George Balanchine’s Serenade has the most beautiful opening in ballet. Seventeen women standing like statues, bathed in cool blue light, raise one hand in the air, palms outwards, as the music of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings surges around them. It has the most elegiac closing moment too, as a single standing ballerina is lifted aloft by four men, curved arms flung behind her, arching into the unknown.
The rest of the piece, made in 1934 for students of the Russian-born choreographer’s nascent school in the US, is just about perfect. It incorporates mundane daily events – a student running in late, a stumble, a woman unpinning her hair – and turns them into mysterious art. In its ceaseless, inventive movement it makes space visible, as the dancers seem to mould the air they move through.
