When he is working, David gets up early, checks the light and the weather, and prepares himself in good time. Sitters are expected to be prompt, and we were on the nose, like a Swiss express.
We had our backs to a long row of double portraits in watercolor. As portraits in watercolor go, they were uncommonly, and quite possibly uniquely, big. Each was four feet high and three feet wide.
The sitters included some of David’s painter friends—Lucian and Howard Hodgkin among them. Others, like ourselves, were invited for the ride.
Those portraits could never have been painted on one sheet of paper or on a conventional easel. The paint would have run, and the paper would have wrinkled.
So David decided to work with sheets of paper that would be of manageable size and could be laid flat on a board. Each one was twenty-four inches by eighteen inches.
Each double portrait consisted of four of those boards. Once they were fitted tightly together, they could stand tall and be hung on the wall like any other painted portrait.
Sitters were expected to pose, motionless, for six hours the first day and to be on call for a second day if needed.
Anyone who shifts by as much as an inch gets reprimanded. He works in complete silence, no talk, and no music.
Behind him, to our left, were white circular dishes, already filled with differing flesh tones and reds.
To our right were brushes, bottles of water, small glass cups to be used for mixing the pigments with water.
David in daily life is the easiest of men. But when on the job, he can look like a man on the rack. He doesn’t exactly groan, but he shivers and shudders. His face darkens. He peers down at the painting as if daring it to disagree with him.
Then he looks at the sitter with one eye screwed up and his face contorted as if he had just seen an appalling sight.
His concentration was almost painful to witness. We had frontrow seats, since David did most of his work standing directly in front of us, just a few feet away.
We were thoroughly looked over, in that our feet were not just auxiliaries. Feet and shoes got star billing.
The sitters sit in identical poses, side by side, but an inch or two apart. They sit on identical office chairs.
To begin with, he takes a smaller pad and roughly blocks in the two figures. Then he takes a quick look, with brush poised. If it’s a small brush, he makes brief pecking motions toward the paper, or broad flat marks with a larger brush.
At the initial stage, the paper is laid flat on the board, and he paints a neutral pale gray across the upper part of the paper. It will remain unchanged as the background.
When he started on my face, he first laid a pen and then a cigarette on the paper to indicate where the top of the head should come.
Every so often he reached for his pack of cigarettes, pulled one out, lit it, took a few puffs, and then threw it on the floor and stamped it out. After a while I counted seven discarded cigarettes on the floor. “I don’t smoke them much,” he said, “but I can’t work without them.”
The sitter sees the paper at an angle that is almost but never quite horizontal. David began by taking two big panels of paper on a board and laying them flat in front of him.
The initial deposits of paint on the paper are difficult to read. They are pure color and of a purity that is rarely met, with such intensity and with so little that identifies the future subject matter.
Progress is slow but methodical. We see blobs of red and pink whose purpose we cannot identify. But there will come a moment at which, without warning, everything suddenly snaps into place. But there are none of the broad sweeps of the loaded brush that we find in what the English call swagger portraits in oils. The brushes are often tiny, as are the amounts of paint that they can carry.
Half an hour may pass before we get our bearings. Those tiny but vivacious deposits are not going to help us out. They have no volume as yet, but then we suddenly identify them as our fingers, our knees, and a flash of the light from our carefully polished shoes.
Hockney gives a gala finale to the group portrait. The shoes and feet cut a dash—if I may so put it—that the heads and shoulders don’t always equal. David features John’s signature red socks. It is below the ankle that some of the sitters live life to the full.
This is a high-wire act, without a net, and occasionally Hockney checks his watch. His double portraits have the tone of friendly conversation. His hand lets his eyes get on with their work. Nothing can be corrected, rubbed out, or redone. And if the result does not seem to the sitter to be “lifelike,” he simply isn’t interested. “That’s the way I see you,” he will say, if pressed.
That seemed to us a fair deal. To have sat for David Hockney was an experience, and a proof of long friendship, on a scale that does not come every day.
Jerome Robbins
In 1985, John and I were in Leningrad in one of those once-grand hotels. Our salon was peopled with large pieces of somewhat worn furniture, with the unexpected addition of a bulky Frigidaire—empty and unconnected.
There was also a small, fancy telephone, left over from some other era. We presumed its function was purely decorative. One time, to our astonishment, it rang. It was Channel 13 calling from New York to ask me to interview Jerome Robbins for their Great Performances—Dance in America series.
I thanked them for thinking of me but said I was not a dance critic, they must be thinking of someone else. “We didn’t think of you” came the answer. “It was Jerry’s idea. In fact he said that if you won’t do it, he won’t do it at all.”
Jerry and I had been friends for many years. He had often given us tickets for his ballet performances. He had come to my lectures at the Metropolitan Museum. But our conversations were more apt to roam on such general subjects as movies, or trading recipes for exotic sherbets—he was an excellent cook.
