SWAN LAKE Choreography: George Balanchine, New York City Ballet, 1951 Music: Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky (excerpts from Swan Lake, Op. 20) Scenery and costumes: Cecil Beaton
Well, a prince comes out with a feather in his hat, and that’s the plot. George Balanchine
basis is the score rather than old footwork resistance—his version quickens bird hearts; he attends to the flock who flap and flap and flap and flap and do not mime and do not bow to the cool countenance of the Queen and do not harden into feathered ornaments
Tschaikovsky speaks from beyond the grave; he is keen on revision: omit this, adjust that, valse bluette, a new ending, 400 yards of black tarlatan, backswept to find a bird in a little finger or head movement, his creature-like demand. Odette, always unobtainable
MONUMENTUM PRO GESUALDO
Choreography: George Balanchine, New York City Ballet, 1960 Music: Igor Stravinsky (three madrigals by Gesualdo, recomposed for instruments) Scenery: David Hays
Only a whiff of menace in the muted horns Don Carlo’s scandalous chromatics long buried but not forgotten—cup your ear on dissonance unresolved
her weighted figure in the air
She walks in circles, a measured pace, slides down his back to rest in the crook of his leg, gentle, like a lamb moved to stillness--
the mood, arrested in a far off place
All women are beckoned to lean on danger clear- cut, to brush fingertips in communion; an eye, a wave—over so quickly
Jessica L. Wilkinson is the founding editor of Rabbit: a journal for nonfiction poetry. Her first book, marionette: a biography of miss marion davies was published by Vagabond in 2012 and shortlisted for the 2014 Kenneth Slessor Prize. Her second poetic biography, Suite for Percy Grainger, was published by Vagabond in 2014. In 2014 she received a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship to research her third poetic biography, Music Made Visible: a biography of George Balanchine, which is forthcoming in 2019. In 2016, she co-edited Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry (Hunter Publishers). She is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at RMIT University, Melbourne.