by Henry Alford
Indeed, American dance has a longish history of being an equalizer or intermingler, as evidenced by what many dance historians see as our first national dance, the cakewalk. Originally devised as a way for slaves to mock their masters—the cakewalk has you puff up your chest and kick your legs high in the air, exaggeratedly strutting in a circle or line like a very fancy sparkle pony—the dance became by the 1880s, a period when more than one hundred black people in the U.S. were lynched each year, a national craze wherein the races intermingled. Plantation owners would watch slaves imitate them, and former slaves would watch plantation owners imitate slaves imitating plantation owners. As they say at Disney: the circle of life.
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More typically, however, it’s the works that were created during politically charged times, as opposed to works that are themselves overtly political, that are the keepers. Alvin Ailey’s beautiful Revelations, created at the height of the civil rights struggle in 1960, charts African-American tenacity from slavery to emancipation. It’s powerful not because it’s a condemnation of human bondage, but because it celebrates steadfastness and faith.
Or consider ballet after World War II. Given that ballet’s roots are in French and Italian court life during the Renaissance, the idiom would seem not to be a great fit for America, a country which, as discussed in the last chapter, is sometimes in love with its own egalitarianism. But in the first half of the twentieth century, ballet started to seep into American culture, mostly via either the vaudeville circuit or Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, which first toured North America in 1915. (Some credit Diaghilev, who nurtured the careers of five of the most important choreographers of the twentieth century—Nijinsky, Massine, Fokine, Nijinska, Balanchine—with making ballet a modern art. All this from a man whose white-streaked hair earned him the nickname Chinchilla.)
In 1942, Agnes de Mille choreographed her “cowboy ballet” Rodeo for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Set on a ranch out West, this ballet, along with its contemporaries Billy the Kid (choreographed by Eugene Loring) and Filling Station (Lew Christensen), helped make the point that ballet was not solely the province of effete, hand-kissing Europeans and their rarefied concerns—a view held by some of the more fanatical modern dancers of the time. Ballet could be about ranch hands. There could be dust.
But the real ballet explosion on these shores occurred after the war, when arts leaders, many of them with ties to a now-ravaged Europe, decided to install on our economically robust shores some of the cultural riches that were now rubble-covered or in abeyance overseas. The companies that would become American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet were launched in 1939 and 1948 respectively.
When the Iron Curtain fell between the United States and Russia after the war, many Americans saw the need, in the face of the Communist Party and its secret police, to flex our democratic and cultural muscles. U.S. government-sponsored organizations that promoted American arts started springing up—Radio Free Europe took to the airwaves in 1949; in 1958, President Eisenhower signed into law an act that would result in the building of the Kennedy Center.
(Speaking of Kennedy—First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy got in on the act, too. Her first guest at the White House was George Balanchine. When the first lady served the great choreographer tea, he asked, “You don’t have anything stronger?” He later told the press, “She looks like a pussycat”—high praise from a man who taught his cat Mourka to do jetés. On another occasion, when the first lady invited Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn to visit with her, she transported them to the nation’s capital via White House jet.)
By the mid-sixties, ballet was a decidedly non-hazy feature on the American cultural landscape—the $7.7 million that the Ford Foundation threw at the art in 1963 didn’t hurt—and would continue to thrive during the dance boom of the 1970s and early 1980s. Nipples firing.
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As you may have noticed, I like political dance best when the politics are covert or ancillary or unintentional. I have trouble rallying enthusiasm or the ticket price for any dance piece featuring soldiers’ dog tags or the narrated transcripts of dead children. But I’m very curious about the small-bore intrigue of who in his orbit a dancer will confess having an injury to (the dancer who inflicted it? the person who might recommend the injured dancer for a gig?), or about how all the soreness that my dancing in the last six years has visited upon my body has caused me to triple my consumption of hot water.
