Serenade 90th Anniversary No. 3

For a ballet that turns 90 this Monday (June 10th), Serenade has endured it fair share of audiences and critics hypothesizing and philosophizing about its meanings. Tanaquil LeClerq shared her (very blunt) opinion on trying to find meaning in Serenade, or any of Balanchine’s ballets:

“People read into something. Everybody takes away a different impression. Fine. In Serenade—she falls down. And somebody thinks it’s death and somebody thinks it’s so-and-so. Fine. But to write and say, ‘This pulls it together’ —that I think is idiotic. It’s certainly not true from the dancer’s point of view, unless you’re a very pretentious dancer and say, ‘I’m doing three ronds de jambe and I’m pulling the whole ballet together.’ It’s nothing like that. It’s very primitive, banal. You go on and you do the best you know how, and you don’t worry about other things, other this, other that, anything. And if Balanchine has a master plan, he doesn’t tell you that he has it.

—Striking a Balance: Dancers Talking about Dancing by Barbara Newman