Dancing Laser Beams

One of my favorite moments in George Balanchine’s Rubies is when the soloist, known as the “Tall Girl,” emerges from the corps de ballet and finds herself at center stage. She carefully places each foot in a wide second position—an exaggerated stance, feet apart and turned out—and beckons the four men of the corps toward her. They arrive one by one, separated by the staccato notes of Igor Stravinsky’s Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra. Together they manipulate her body, a man at each limb: one stretches her extended leg in a developpé as far as her flexibility will take it, then turns her en pointe so she’s standing in an arabesque, while another grabs her foot from behind as the others work to balance her. They weave through her limbs before setting her back on two feet. 

She’s meant to be tall (“Amazonian,” as the critic Nancy Goldner once wrote) and without a partner. She doesn’t need those men for long. After the sequence she makes her way to stage left and performs three arabesque penchés—extending one leg behind and leaning forward to form a 180-degree angle, establishing her “line” from supporting heel to extended toe. The eight women of the corps mirror her like understudies at a rehearsal, while the men face her reverently. She personifies the corps; they are led by her and learn from her. 

The arabesque penché is central to Rubies, executed over and over by the corps and the principals. Balanchine taught his dancers to open the hip of their outstretched legs, instead of squaring both hips forward, in order to lengthen the extension. The gesture became bolder and more aerodynamic in his choreography; his method changed how dancers could move. As Joan Acocella once wrote, “The better the dancer’s first arabesque penché—the more exact, the more spirited, the more singing its line—the more he or she will embody the promise of the ancient Greeks, lasting at least up to Keats, that beauty, truth, and virtue are inseparable, that we live in a good world.”

In Rubies the Apollonian ideal of beauty, truth, and virtue is an American chorus girl. The dance premiered in New York in 1967 as the second act of Balanchine’s Jewels, a three-act ballet in which gems represented countries he loved. Emeralds, choreographed to Gabriel Fauré’s Pelléas et Mélisande and Shylock, symbolized the light elegance of France, where, after defecting from the Soviet Union in 1924, Balanchine had collaborated with Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Rubies stood for the jazzy newness of America, where in 1948 he cofounded New York City Ballet with Lincoln Kirstein; it also paid tribute to his friend Stravinsky, with whom he worked closely on his neoclassical ballets, most famously Apollo (1928) and Agon (1957). Diamonds, set to Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 3 in D Major, was an homage to the grand classicism of Russia, where Balanchine had trained in his youth during the revolution. 

Jewels was also molded to the personalities of Balanchine’s dancers. Emeralds was for the subtly elegant Mimi Paul and Violette Verdy, who once compared herself to a French poodle in a company of “greyhounds and borzois.” Diamonds was for the aristocratic grace of Suzanne Farrell, with whom Balanchine was in love at the time. Rubies was for Patricia McBride and Edward Villella—“kids from New Jersey and Queens,” Jennifer Homans wrote in her recent biography of Balanchine, Mr. B.—who displayed a bombastic, jaunty energy onstage. Balanchine cast Patricia Neary, precise, with a big personality, as the Tall Girl. 

Rubies is split between the Tall Girl’s corps and the couple. They take turns making room for each other until the end, when the corps, Tall Girl, and principals dance in synchrony as the music swells. The choreography is a fever of long limbs, jutting hips, and angled balances that still feels refreshing—innovation and abstraction remain its essence. Typically, as in its original staging at Lincoln Center, the women dance in short skirts dripping with red crystal beads that clink as they move, reminiscent of the glitzy, leg-baring costumes of Broadway musicals, some of which Balanchine choreographed in the 1930s during his stint in showbiz. The principals trot as if on horseback, mime jumping rope, and high-five as a warm-up before throwing themselves into leaps and daring off-center arabesques, like in Agon. As Goldner pointed out, the basic stance in Rubies is the chorus girl’s turned-in leg; the jutted hips also evoke Bob Fosse. At one point the Tall Girl gets swung around by each man in the corps in a do-si-do, recalling Balanchine’s Western Symphony (1954). Stravinsky wrote the capriccio not long after he defected, between 1928 and 1929, in part to support himself financially. It veers in and out of an elaborate piano melody that brings to mind cabaret. 

Like Balanchine’s other work, Rubies has been restaged by different companies around the world. Each restaging is an opportunity for a rereading, but the ballet still seems to represent what it did when it premiered: City Ballet’s centrality to American dance, and American dance’s centrality to the present and the future of the art form. 

