Everything Old Is New Again

A very old Balanchine feels fresh and a new ballet feels timeless in American Contemporary Ballet’s double bill, as reviewed by Dorie Chevlen.

By Dorie ChevlenAugust 1, 2025

THE EUTERPIDES & SERENADE, Television City, Los Angeles, June 27, 2025.

To reach the venue of American Contemporary Ballet’s The Euterpides & Serenade, you must first confront the complex realities of how time shapes art. This being Los Angeless, most of these confrontations are centered on the film industry; for me, driving west from Hollywood, it means first passing El Coyote, where Sharon Tate likely ate her last taco, and then the New Beverly Cinema, where on this Friday night Once upon a Time … in Hollywood would rewrite the story of her murder. Getting nearer, I passed the studio of The Price Is Right, where a slightly younger, slightly more optimistic me genuinely thought she’d win a car from Drew Carey, who had himself replaced the retiring Bob Barker, who had himself (by now) apparently died.

Walking into the soundstage that serves as ACB’s home, I glanced up to see the long shadow of a billboard for the Smurfs movie, which was the first feature-length installment of the newly Paramount-rebooted franchise (but actually fourth feature-length Smurfs film since 2011), which was actually an animated series from my mother’s childhood that she once felt excited about introducing to childhood me.

Nothing was new and neither was I.

It was not a romantic headspace to be in, so I dropped $15 for a plastic cup of sauvignon blanc to soften what I feared was a mind about to curdle into cynicism. It didn’t help that on my seat sat a program as thick and heavy as a Cheesecake Factory menu. My friend Emily, with whom I attended the show, uttered a quiet “Ohh” as she lifted it close to her face in an attempt to read the fine print. “I think let’s just let ourselves be surprised!” I said, because Emily had never seen a ballet before, and I didn’t want to spoil the experience. 

As luck would have it, there was no risk of my doing this. The first ballet of the evening, Euterpides, was an all-new creation by ACB artistic director Lincoln Jones, with a score composed by Alma Deutscher, who I later learned was a homeschooled child prodigy in the vein of Mozart or Greta Thunberg. (At 20 years old, she probably doesn’t qualify as a child prodigy anymore, but the program’s deliberate and repeated inclusion of her age at each musical achievement suggests to me that her youth remains the weight-bearing arch of her personal brand.)

The second piece was George Balanchine’s Serenade, which was the choreographer’s first American creation after fleeing Russia in the early 1930s, set to a Tchaikovsky score. It’s to the credit of Balanchine’s modernity and Jones’s timelessness that one man seated behind me asked his friend which piece belonged to whom. (And it is to the shame of Los Angeles dance education that he rhymed Balanchine with Valentine in his asking.)

I learned Serenade at a summer dance intensive as a teenager; it’s a genius piece of choreography because of its technical simplicity. There are no demanding balances, no dizzying manèges, no overly complicated turns. But it is beautiful. When it premiered, the ballet was revolutionary for its lack of narrative; most prior ballets had depicted folk stories and fairy tales. Balanchine’s achievement was in making something that felt emotional while lacking plot. And it still feels this way—ACB’s dancers join hands with urgency, shift their feet from parallel to turned-out with military precision, and when “The Waltz Girl” unpins her bun and falls to the ground, her hair pools around her like blood leaving a gunshot wound, violent and sensual without any context.

Jones’s imagined myth ballet played to the same strengths; there were airy grand jeté leaps, luscious port de bras, and nothing more dizzying than a double pirouette. For a company like ACB—technically gifted but with fewer resources than a larger, older company like the neighboring Los Angeles Ballet—it’s especially clever choreography, playing to the dancers’ strengths, concealing any weaknesses. Frankly, the long program spiel about Jones’s inspiration (a convoluted plot following a Greek myth that he invented based on the idea that Euterpe, the goddess of music, had a bunch of daughters) does the ballet a disservice. Jones is a devoted Balanchine scholar; the simple, nearly algebraic beauty of his choreography confirms that, and requires no written tale to prove to me that there is a story taking place.

Between both dance sets, the musicians moved from the back of the soundstage to the front, playing Deutscher’s Cinderella overture, apparently written when she was 10 years old. It’s a triumphant piece of music, and yet eerily familiar. My punishment for not having immediately read the program is that my mind struggled to place it: Was it another Tchaikovsky piece? Chopin? Where had I heard it before? Nowhere, I realized when I finally read to completion.

That duality—the beauty of dance designed to be beautiful, the uncanny familiarity of that beauty—tied the dance and music together all evening. I had seen it all before, or I hadn’t, but I still knew what to expect. Perhaps it was being in Los Angeles, or the stark contrast of the dancers’ long, pale tutus against the deep black Marley, but watching ACB felt similar to rewatching an old black-and-white movie you love. In the case of Serenade, not only had I seen it before, but I’d learned it before too, its choreography both a visual memory and an embodied one. My wrists recalled the sensation of being held in flexion like that opening posture; my toes remembered the painful strike of those fast pique turns en ronde. But like watching a movie, even knowing the end, I gasped when the Waltz Girl, held aloft by four men, began arching her back, the dancers trailing her rising to their pointes and mimicking her posture, their heads moving lower, lower, lower—until the stage went black.

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Featured image by American Contemporary Ballet. Image has been cropped.