It’s also intriguing to see how the political climes under which a dancer or choreographer grew up affect the work he later creates. Take, for instance, George Balanchine, whose Nutcracker has introduced millions to the joy to be found at the intersection of the Marzipan Shepherdess and fifty pounds of fake snow. Born in St. Petersburg in 1904, Balanchine would study at that city’s Imperial Ballet School; dance and choreograph for the Mariinsky Ballet; and move to Europe and join Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes before coming to the U.S. to cofound two of ballet’s most important institutions, New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet.
But I’m more interested here in another part of Balanchine’s legacy: he is the leading exponent of the plotless ballet.
Born to a musician father and a social climber mother, young Georgi Balanchivadze loved playing the piano but hated dancing. His parents were itinerant, and sometimes lived separately from their children. Young Georgi was aware that they—especially his mother, whom he’d later call “the queen of the glaciers”—favored his siblings over him.
At age nine, against his will, Balanchine was entered into St. Petersburg’s Imperial Ballet School. He kicked and screamed; he’d later say that he felt like “a dog that has just been taken out and abandoned.” (He’d be abandoned again five years later, when his mother and his siblings joined Balanchine’s father in the Georgian Republic, where Mr. Balanchivadze had been appointed the minister of culture. Balanchine never saw his parents or sister again.)
The school was supported by the Russian court—indeed, students were considered to be members of the czar’s own household—and was a bastion of hierarchy and discipline. Yes, the school’s servants picked up after the children and made their beds for them, but the students had to wear severe military uniforms and were regularly made to take cold showers. It was only after years of strenuous barre work and floor exercises that the students were allowed to perform. Georgi had bruises on his body from the teacher who would rap students with his knuckles while wearing heavy rings.
Young Balanchine was solitary and spookily self-confident. Possessed of a high, reedy, nasal voice, he had a tic of twitching his nose and sniffing that would earn him the nickname “Rat.” Arts patron Lincoln Kirstein, who would bring the young choreographer to the States in 1933, once said of him, “He’s Georgian. Stalin’s type. He seems soft as silk, but he’s like steel. He’s really rather sinister.”
How did Georgi view the decadent aristocracy that ruled Russia? In his book George Balanchine: Ballet Master, Richard Buckle writes, “Georgi was for the most part unaware of the political situation—politics meant little to the enclosed community of Theater Street. . . . [The students] had probably heard that Nicholas II had himself taken over the supreme command of the armed forces, but they could not have realized that as a result political power had been passed to the empress’s ineffectual favorites, and the country was disintegrating. They must however surely have heard of Rasputin’s murder in December 1916 and the czar’s abdication the following March.”
Came the revolution—or, should we say, revolutions. Ballet had been supported by the court, so it would be easy to imagine that the Bolshevik revolutions of February and October 1917 might have spelled the demise of crinkly tulle and of fictional characters who can’t help themselves from turning into puppets or falling in love with nymphs. But a high-powered arts enthusiast—Anatole Lunacharsky, the Bolshevik commissar for education—persuaded Vladimir Lenin that ballet and opera were not counterrevolutionary.
No
w that Russia’s dysfunctional monarchy had been interred, the prevailing mood of Balanchine’s city was joyous. As was that of Balanchine and his fellow students: “They’d put up with ancient humiliations from haughty caretakers and senior students because that was the order of things,” writes Elizabeth Kendall in Balanchine and the Lost Muse. “They’d been passive pawns, not just of their education but of school rituals designed to remind them of their ‘place.’ Now this arbitrary arrangement had ended, and something more human was on the horizon.”
This more human something, alas, was no box of chocolates, either. Due to shortages and deprivation, learning and performing ballet at the school was never easy. To begin with, food was scarce in St. Petersburg after the revolution; residents would make “cutlets” out of coffee grounds, or, worse, as Balanchine would later say, “Sometimes we catch rat and we kill and eat rat.” (How his nickname must have stung.) One day Georgi saw a skeletal-looking horse collapse on the street, whereupon a swarm of the street’s residents flew out their doors wielding knives and proceeded to hack the horse up for food. Meanwhile at the school, heat and costumes and makeup were not in abundance. You could see your breath in the studios, and students would sometimes make dresses out of umbrellas or coats out of the seats of railway carriages.
