Sometimes a butterfly drops down from the sky, and it feels like its sole purpose fluttering through the world is to join you for a walk. It bobs up and down in a frenzy, yet it is free. You can’t touch it, you can’t catch it. And then it’s gone.
In “Ballade,” a rarely seen ballet by George Balanchine, Mira Nadon is that butterfly.
A highlight of New York City Ballet’s opening night on Tuesday, “Ballade” (1980) hasn’t been performed by the company since 2003, a strange fate for a beautiful ballet. Its original female lead, Merrill Ashley — for whom it was tailor-made — returned to City Ballet to coach it.
When Nadon began to glide across the stage in “Ballade,” the tips of her pointe shoes made tiny, trickling steps as her arms rose and fell, floating gossamer wings. Her momentum seemed to draw her into the air as she both resisted gravity and dug into it, swirling in a way that was dreamlike but not dreamy. Each step, each breezy change of direction was inscribed with intention and authority.
Set to Gabriel Fauré’s Ballade in F-Sharp Major, played by the pianist Hanna Hyunjung Kim, the ballet is rooted in a frequent Balanchine theme: the unattainable woman. Nadon, like a vision, though not exactly ethereal, dances with Peter Walker yet seems to see him only in flashes. In one daring, repeated phrase, she faces the back of the stage supported by Walker while extending a leg to the side in développé à la seconde before falling backward and rotating into an arabesque. It’s like a memory, strong and deeply etched before it collapses and fades away.
Their dynamic is peculiar, because you’re never exactly sure what their relationship is. The way Nadon moves through space seems instigated first by emotion and then by motion even as her body has a torrential way of whirling across the stage. Her essence is more spirit than woman. She doesn’t just love and leave her partner, perhaps because she was never anyone’s to begin with. In “Ballade,” this Balanchine ballerina is independent, free like a butterfly to go her own way, and so she does, exiting the stage the same way she entered.
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The post At City Ballet, Dusting Off a Balanchine Jewel appeared first on New York Times.
