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
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