You want to preserve the flavor as much as possible. Emeralds literally unfolds as it begins, with a principal couple and a corps of 10 women onstage, and much of its beauty comes from its expressive port de bras. As it moves through two contrasting pas de deux, a buoyant trio, and lovely tableaux, its mood changes. A joyful beginning yields to an elegiac tone toward the end.
His incidental music for Shylock , a play by Edmond Haraucourt, premiered in ; a year later, he adapted it for the concert stage in the form of a symphonic suite. And rarely did he put his women in Romantic tutus. Of the three ballets, Rubies is the most contemporary, with music that makes it a dissonant, edgy counterpoint to Emeralds and Diamonds.
Stravinsky wrote Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra in , during a period in which he was performing widely as a concert pianist, and revised it 20 years later. Fueled by Stravinsky, Rubies is flashy, sexy, and fun. San Francisco Ballet first performed it in , long before the Company danced the full-length Jewels.
When she stages Rubies as a stand-alone ballet, Sandra Jennings, a former New York City Ballet dancer who sets works for The Balanchine Trust, approaches it with several priorities in mind.
It also helps with the spacing. We work on some of the footwork to get her back upstage so she can take big steps, because if she has no room she has to take little steps and then it looks very different.
Jewels is unique: a full-length, three-act plotless ballet that uses the music of three very different composers. Balanchine was inspired by the artistry of jewelry designer Claude Arpels, and chose music revealing the essence of each jewel.
Each section of the ballet is distinct in both music and mood. Rubies is crisp and witty, epitomizing the collaboration of Stravinsky and Balanchine. Petersburg featured jewel characters. Balanchine himself appropriated the jewel theme twenty years before choreographing Emeralds , Rubies , and Diamonds.
In Le Palais de Cristal , later renamed Symphony in C , he identified a different jewel for each movement—ruby, black diamond, emerald, and pearl—and the costumes reflected their colors. The ballet has nothing to do with jewels, the dancers are just dressed like jewels.
Ideas, analyses, and commentaries abound. What seems clear are three things: one, Balanchine made Jewels to display the breadth and diversity of his New York City Ballet talent in its new and spacious New York State Theater; two, he created leading roles carefully tailored to his star dancers; and three, he paid tribute, consciously or otherwise, to three countries, their music, their schools of dance, and their contributions to his development as a choreographer.
France is the birthplace of classical ballet and also where Balanchine came into his own as a choreographer in the s, working for the Ballets Russes under the direction of Serge Diaghilev.
Balanchine made two ballerina roles in Emeralds , casting Violette Verdy and Mimi Paul, contrasting personalities—the former effusive and open, the latter elusive and private—their dances creating worlds that invite audiences in as intimate observers. The choreography capitalizes on the unique characteristics of these two dancers while utilizing movement vocabulary of the French school, with its emphasis on precise footwork and a sculptural and expressive upper body.
This was a dance Balanchine had performed as a student in Petrograd and to which he returned throughout his career, including it in the repertory of his Young Ballet and staging it at least two more times. Emeralds was a relatively short ballet in its first outing.
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