I was touched that he had singled me out to be his interviewer. So in spite of misgivings, I finally accepted.
Some time later, we were together in a studio in New York, and Jerry proved to be as eloquent with words as he was with gesture.
Asked about his early days with Ballet Theatre—as a member of the corps de ballet—under Bronislava Nijinska, he said:
She took an instant dislike to me. She singled me out of everyone and said, “Please do a double air turn.” I don’t think she said “please,” just “Do a double air turn.” I did my best and landed in a fifth, slightly off balance, and had to put my foot down. She said, “Ha!” and from then on nothing I could do ever pleased her.
However, I thought Les Noces, a remarkable piece, one of the great works of the ballet repertory.
I also like Les Biches very much.
We were very fortunate because at that time—there were Fokine, Massine, Lichine … It was a great school for me to be able to go from rehearsal to rehearsal in the same day and work with different choreographers and see how they approached their various ballets.
It was very, very Russified. There was one year when I never got out of boots and Russian bloomers.
It was somewhat against all that that my feeling came to do something American. I thought, why must we only dance Russian subjects? We have American subjects we can dance about. Those feelings turned into Fancy Free—about sailors in wartime in New York.
The material for research was all there in front of us. We were at the old Met, a block away from Forty-second Street, where every sailor who came to New York gravitated. One could see them walking down the street, eyes and mouth wide open to all the sights that were New York. They usually went in threes, which struck me.
Another approach to Fancy Free was that I had been submitting scenarios to the company for quite a while—little things like five-act ballets [laughs]. Casts of thousands. Finally, someone wisely said to me, “Why don’t you compose a scenario with just a few people which won’t be difficult to put on.” So I did just that, and wrote a scenario which is the basis of Fancy Free. They said, “Now, find yourself
a composer and you can put it on this spring.” So I searched and searched and found Lenny Bernstein, who was unknown then.
He had been suggested to me by a number of other composers who didn’t want to bother with Fancy Free. They didn’t know who I was, why should they spend the time. They all said, there’s this guy named Lenny Bernstein, if you can find him.
Oliver Smith, who was to design the set, said, “Oh, I know him.” So I called him up and went over. I walked in and said, “I’ll give you my scenario and you play me some of your music and let’s see how we get on.”
We both liked each other’s ideas and that was that. We were off and running.
He was writing the ballet score while I was touring. We were all so young we didn’t think of the complications. He would send me records, of him and sometimes even Aaron Copland, playing the music so that I would hear what the music was like.
Then I’d either write or call him and say, “I’m sorry, Variation Three is much too long, or this is too fast, or this is wonderful.” This correspondence went on right until we came back off tour.
I was inventing the ballet as we toured … in cellars, lobbies, gyms, any place I could find room. On top of normal rehearsals and performances.
I was told I never had my nose out of the score during the whole trip. On the train, everywhere, I was fascinated by it.
The dancers that I wanted were all pals of mine, we were all in the corps de ballet, we had been bumming around together on four continents.
When the ballet was finally put on, it was a surprise, to all of us. A Hurok press agent had come and watched a rehearsal and said, “I think you’re in for something here.” The ballet opened, we did our best, and then came this reaction which was the wildest reaction I’ve ever had.
We had an unprecedented amount of curtain calls—twenty-two, which is really extraordinary. It was such an abrupt change from what the ballet audiences were used to.
The second night, we were so nervous we almost fell down, and did all the wrong things.
It was difficult being both choreographer and dancer. I had choreographed a role for myself in Fancy Free, the Third Sailor. I hadn’t quite finished choreographing my own variation by opening night; I think I improvised a bit.
After the success of Fancy Free, unfortunately, for a while, I became known as a jazz choreographer who did New York subjects, contemporary work. It took me a long time to dispel that classification.
“You’re very physically aware of the way people move.”
Not only the way they move, the way they move in space, because that’s what ballets are about. That volume, that space, is the stage. The drama is how people move in and around it, or separate from each other, or more come in, or move to one side of the stage, move forward or backward.
That is the fascination of choreography. It’s an empty studio when you start a ballet and the first dancer begins. It’s rather an awesome moment because it is like putting the first mark of ink on a piece of blank paper. From then on, your whole structure is going to be connected to that.
I always feel that choreography is a little like building a bridge. You start on one side, you build a step, then you build another step, and another. The structure has to contain itself so that it meets at the ends of the ballet and makes an architectural structure that is satisfying.
It was Oliver Smith who suggested making a musical out of Fancy Free. We made the adventures of three sailors in New York into the musical On the Town. We had fun doing it. It was our first time out with the genre, there was a lot we didn’t know, we were very brash, but we got away with it. Then that became a movie.
