balanchine, anything\u2019s possible.<\/p>\n New York City Ballet<\/strong><\/p>\n Performances continue through Oct. 15 at David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, nycballet.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n