This past Wednesday was George Balanchine's 121st birthday.

        Many of you who are reading this know that the majority of my ballet training was at Balanchine's school, the School of American Ballet. SAB was not where I had my first introduction to ballet, though. In fact, I had already felt a strong compulsion to dance before I even knew who George Balanchine was, let alone that he had built a magnificent school and company and scores of even more magnificent ballets.

        But SAB is where I discovered why I needed to dance. And it was from my SAB teachers, particularly those who had themselves learned directly from and danced the ballets of Mr. B, that I learned what makes the Balanchine way of dancing-- and the principles on which it rests-- so glorious.

        Although I never danced in the New York City Ballet, most of my career was in companies that orbited, however obliquely at times, around Balanchine's work and aesthetics. And while I did learn and perform works in a variety of forms and by a huge range of choreographers from ultra-classical to ultra-modern, dancing a Balanchine ballet always made my body go, "Ahh... yes." It a relief, in a way, because even a Balanchine ballet that I had never previously learned would, reliably, feel right and familiar even as I made its acquaintance for the first time. It was a homecoming. 

    I'm finding it hard to describe the way it felt, to me, to learn a new Balanchine ballet. Maybe it was like finding new ways to speak in a language I'd grown up using. New vocabulary, phrasing, idioms, accents and parts of speech, new dialects, but all with the ease, smoothness and rightness of tongue-in-groove parquetry. 

        It's been eons since I heard a dancer or observer negatively critique Balanchine's way of dancing or his ballets. When I was in school (yes, while at SAB but more at some of the summer intensives I attended outside New York), some other kids who weren't used to being urged to dance at very quick tempos would complain that it felt crazy and that no one could do the steps well when it was that fast. There were also frowns about the articulated positioning of hands and fingers, the pronounced epaulement, or the expansive arm movements. But, as my SAB teachers told us, the only way to move faster is to push yourself to keep up when it feels like you can't. 

        On Balanchine's birthday last Wednesday, I was thinking about what to give my advanced students in class that night. I decided to turn to the sources who'd taught me best, many years ago, and whose presence and ethos remains imprinted on me just as deeply as their technical training. I texted my SAB teacher, Suzy Pilarre, and Pacific Northwest Ballet teacher, Marjorie Thompson, for suggestions on a "classic Mr. B" step or steps that I could use to challenge and thrill my own students.

        Margie said: "Lots of variations on pas de bourreé, front, side, ecarté, back and croisé. He never tired of making pas de bourreé interesting!" 

        And Suzy said this:

"I can’t think of an actual step, just the principles that infuse everything I’ve ever given in class:
           Cross your legs in tendu, heel forward, toe back, place your feet before piqué, sauté and everything else, épaulement always. Narrow and fast, not wide or slow glissades with weight on the 2nd foot. Beautiful hands like you're holding a peony!
          These are some ingredients with which to bake a Balanchine birthday cake." 🎂