LAURA HAS THIS TO SAY

“This Serenade is amazing, caught up in coarse shadows on a claustrophobic stage and still it flies into infinity. Fascinating, how intimate is the Waltz Girl’s final fall. Except it’s not a fall.  It’s a death roll, Diana Adams turning in the arms of Jacques d’Amboise, simultaneously rolling and falling in a horrific hydraulic.  Today this sequence is much more stylized, but here, in 1957, these two were caught in a turbulent narrative. Diana’s body on the ground is not a graceful pose–she is marked, stricken!  Jacques, bending over her, is stricken too. This is not the Serenade we were seeing by the 1970s.  We know that in so many instances Balanchine was stylizing away from the “exciting event,” as Freud would say.  So here it is, as it was — exciting!”

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