Lupe Serrano, 1930-2023
Peter Tonguette
Why is it that some people enter the world with names that sound ideally suited for the lives they will one day lead? Jimmy Stewart is the perfect name for an aw-shucks American good guy, and Kurt Vonnegut sounds exactly like the name of a writer who would one day dream up the planet Tralfamadore.
By the same token, how could a girl given the name Lupe Serrano (Guadalupe Martinez Desfassiaux Serrano, in full) ever be anything but a dancer? The name not only rolls off the tongue but it practically pirouettes in the mouth.
Given the family background of Serrano, who died on Monday at age 92, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that her family knew early on that she might one day grace the stage in some capacity: Her father, Luis Martinez Serrano, was a musician of some note from Argentina who was residing in Santiago, Chile, with his wife, Luciana, at the time of their daughter’s birth.
Upon the family’s move to Mexico City while she was a child, Lupe Serrano fell under the tutelage of teacher Nelsy Dambre, and she had barely entered her teenage years when she had graduated to appearances with the ballet ensemble at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, according to a biographical note in Playbill.
Although she later toured with Ballet Alicia Alonso, run by the Cuban dancer who was its namesake, and the Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo, Serrano eventually set down roots in New York City. In 1953, she accepted an audition with Lucia Chase, the co-founder of the American Ballet Theatre, which, along with George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet, dominated the New York dance scene.
“I took a class for her to see me,” Serrano said in a 2015 interview. “It was a Russian teacher, and I couldn’t understand quite what she was asking for.” As she recalled, during the class, Serrano ill-advisedly launched into a series of fouettes that resulted in her tumbling to the ground, but Chase, looking on, was impressed with her moxie. “She gave me a contract.”
Soon, dance fans the world over became bewitched by Serrano’s technical assurance and artistic force. In a performance of the ballet Le Corsaire recorded for the Bell Telephone Hour in 1962, Serrano pulls off jumps so joyously high that she seems to be on springs, but when she falls to earth, she quickly regains her ladylike composure — a pas de deux from Giselle, from the same broadcast, reveals reserves of emotion and elegance.
Yet Serrano seemed to prefer roles that showed off her vim and vigor. Speaking in 2015, she recalled dancing in Balanchine’s masterpiece Theme and Variations, which concludes with the ballerina and her partner at the forefront of a group of dancers moving majestically to the impossibly invigorating music of Tchaikovsky. “I was in front of these wonderful dancers, and I remember getting so emotional about it — that I had made it that big,” she said.
While a member of ABT, she remembered participating in tours “behind the Iron Curtain,” an example of the sort of cultural exchange that led a Chilean dancer to train in Mexico and eventually reach the stages of New York. “I can’t think of a better way to keep the peace than through the arts,” she said in 2015, remembering teaching Agnes de Mille’s all-American Rodeo, with its much-noted hoedown scene, to fascinated Russian dancers.
Even after departing ABT in 1971, Serrano remained “in front of” numerous groups of dancers. For the last five decades of her life, the woman who was born to dance helped train others who felt a similar calling at institutions that included the National Academy of Arts and the Pennsylvania Ballet. Serrano had two daughters with her former husband, an ABT musical director named Kenneth Schermerhorn.
In 1981, the Christian Science Monitor caught up with Serrano at the Pennsylvania Ballet, where her eyes were said to be her only aged feature — “probably from the effort of watching everyone in the mirror as she demonstrates the technique most of them have spent their lives studying.”
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.