Serenade

A plotless, atmospheric ballet for an ensemble of women (with two principal men and a mother-like figure) set entirely in blue light and blue costumes. Three featured roles — the Waltz Girl, the Russian Girl, and the Dark Angel — emerge from and dissolve back into the corps across four movements, each carrying a fragment of unspoken narrative: entrances, partings, and small dramas of longing. The ballet builds from a communal ritual opening through increasingly emotional, Romantic-tinged episodes toward the Elegy, where the Waltz Girl is guided, "blinded," and ultimately lifted skyward in a solemn, quasi-funereal final tableau. Balanchine always denied any fixed story, insisting the work grew out of stagecraft lessons for his students, though it is widely read as an elegiac meditation on loss and transcendence.