Ballet was brought from Italy to France during the Renaissance, when Henri II married Catherine de Medici, and from there spread across Europe. In the early eighteenth century Peter the Great, as part of his project of Europeanizing imperial Russia, sought to create a ballet theater; a century later Marius Petipa, a Frenchman, arrived in St. Petersburg, where he went on to choreograph The Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty, and La Bayadère, among other works that came to define the canon and gave classical ballet a Russian identity. This is why Jewels proved to be such a good metaphor for ballet’s trajectory, even if Balanchine was inspired to choreograph it after visiting the showroom of the jewelers Van Cleef and Arpels. Rubies, after all, were imported to Europe from East Asia during the Middle Ages. In 1960 the California-based engineer Theodore H. Maiman invented the laser, in which a synthetic ruby rod, placed between two mirrors, is pumped full of white light to create a slim directional beam. (In 1969 a ruby laser was used to measure the distance between Earth and the moon.) At Lincoln Center, the women dancing Rubies do so not beneath a crystal chandelier, as in Diamonds, but between red cylindrical lighting columns. When their legs click out, they look like laser beams.

Jewels seems to encompass ballet’s history, starting with France and ending with Russia. Sandwiched between, however, was a new terrain: America. In a 1979 TV broadcast called “Baryshnikov at the White House,” Mikhail Baryshnikov performed four ballets, including Rubies, with Heather Watts as his partner. This was toward the end of the cold war; Baryshnikov, the United States’s most celebrated dancer, had defected from the Soviet Union five years earlier. He and Watts slink into each other in a ballet created by another defector, their costumes’ red crystals catching the light of the chandelier over the White House stage. The image suggested that the future of ballet was American. 

Nearly four decades later, in 2017, New York City Ballet performed Jewels at the Lincoln Center Festival with a twist: acts were assigned for the nationality of the companies. Emeralds was performed by the Paris Opera Ballet, and as an extra challenge, on successive nights Rubies and Diamonds toggled casts between the Bolshoi and City Ballet. Decades after the Iron Curtain had fallen, the new diplomatic globalism almost seemed like it could last forever, and the production resembled a friendly, Olympic-style competition. In their reviews, both Acocella and Robert Gottlieb begrudgingly accepted that the nationalist method worked well visually: Paris Opera returned some delicacy to Emeralds, City Ballet pulled out all the stops for Rubies, and the Bolshoi brought technical virtuosity and beauty to Diamonds. But with Rubies, according to Gottlieb, the Bolshoi gave “the worst performance I’ve seen in half a century,” proving, perhaps, that it was the ballet most reliant on Balanchine-style training.

Perhaps no company will ever dance Rubies as well as the 1967 City Ballet, even in the company’s modern iteration, which inevitably performs the ballet in the shadow of Villella and McBride. Jewels was restaged in its entirety during the fall 2023 season, then Rubies was excerpted in the following spring. I saw the revival in May at the Spring Gala, part of the company’s yearlong seventy-fifth anniversary celebration. Meghan Fairchild and Anthony Huxley were the principals. Though light and playful, they were outshone by Mira Nadon, magisterial and seductive as the Tall Girl. We never quite saw the end of her extension, giving the impression of limitless potential, which was fitting since the gala was about the company’s future. 

McBride has said that while rehearsing for the premiere of Rubies she brought her arms inward during a series of pique turns to mirror the corps de ballet. Balanchine liked the move, and it became the standard. Goldner compared the principal’s arms in Rubies to chicken wings, as opposed to the swan arms of Petipa’s Swan Lake. I think the dancer depicts a woman who has figured out that she can move quicker with her legs than with her wings. But that night Fairchild made it look more like a shrug, as if to say, Yes, I’m here again. Last fall at the launch of City Ballet’s anniversary season, I had seen Rubies performed by Emma Von Enck, who was making her premiere in the role, and she was breathtaking, spry and charismatic, as the choreography deserves. I wondered why a program celebrating the company’s future didn’t feature one of its most exciting principals.

At the Spring Gala, following Rubies was Dig the Say, a short ballet by Justin Peck (likely all he had time for while his celebrated Broadway show, Illinoise, was in full swing), in which Tiler Peck (no relation) and Roman Mejia toss a red ball back and forth, by turns playful and aggressive. The piece was fleshy and, in stark contrast to Rubies, rather twee, which is Peck’s modus operandi these days. The night concluded with Amy Hall Garner’s first work for City Ballet, Underneath, There Is Light, a longer dance that puts familiar motifs—birds, daylight, mourning—to beautiful but over-literal use. It seemed the women were miming pecking beaks and preening feathers with their hands as the stage lights simulated daybreak and the sounds of chirping birds and the slow, mournful strings of Ottorino Respighi’s The Pines of Rome faded out.

In a speech that night, Wendy Whelan, New York City Ballet’s associate artistic director, said that the program represented the company’s view of classical ballet in the twenty-first century. It was an assertion about ballet’s claim to progress, implying that City Ballet—and therefore American ballet—still has a stake in the future of the art form, however grounded that form remains in the past. Rubies is a ballet rooted in a time more distant to us today than Petipa’s Imperial ballets were to Balanchine. And yet it never feels rote or old-fashioned. In one of the dance’s famous poses, Huxley holds both of Fairchild’s hands as she balances with her leg extended outwards in second position, leaning so far she’d fall if they unclasped. I was close enough to see the faintest quiver of their arms as they worked to hold on.