While the Bolshoi Ballet was finishing its New York run in Madison Square Garden last week (see above), the New York City Ballet was staging its season's first new work, providing a striking contrast with the Russians' old-fashioned choreography. The premiere: Episodes, a two-part work set to the symphonic pieces of Viennese Atonalist Anton Webern (1883-1945). Choreographers: two modern masters of the dance, George Balanchine and Martha Graham, who had never worked together before.
Even now, their collaboration was strictly limited. Using mostly her own company and appearing herself in the leading role, Choreographer Graham presented the last struggles of Mary Queen of Scots to Webern's expansive Passacaglia, Opus i, Six Pieces, Opus 6. The work detailed Mary's discard of the symbols of statecraft, her hopeless duel with Elizabeth, her course to death on the scaffold. Brilliantly costumed, the work had some stunning theatrical effects: the sudden revelation of Elizabeth in shimmering gold gown as her high-backed throne turns slowly to the audience, the ritualistic tennis game played with gold rackets and balls by Elizabeth and Mary. If the work of Choreographer Graham sometimes seemed pretentious in its symbolism, it was redeemed by the performance of Dancer Graham, who moved sometimes with an imperious tread, sometimes with the pathetic lurchings of a crippled bird as the doors of hope closed, one by one.
Balanchine's plotless episodes were set to later, drier Webern—music that chattered, squeaked, moaned and repeatedly died away in cacophonous little cries. Dance matched music with some wonderfully inventive and often funny sequences of movement. In one pas de deux (set to Five Pieces, Opus 10), Balanchine has a man and a woman approach each other time and again in an elaborate effort to embrace, only to have a final miscalculation leaving them clutching at air. Vastly different in their approaches, both Balanchine and Graham were remarkably successful at illuminating Webern's sparse, mostly atonal scores—perhaps the world's unlikeliest music for dancing.