Which brings us, of course, to the fact that many of the stunning masterworks that Balanchine would go on to create—Serenade (1934), Concerto Barocco (1941), Jewels (1967), to name just three—feature simple costumes and minimal décor. The choreography is the star here, not the spectacle or the storytelling. “Many of these ballets showed up best when danced in practice clothes against a simple cyclorama,” biographer Bernard Taper wrote of a practice that Balanchine started with the young New York City Ballet in 1951. The less you have, the more you have to make of it. As Balanchine put it, “Our poverty is what saved us.”
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Back in Russia’s capital in the 1920s, the very fact that Balanchine would gain the experience he needed to become one of the city’s most sought-after choreographers owes something to political reality, too. When introduced in 1921, Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which promoted “state capitalism,” saw the opening of a huge number of dance venues in the capital. Here, in cabarets and on more traditional stages, Balanchine would start to hone some of the choreographic hallmarks he would become known for. He liked to get the corps dancing (years later, criticized for the lack of uniformity in the NYCB corps’ dancing, he’d comment that the aesthetic he was aiming for was that of an unclipped garden). He loved dazzling footwork, few or no demi-pliés, high arabesques, and long leaps. He strove for dancing that was precise but natural-looking—“Serve a glass of champagne on your heel” he’d tell one dancer; when another’s work looked forced, Balanchine said, “You look like you’re coming from the toilet.”
For many of us ballet-goers, the high point of the Balanchine canon is the magisterial and stirring Serenade, a lushly romantic work in four movements that is set to Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings. It’s possible, as I did the first time seeing it, to gasp at both the opening tableau (seventeen ballerinas in pale blue tulle, outstretching their arms skyward) and the ballet’s moment of surprise (a ballerina takes down her hair and then falls on the ground), and then to tear up at the work’s conclusion.
But the acme of Balanchine’s ability to make music visible—and more important, the ability to make movement shorn of story or flesh-and-blood characters elicit an emotional response from viewers—is probably the moment, fifteen minutes in, of Concerto Barocco. Set to Bach’s Double Violin Concerto in D Minor, the work is mostly a piece in which two female soloists each take on the life of one of the violins. But Concerto Barocco bursts into Technicolor amazingness when the two soloists flit off, leaving behind the corps of eight women.
The audience is staring down the barrel of the dancers—they’re arranged in two columns of four. The dancers are all hopping on their toes with their arms en haut—sproing! sproing! Then it happens: half of the dancers start down-casting their arms on a count of three, and half of them on a count of four. It feels like you’re beholding the world’s most elegant threshing machine, or a Swiss clock that’s made entirely of wrists and elbows. It’s weirdly pleasing: in the early 1970s, a young Mark Morris, arguably the heir to Balanchine’s exquisite musicality, saw Concerto Barocco for the first time and was so thrilled by this moment that he burst out laughing.
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But you can’t consider Balanchine as an artist without also considering women. He lionized them. When Kirstein first broached the idea of Balanchine coming to the U.S., Balanchine said he would love to live in any country that could produce so splendid an entity as Ginger Rogers. One of the most famous utterances of Mr. B (as his dancers would come to call him) was “Ballet is woman.” It’s entirely possible that, had Mr. B not existed, the long list of women he choreographed for—Alexandra Danilova, Tamara Toumanova, Marie-Jeanne, Mary Ellen Moylan, Maria Tallchief, Tanaquil Le Clercq, Melissa Hayden, Diana Adams, Allegra Kent, Suzanne Farrell, Violette Verdy, Patricia McBride, Merrill Ashley, Gelsey Kirkland, Heather Watts, Darci Kistler—would have come to our attention anyway. But it’s also possible to say that, for most of these women, he was their greatest influence.
He was fascinated by women’s inherent complexity: “Put 16 women on the stage, and it’s everybody—it’s the world,” he once said. “Put 16 men on, and it’s always nobody.” But if the New Economic Policy’s approach toward women had been ambivalent—while Russian women were meant to work shoulder to shoulder alongside their male compatriots, they were also needed to be hungry consumers of the influx of new consumer goods—so, too, was Mr. B’s. Some critics, like Ann Daly in her 1987 essay “The Balanchine Woman,” argue that Balanchine objectified women (Daly called ballet “one of our culture’s most powerful models of patriarchal ceremony”).
