'La Valse': a fever dream that still enchants

A mysterious trio of women stand like sentries, each with a gloved hand in front of her eyes, and an arm raised as if in warning. A dancer, in a long tutu seemingly dipped in a night sky, flings her skirt into the air; its shadowy folds float back down again, as if creating their own dance. A young woman in white, happy and lithe, is transformed as she dons a dark gown for a final waltz with a black-clad figure of death. And at the end, a furious cyclone of dancers whirls at center stage as the music seems to hurl itself off a cliff. Like the doomed ballerina in the film, "The Red Shoes," it's as if they can never stop dancing.

This is George Balanchine's strange, beautiful danse macabre, "La Valse," to be performed by Pacific Northwest Ballet in repertory beginning Thursday. And it's bewitched me from the first time I saw it, many years ago. The combination of Balanchine's movement, Maurice Ravel's fever dream of a score and the somber beauty of Karinska's costumes creates a mood like no other ballet; it seems to lure us in, like the girl in white, dazzled and wide-eyed. Its elegantly dressed people rush toward and past each other without touching, caught up in movement that cannot end. "La Valse" is the dance of the beautiful and damned.

Balanchine created "La Valse" in 1951, in his prolific early years of New York City Ballet. (A precursor can be seen in his now little-known ballet "Cotillon," choreographed for the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo in 1932 and recently restored for the Joffrey Ballet. The PBS documentary "Balanchine" includes a tantalizing few seconds of archival footage of "Cotillon," showing dancers in formal gowns whirling in a frenzied circle, much like the ending of "La Valse.") Finding Ravel's symphonic work "La Valse" too short, he combined it with the composer's "Valses Nobles et Sentimentales." Of the music, reckless and alluring, Ravel once wrote, "We are dancing on the edge of a volcano."

The ballet was created to showcase Tanaquil Le Clercq, a spindly-limbed and enchanting young ballerina, just 22, who would marry Balanchine the following year. Her story adds another layer of darkness to "La Valse's" history: Five years later, at the peak of a glittering career, she was stricken with polio. There was nothing beautiful about this waltz with death: She survived — barely — but never danced again.

Barbara Karinska, the fabled costumer and frequent Balanchine collaborator generally known just by her last name, added immeasurably to the ballet's mood. Its signature tutus feature multiple layers of tulle in coral, yellow and blue-gray, topped by a sheer layer of black. The different colors shimmer as the dancers move, bursting out from under the darkness. The women wear elbow-length white gloves, accentuating the ballet's angular, snakeish hand and arm movements. And the men are all in black, with the merest hint of a white shirt. Death, appropriately, is the only one in velvet.

Balanchine died in 1983, leaving behind "La Valse" as just one of numerous examples of his genius; his way of marrying movement with music in a way that seemed so right, you couldn't imagine one without the other. I can't hear Ravel's music any more without seeing those wafting tutus, those hands poised as if to push back some stronger force, the sped-up recklessness of the waltzing couples — and after seeing the ballet several times, both here and at New York City Ballet, I can't wait to see it again.

Last week, I watched a rehearsal of "La Valse" in a PNB rehearsal studio, performed by a cast in sweatpants and torn T-shirts and punctuated by quiet buzzes of conversation. A dancer wandered past me in her Karinska tutu, incongruously topped by a baggy cardigan. The music came not from an orchestra, but from a pianist in the corner, and was often stopped to correct traffic problems. And yet the dance that haunts me was still magical. Ballet, at its best, sweeps us into a world completely unlike our own. Whirling somewhere above our dreams, "La Valse" takes us there, dark and yet glorious.

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com