Stravinsky and Balanchine: A musico-choreographic analysis of Agon.

Abstract

A masterwork of the twentieth century, Agon is the last ballet that Igor Stravinsky and George Balanchine created together for the stage. Yet for all its importance, Agon the collaborative work has been neglected. Studies of its music and the remarks of dance critics have produced insights that are provocative, but which fall short of a clear explanation of how the music and dance relate to one another. To confirm these observations, many of which are based primarily on instinct, the present study integrates musical and choreographic analysis, based on videotape and choreographic scores in Labanotation. Agon is a dense work. The musical and choreographic composition exhibits an unusual concentration of materials with great sensitivity to textural nuance. Each movement of this suite of dances is individual in orchestration, personnel, style, and technique. At the same time, the diversity of music and dance throughout the ballet is held together by certain threads of continuity: historical reference spanning several centuries, the collaborators' own creative histories, and the melding of neo-classical and modern (20th-century) techniques. Approaching Agon first as music, then as dance, and finally as a collaborative artwork, this analysis shows that despite the diversity of its elements of style, the ballet exhibits an overriding stylistic unity. The dance is both reflective of and complementary to the music (a not unexpected result from a choreographer who was a trained musician), yet it also has its own compositional processes and structural integrity. In music and choreography, interlocking references between sections and movements--what Balanchine called symmetrical asymmetries--contribute to a coherent integrated architecture. A rondo-like recurrence of gesture is melded with a broad historical curve; the sine-wave which traces style dips into the Renaissance before arching into the twentieth century with nodes at the neo-classical. Agon is also unified by an unstated, rarefied element of narrative; it is a stylized ballet rehearsal, illuminated with flashes of wit and play.