Tell Us a Story, Mr. B.

George Balanchine, the choreographer who made ballet modern by freeing it from plot and elaborate costuming and scenery—that is, by stripping it to essentials and zeroing the audience’s attention on movement and music—created some of the twentieth century’s greatest dances. Nevertheless, he continued making story ballets when commissions, circumstances, or inspiration demanded, and many of his narrative works emerged as masterpieces as well. His 1954 Nutcracker forever changed Christmas in America and, for better or worse, inspired a now-multimillion dollar Yule-tide industry, while his 1962 A Midsummer Night’s Dream offered a sublime dance parallel to Shakespeare’s comedy that captured to a remarkable degree its high hilarity and erotic wistfulness. Though he made both these full-length works for the New York City Ballet, the company he cofounded in 1948, his history with story ballet began two decades earlier, and his two earliest surviving works tell stories. Apollo, his 1928 collaboration with Igor Stravinsky, dramatized the emotional power of neoclassical restraint by refining its mythic tale of the young god’s education into a crystalline series of dances, while Prodigal Son, from 1929, elaborated the biblical parable through a compelling imagining of the Son’s descent into debauchery and his subsequent suffering and repentance. In both cases Balanchine had the scenarios and the music imposed upon him. Serge Diaghilev, the Ballets Russes’s impresario who believed in dance as a supremely collaborative art, gave him both assignments, and as just one cog in Diaghilev’s ballet machine, Balanchine needed to accommodate the librettist (Boris Kochno in both cases), the scenic designer, and, most of all, the composer. The modernist purifying of ballet would need to wait until the choreographer had a company on which he could impose his own vision.

During its fall 2013 season, NYCB paid tribute to Balanchine’s narrative efficiency and authority with an evening called “Balanchine Short Stories,” which I watched at their Lincoln Center home over Columbus Day weekend. All three works predated NYCB’s 1948 founding, and each originated as work for hire, piecework of high quality. Prodigal Son centered the program, preceded by La Sonnambula, from 1946, created as Night Shadow for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, and followed by Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, the 1936 ballet parody number that originally climaxed the Rodgers and Hart musical On Your Toes. Balanchine thought highly enough of all three to import them into NYCB’s repertory between 1950 and 1968, and all three have thrived through generations of remarkable performers. The works also show Balanchine working in three distinct narrative modes: earnest dance-drama in Prodigal, show-biz dazzle in Slaughter, and romantic allegory in Sonnambula.

Allegory often feels like Balanchine’s natural element, especially in his narratives, but at times in his plotless ballets as well. Many of his dances begin with abstract but sensuous human geometry (Serenade) or social gatherings (Liebeslieder Walzer), but before we realize it, we have begun feeling in another world, the public realm having admitted glimpses, both transporting and terrifying, into the private psyche. As such works pursue their elusive sublimity, we experience a kind of vicarious ecstasy, as though our intellect and our emotions hovered somewhere above the dancers, their physical gestures initiating us in ritual mysteries. La Sonnambula, which Balanchine brought into NYCB’s repertory in 1960, presents a simple Romantic story: a Poet attends a ball thrown by a Baron in the courtyard of his castle, where he flirts with his host’s mistress, the Coquette. Left alone, he falls in love with a mysterious sleepwalking woman who descends from a tower, carrying a candle. The Coquette discovers them and, her jealousy aroused, whispers to the Baron, who then murders the Poet. The Sleepwalker appears again and, before the assembled guests, claims the Poet’s body. Vittorio Rieti’s music weaves themes from Bellini’s operas (one of which, La Sonnambula, gives the ballet its central image but not its plot) into a Romantic pastiche, spiked with some modern dissonances.

The pas de deux between the Sleepwalker and the Poet marks the ballet...