There was a period when I alternated doing commercial shows and working on ballets. I sandwiched in West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, and Gypsy, and I became a director of those, as well as the choreographer.
How do I start a ballet? Mostly I feel that working on a ballet is like knowing there’s an island out there, which you’ve heard about, and you have to find your way to it. Once you get on it, you have to explore. By the time you finish the ballet, you’ve explored the island.
I don’t always know how my ballets are going to end. I have to find that as I go along. I do have a conception, somewhere in the back of my head, of the total arch of the music.
I know none of the steps before I begin. I have to work that out in the studio, with the dancers. What comes out of that leads me to the next move, always guided by the perimeters … the perimeter is the score.
Choosing the composer, the music, is a very subjective thing. At one moment you can hear something that appeals to you because of what’s going on in your life, it really hits you. Another time, you might not have reacted to it.
I know this was true of Alban Berg. When I heard a recording, I was intensely moved by it. A friend of mine pointed out that I’d heard it with him several years before. At that time, it didn’t stay with me enough to want to work with it. But then I was ready for it.
I followed the actual structure of the score. That score is a marvelous cryptogram on many, many levels. The story behind it is that Alban Berg was very fond of a daughter of a friend of his, Alma Mahler. She contracted polio and died after a lot of suffering. Berg was so upset that he stopped working on Lulu, or the last act, and wrote this piece in memory of her. My ballet is In Memory Of … The structure of the music is a portrait of the girl, and her society, and her struggle with death, and then her transfiguration.
So much of his own biography was incorporated into that score. It was written in 1935. The Nazis were rising up. He was also very ill himself. In it are his notes about his love affairs, an illegitimate child he had when he was very young, his relationship with another woman.
All this within the structure of twelve-tone serial music. At the same time he was a wonderfully dramatic, lyric writer. Finally, the ballet should not be connected to one person, but to the sense of losing people, and the struggles they go through when they’re ill and die. And hopefully, arrive at a peace for themselves.
I had a difficult time with that ballet. I got quite despairing halfway through it, up to the point where Death enters. I didn’t know how to use the rest of the music. I got very depressed because the music is very depressing.
But by chance, Adam Luders was at that rehearsal. I dismissed everyone else, thinking I am going to stop the ballet here. I still had half an hour, so I said, “Come on, Adam, stand here,” and I started working on a pas de deux.
I didn’t know that I was going to use that music for a pas de deux until that moment. Everything opened up. I couldn’t go wrong.
You have to remember I had studied the score very closely so that I knew musically what was going to happen even though I didn’t yet know physically. It was almost like automatic writing. I felt I couldn’t make a mistake.
The same thing happened in rehearsal with Adam and Suzanne Farrell, we all fused in an extraordinary way. I’ve never had a rehearsal like that, it was almost as if it had already been done. No matter what I asked them to do, it led immediately to the next thing, and then we moved on to the next.
I don’t know what I will be doing next. I have a list of ballets I want to get to sooner or later, but you have to be ready for them.
Sometimes you can force yourself, and that isn’t bad, the discipline can turn into something interesting.
Whenever we did our festivals that Mr. Balanchine organized, suddenly we were all doing Stravinsky ballets, or Tchaikovsky ballets, or Ravel ballets, whether we wanted to or not. And that wasn’t bad discipline.
Sometimes it is good to work not where you feel the most comfortable or the most ready.
What I find about rehearsals is that on the days that I do not want to go to the theater, and do not want to choreograph, because I don’t know what I am doing, and I’m the most upset about it, is the day when something happens.
As choreographers, we’re stuck working not when we feel like it but when the company can arrange a rehear
sal. Terpsichore has to come down between three and six on Friday afternoon, even though you may feel like working between ten and twelve.
So we have to work when we can get the dancers and when the schedule permits it. That too is a wonderful discipline.
I did one ballet without music, called Moves. I had commissioned a score from Aaron Copland , this was for my own company. He was late writing it, I was already in rehearsal. So I’d go over to Aaron and he’d play me a fragment, and I’d go to the rehearsal with some of the tunes and certainly the rhythms in my head. I started to choreograph it, even though there was no score. I was doing it to counts. Suddenly I looked at it and thought this is very interesting without any music.
So I went ahead and choreographed the whole ballet in silence. The dancers got used to it very fast.
It was really about what happens to roles when they’re not being danced. When Petrushka, Giselle, Hamlet, or Traviata are not being performed, they’re sort of hanging around somewhere, waiting for an actor or a dancer or a singer to bring them to life.
I had started a ballet called Antique Epigraphs, and it was only when I got near the end that I realized that what was haunting me were some statues in Naples at the National Museum. Many years ago I had walked into a room, and there were four or five bronze life-sized statues with enamel eyes. It was like walking into the middle of a silent ritual. It was almost alarming.
Some of My Lives Page 24
