When I purchased my first subscription to the New York City Ballet (NYCB), the offering that most piqued my curiosity was “Agon.” This was the third ballet that George Balanchine had created in partnership with Igor Stravinsky preparing an original composition to be choreographed. Indeed, it was Stravinsky’s music that first drew my attention to the ballet itself. That score was actually a long time coming. Stravinsky began his work at the end of 1953, but the completed score was not ready for Balanchine until April 27, 1957. The creation of the choreography proceeded at a faster clip, and the ballet was first performed at the City Center in New York on November 27, 1957.
It was only after the death of Arnold Schoenberg on July 13, 1951 that Stravinsky began to take an interest in twelve-tone technique. That interest was probably prompted by Robert Craft, who had been serving as Stravinsky’s assistant since 1948. By 1950 Craft had become involved with the Evenings on the Roof concert series in Los Angeles, preparing performances of Stravinsky’s music. During the 1951–1952 season Craft conducted the first Los Angeles performance of Schoenberg’s Opus 24 serenade; and it is reasonable to assume that Stravinsky knew about this activity, even if he did not attend the performance.
One may thus conjecture that the amount of time that Stravinsky put into “Agon” may have been due to his trying to come to terms with Schoenberg’s techniques. As a result, the score for “Agon” ended up covering a rich variety of technical foundations, including his first efforts to work with a twelve-tone row, while many of the movements were structured around pre-Classical forms, such as the French court dances from the seventeenth century. By the time it was completed, the stylistic diversity of the entire composition was prodigious.
Nevertheless, it is clear that Stravinsky had choreography in mind from the very beginning. The subtitle of “Agon” is “Ballet for twelve dancers;” and that number also figures in the overall structure of four sections, each of which consists of three dances. The first two sections are separated by a prelude, whose thematic material recurs as interludes following the second and third sections.
Much of this “numerical symmetry” is reflected in Balanchine’s choreography. The first section begins with a pas de quatre for four men. They are then partnered by four women for a double pas de quatre. The first section concludes with the remaining four women coming on stage for a triple pas de quatre. The second and third sections both have pas de trois structure with movement titles taken from those seventeenth-century dance forms. The final section begins with a pas de deux followed by two concluding movements, one for four pairs of dancers and the second for the full ensemble structured as four trios.
While all this sounds highly abstract, all of those structures lend themselves to highly expressive interpretation. Sadly, this is probably most evident in a 1960 film of an NYCB performance that was most likely made without permission. (To be more accurate, the film seems to involve an edited synthesis of film from two different cameras.) John Clifford uploaded the digitization of the resulting film to YouTube in September of 2016; and, for all of the technical shortcomings, one can still appreciate the rich interplay of abstraction and expressiveness. Unfortunately, because of the circumstances behind the recording itself, there are no “credits” at either the beginning or the conclusion.
One of the reasons I am calling attention to this video is that, after seeing “Agon” for myself at the New York State Theater, I have never been satisfied with any subsequent viewings. One reason is probably that the choreography itself is devilishly difficult. Without Balanchine’s demanding approach to getting what he wanted from his dancers, there has been a risk that, even if all the steps were duly taken into account, the spirit would not be there. My own encounter with a reconstruction by the Pennsylvania Ballet left me as furious as I was frustrated.
On the other hand, even if one cannot make out the faces in the camera work for the YouTube video, one cannot miss out on the rich expressiveness of those twelve bodies in motion. Whatever inconveniences I had to endure, there were still any number of moments that made me catch my breath or smile in acknowledgement. I have no idea whether I shall again encounter an actual performance that lives up to my excitement at seeing “Agon” for the first time; but, for all of its inadequacies, the video that Clifford uploaded may be the best possible way for the curious to become acquainted with this truly extraordinary ballet.
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