The Zenobia Pas de Deux is a short ballet made by George Balanchine for Richard Rodgers's 1936 Broadway musical On Your Toes, where it appeared inside the show under the title La Princesse Zenobia Ballet. It functions as a comic set piece that spoofs the Orientalist ballet vogue of the Ballets Russes era, taking direct aim at works such as Fokine's Schéhérazade. Its presence in this catalogue rests on being one of Balanchine's earliest choreographic contributions to American commercial theatre, made only three years after he arrived in the United States.
What it contains
- Classical Ballet · the whole ballet (originally titled La Princesse Zenobia Ballet within On Your Toes) — Built on classical ballet technique but staged as knowing pastiche of Orientalist ballet convention — exaggerated exotic posing, stylized gesture, and theatrical excess in the manner of Fokine's Schéhérazade, played for comic effect rather than straight spectacle. Source: "Balanchine parodies such Oriental-style ballets as Schéhérazade."
What is danced
The article gives only one direct statement about what is danced: that Balanchine 'parodies such Oriental-style ballets as Schéhérazade.' That places the piece squarely in the vocabulary of the exoticized, pseudo-Eastern classical ballet idiom that Diaghilev's company had popularized decades earlier — stylized harem and court poses, ornamental arm and head positions, and the theatrical excess associated with that genre — but rendered as send-up rather than homage. Because the source is a brief catalogue entry rather than a stepped-out description, no specific choreographic phrases, lifts, or floor patterns are recorded, and none should be assumed beyond the parodic frame the article names.
What can be said with confidence is that the piece is built on classical ballet technique (it was danced by trained ballet dancers in both its original and NYCB incarnations) deployed for comic and satirical effect rather than straight romantic or exotic display. A choreographer or dancer approaching this work should expect the humor to live in the gap between correct, legible classical vocabulary and the knowingly overplayed 'Oriental' styling layered on top of it.
Context
1936 sits at the point where Balanchine, newly arrived from the Ballets Russes diaspora, was beginning to place ballet technique inside American commercial theatre rather than opera houses or touring ballet companies. On Your Toes is one of the earliest Broadway shows to use a ballet-trained choreographer for integrated dance sequences, and Zenobia's target — the Orientalist ballet spectacle typified by Schéhérazade — was itself a recently fading fashion from the very Ballets Russes world Balanchine had just left, making the parody a pointed, insider joke rather than a generic exotic pastiche.
Staging history
The original 1936 production was danced by Tamara Geva, Demetrios Vilan, William Baker and George Church. New York City Ballet gave the pas de deux its own concert premiere on Tuesday, November 23, 1993, at the New York State Theater, Lincoln Center — a decade after Balanchine's death — with Darci Kistler and Igor Zelensky, extracting the number from its original musical-comedy setting into standalone repertory.
How to watch it
Watch for the deliberate overplaying of exoticized classical ballet gesture — the kind of stylized 'Eastern' posing associated with Schéhérazade — pushed slightly too far, since the joke depends on a dancer's audience recognizing the convention being mocked. The piece assumes familiarity with the Ballets Russes Orientalist repertory it is quoting; without that context the parody reads simply as exotic dance rather than commentary.