There is Oberon, the King of the Fairies, and his beautiful Queen, Titania. Puck, a sprite, works his magic with the occasional unforced error, as mortals and immortals find themselves in a similar predicament: wanting to love. And wanting to be loved. But for all the sparkle of the mythological adults in George Balanchine’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” it’s the kids — 24, plus Titania’s page — that rule this fantastical realm.
Enter the Bugs.
These young dancers from the School of American Ballet are the heart of New York City Ballet’s production. Technically, they play Fairies and Butterflies, but at City Ballet and its training ground, S.A.B., they are known informally as Bugs. (Perhaps less dignified as far as outdoor creatures go, but cuter.)
These Bugs are small, exuberant bodies that, at times, scurry across the forest stage, gleaming in the moonlit night. They’re a coalition, a small but mighty squad of fleet-footed girls, ages roughly 10 to 12 — “a wholly unsentimental deployment,” wrote Lincoln Kirstein, who founded the school and company with Balanchine.
Balanchine based his ballet more on Felix Mendelssohn’s overture and incidental music for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” to which he added additional pieces, than on the Shakespeare comedy. Mendelssohn’s sweeping music also thrills the Bugs no end.
It puts the gas in their engines, the quiver in their antennas, the flap in their delicate wings.
“You’re not walking down the street anymore,” said Naomi Uetani, 11, with a smile she couldn’t suppress. “I’m in a magical place. I understand ‘Nutcracker’ — yeah, you’re in the candy land, but this is different. The feeling.”
There’s truth to that. “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker” (1954) is a marvel of storytelling and dancing, and kids play a huge part in it. But “Midsummer” (1962), which closes City Ballet’s spring season this week, remains both grand and carefree, irresistible for its sweetness. That comes from the children.
“They bring so much to the whole idea of the forest and all the little creatures,” Dena Abergel, City Ballet’s children’s repertory director, said.
In other words, they bring the magic. With militaristic precision they burst into the action — their movements sharp and swift — while brief, stand-alone moments bubble up, seemingly from nowhere, as when the Bug called the spinner whips around in place while drawing her arms up and down. The seven Bugs in the overture have more difficult steps, including the first two who perform big saut de chats, or catlike jumps. But largely, for the children, the dancing in “Midsummer” is a group experience.
“They’re all part of the finale, they’re all part of the Scherzo,” Abergel said. “Everybody gets to dance a lot in ‘Midsummer.’”
Arm movements — pushing them out like rippling wings — are important for the Bugs; running and sharp footwork, too. “There are a lot of sauté arabesques and pas de chats, and those are things that Balanchine uses from beginning to end in the training,” Abergel said. “They’re practicing all of those crucial classical steps,” as they also work on moving in and out of formations.
When she’s casting, though, Abergel is on the lookout for something other than technique. “Just like every creature in nature, there are different bugs and different energies,” she said. “This is more about energy and that ability to move quickly and with excitement.”
For Abergel, the sweetest moment in the ballet has nothing to do with nailing a tight fifth: It’s when the bugs yawn and fall asleep on one another in a pile.
“You don’t really need any technique for that,” she said. “You just need to be in the moment and understand what it’s about. I love that they experience that onstage.”
The children, wearing dresses or short pants and whimsical headwear designed by the innovative costumer Karinska — there are a dozen designs with individual details on each, which is rare for an ensemble — frame the ballet. After the classical wedding scene in the second act, they return to a darkened forest stage for the finale. Isla Cooley, 12, loves this moment, when the adult dancers leave and “then, us Bugs are running onstage and flapping our wings,” she said. “I think it was a supervisor who told me that she thought it was like us kind of crashing the party. Because it’s like, Oh, wait! We’re here.”
Last year Isla was the spinner. This year, she is a pop-up Bug. “When Oberon motions to us, we pop up, we spin, and then we jump around,” she said.
Naomi was the first Bug in the overture last year. For her big jumping moment, she said: “You have butterflies in your stomach, but you also want to do it super bad. So I was scared, excited and like nervous at the same time. But yeah, I still couldn’t wait to do it.”
What was Balanchine looking for when he cast children in his ballets? “Curiosity,” said Carol Aaron Bryan, 74, who trained at the School of American Ballet and danced in “The Nutcracker” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” “A kind of wonderment — just wondering what this adventure will be.”
Bryan was around Balanchine a lot. In 1961 and ’62, she performed Clara (as the young girl in “The Nutcracker” was then known) opposite his Drosselmeier. “He always did something different in the transition scene, and I never knew what he was going to do,” she said. “It was always a surprise.”
His Drosselmeier would sit near her legs on the sofa where she was meant to be sleeping. “The whole couch would shake because he’d be fixing that Nutcracker,” she said. “And I remember this so vividly: He would take the shawl off me and then he would cover me again. Like he was my Drosselmeier, my godfather.”
When rehearsals started for “Midsummer” — the first entirely original full-length ballet Balanchine choreographed in America — she said she felt she had gotten to know him, which “made it easier for me to react when he asked us for things.”
She recalled him working with the students on their runs by taking them to the back of the studio and running along diagonals with them. “He would really show us,” she said. “He was so nimble on his feet. It’s like his heels never touched the ground. He became a Bug, and he became one of the Fairies. He taught us how to be so light and so quiet.”
For Bryan, he was the man with the magic. His ability to enchant lives on in “Midsummer” — in its glittering array of kids. As Naomi said, “Without the bugs, the ballet wouldn’t be alive.”
Additional camera operating: Jared Christiansen.
Gia Kourlas is the dance critic for The Times. She writes reviews, essays and feature articles and works on a range of stories.
The post The Ballet Kids of ‘Midsummer’ Bring Magic to the Bugs appeared first on New York Times.