I suppose that you can find fuel for this argument in Balanchine’s personal life, too. The man who married four dancers during his lifetime and made women the exalted focal point of many of his works also thought that a dancer’s bearing children was a treacherous betrayal of both ballet and him. (“Now, Allegra, no more babies,” he once told Allegra Kent. “Babies are for Puerto Ricans.”) For a ballerina to be singled out by Mr. B was both a blessing and a curse: Suzanne Farrell was one of a number of young ballerinas Balanchine would fall in love with, idolize, and be crushed by when their affection waned. When Farrell married a fellow New York City Ballet dancer named Paul Mejia, Mr. B snubbed her and withheld roles from Mejia, causing the two dancers to retire from the company.
A cynic might view Balanchine’s approach to ballet as a kind of power grab: to make ballets that have no plots is to make the choreographer the author of the show. Ambitious theater directors like to mount the classics rather than new plays because then if the show is a hit, the attention goes to the director not the playwright; it would be possible to see Balanchine through this lens. But this interpretation is undermined by Balanchine’s devotion to music (he thought, “Music is the floor that dancers dance on,” and considered composer Igor Stravinsky his mentor), not to mention his disinterest in money or titles and his belief that his work was perishable (“Ballets are like butterflies. Who wants to see last season’s butterflies?”). Moreover, during the 1930s and ’40s he worked regularly in two highly collaborative arenas, Broadway and film (his vampy ballet “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” from the 1936 production of On Your Toes is canonical), and yet was not thought to be uncollaborative or an egoist. Too, his commitment to his dancers’ growth as artists was so deep that he would sometimes choreograph in order to improve them—e.g., he liked to give Suzanne Farrell lots of pas de bourrées because hers needed practice.
In the end, he emerges a snuffly, sympathetic despot with a spectacular legacy. At New York City Ballet, Kendall writes, “he reproduced the apparatus of the Imperial Mariinsky, but without the monarchy and the protectors, balletomanes and higher-ups courting b
allerinas. It was just him. He was ballet master and teacher to his ballerinas—and tsar and suitor and balletomane and mischievous companion, all at the same time.”
The tsar in charge—sounds like a lot of dance studio owners, no?
3.
Have you ever made a political decision—drawn a line in the sand, or voiced an opinion—that had unexpectedly long-lasting repercussions? I did the first time I undertook ballet seriously.
I’d read about teacher Kat Wildish on the Gibney Dance website. Unusual for having danced for both of New York City’s preeminent companies—she was handpicked by Balanchine at New York City Ballet to dance in one of his last works, Adagio Lamentoso, and at ABT Sir Kenneth MacMillan created the role of the knitting lady in his Sleeping Beauty for her—Wildish, now in her late fifties, teaches a very popular and challenging class for beginners.
On a balmy evening in August 2016, I walked into a huge, mirror-lined studio on the fifth floor of 890 Broadway. Formerly owned by choreographer Michael Bennett (A Chorus Line, Dreamgirls), 890 Broadway is a building where ABT and a lot of Broadway shows rehearse; while walking down its dark, slightly ominous hallways it’s easy to convince yourself that you’re at the epicenter of the dance world.
I took a deep breath, prepared to clutch onto a barre for dear life. Yes, I’d taken three ballet classes before, but everything I’d read about Wildish’s class led me to believe that, when it came to Absolute Beginner ballet classes, this was Mount Everest. The Gibney website used the term “devilishly tricky.”
In walked Wildish—petite, blond, and brimming with energy. She was wearing pearl earrings, and her shoulder-length hair was pulled back and scrunchied. Eyeing the group of us who were stretching out and staring into space, she sauntered over to me, introduced herself, and said, “We’re having a pas de deux workshop after class, up at City Center, if you’d like to come. I always invite the men because we usually don’t get enough of them.”
