An excerpt from the program note for the February programs of the San Francisco Ballet, by Sheryl Flatow, a respected dance writer. I mention that because some of this gets almost too weird. I find it fascinating and accept Sheryl's report as too good not to be true. "`I think today we will make some little choreography,' George Balanchine told a group of young dancers one morning in 1934. With those modest words, he began work on `Serenade,' one of the seminal ballets of his career. ... "`Serenade,' danced to Tchaikovsky's Serenade in C for Strings, was conceived as a vehicle that would enable the (School of American Ballet) students to participate in the creative process and learn what it is like to perform onstage. It is an ensemble work: Only with the passage of time did Balanchine individualize some of the roles. "There were 17 girls in the class on the day Balanchine began choreographing the ballet, so that was the numbr he used in the opening. (He once said that his placement of those 17 girls `almost looks like orange groves in California. If I'd had only 16 -- and even amount -- it would have been two lines. Now people ask me, "Why did you place them that way?" Because I had 17.') Nine girls sowed up the next day, and he fashioned another section for them. He contined to choreograph for whatever number of dancers he had. ... "Ruthanna Boris, who is probably best known as choreographer of `Cakewalk,' was one of the first students in the School of American Ballet and a member of the original cast of `Serenade.' Sever years ago she talked about the ballet, and vividly recalled how Balanchine went about choreographing the ballet's first movement, turning an as yet little-known symbol of horror into a thing of beauty. "`We hadn't heard a note of music; we had no idea what was going on,' she said. `Balanchine had been in Germany before he came to the United States, and he used to say to us, "In Germany there is this awful man. My size. But he wears a mustache, and I do not have a mustache. And I am not an awful man." He kept talking about this awful man, but he never mentioned his name. He said, "When big crowds of people see that man, they do this" -- and he did the Nazi salute.' "Eventually, Balanchine asked the dancers to stand with their feet parallel. Ballet has five basic positions; parallel is not one of them. `He said, "This position doesn't have a number, and I use it all the time,"' Boris related. `"So we will give it the number of six!" Then he went back to the awful man and did the Nazi salute. And he said again, "I am not awful. So for me maybe you go like this."' "`This,' in effect, was a modification and softening of that grotesque salute, which became the exquisite opening image of `Serenade.' The 17 women stand in `sixth' position; their right arms are raised high in front of them, and they stare up a the back of their hands. `I learned later that Balanchine was politically astute and humanely aware,' Boris said. `He must have been horrified by Hitler. I saw the look on his face when he did that awful salute. It was the look of a child discovering something. A light went on. He worked out of his unconscious and made something wonderful.'" Janos Gereben/SF [log in to unmask]