When La Valse came back to New York City Ballet Friday night, everyone in the cast–from lead couple Janie Taylor and Sebastien Marcovici to Ralph Ippolito as Death’s insidious little assistant–existed on stage as if they knew what they were supposed to be doing. It was an exciting and stylish performance. The white-gloved men were dashing without being too much.
Interesting the way that the relationship of the two leads, tentative, testing in the Eighth Waltz of Part 1, seems by the time of La Valse itself to have flared into something more.
When Death enters, everyone at the ballet sinks to the ground and turns away, leaving Tayor’s Girl in White completely and helplessly in his thrall. It’s sort of the same way that in Giselle, the Wilis turn away when Myrtha’s sceptre is foiled–but then again it’s not. By their heedlessness, Balanchine indicts the ballroom spectators in the Girl in White’s fatal dalliance and by extension, we, too in the audience are indicted. We in our seats are, let’s face it, the complete onlooker. It’s only when she falls limp in his arms that everybody else on stage notices that something terrible has been going on.
As I wrote here in 2012, you feel that Balanchine must have been responding in some way to the societal apocalypses through which he’d lived. And watching humanity today turn its gaze away from the encroachment of climate change and so much else, his message is as relevant as ever. I wonder what, if anything–when all is said and done, he did live largely enclosed in the balletic microcosm–he would have to say today.
What he said in La Valse was a chilling depiction of–and a shake of the head at–human folly.