At this time, the male dancer rivaled the female as an object of desire. But ballerinas of the day had not lost their sexual appetite. Backstage affairs continued apace. Ballerinas like the exotically beautiful Ida Rubinstein (1885–1960) matched Diaghilev’s skill at manipulating the press by serving up intimate details of their love life for public consumption. Born into a wealthy Russian-Jewish family, which later bankrolled productions in which she starred, Rubinstein first came to audiences’ attention dancing the title role of Cléopâtre and the female lead in Schéhérazade, opposite Nijinsky, during the Paris season of 1909. Provocatively for being both a woman and a non-Christian, in 1911 she danced the title role in Claude Debussy’s Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien, a mystery play created to show off her also remarkable acting talents. She was sexually and professionally independent and actively cultivated an erotic persona. Her lovers included Walter Guinness, the Anglo-Irish heir to the Guinness brewing fortune. With the Italian nationalist poet Gabriele d’Annunzio and the bisexual American painter Romaine Brooks, Rubinstein formed a ménage-à-trois.
Sex also blossomed within the confines of the company. The ballerina Lydia Lopokova (1892–1981), a favorite of Fokine, had a fling with the married Stravinsky before moving beyond the ballet to take up with the English-born economist John Maynard Keynes, whom she eventually married, ending her days as a baroness.8 Another Fokine ballerina (she was his lover) was the dark-haired beauty Tamara Karsavina (1885–1978), who originated roles in several of his ballets, among them Petrushka (1911), The Firebird (1910), and Le Spectre de la Rose (1911). Her range in lovers was just as diverse; they included the notorious Hollywood lesbian Mercedes de Acosta and the British diplomat Henry James Bruce, whom she later wed, settling down in Hampstead Heath, where she became the teacher of British ballerina Margot Fonteyn (1919–1991).
Kschessinska was only briefly a member of Les Ballets Russes; she preferred the ballets of the old regime, the Petipa classics. Her taste in lovers was equally influenced by the Imperial school. She was a ballerina steeped in the aristocratic traditions of Russia past; a former aide-camp once described her as representing “what Russian society was, and ought to be. Order, punctiliousness, symmetry, work well done everywhere... Whereas those horrible modern ballets—Russian ballets, as you call them in Paris—a dissolute and poisoned art—why, they’re revolution, anarchy!”9
Kschessinska was out of step with the times, and dangerously so, as observed by Maurice Paléologue, the French ambassador to Russia, who, in his memoirs, described an event he witnessed in 1916 that sealed the ballerina’s fate as an artifact of a lost era. It had been a long, cold winter and food and fuel had been in short supply. But by dint of her being the tsar’s mistress, Kschessinska did not have to suffer. Paléologue described in outraged detail seeing four military trucks filled to the brim with coal, courtesy of the tsar, which arrived at the dancer’s mansion at a time when the French embassy had been denied the necessary provisions to see its operations through the season. Even commoners were reportedly astounded by the sight of such a prized commodity being lavished on a woman who, in essence, was only a dancer. Overnight, the Mighty Mathilde became known as the Mighty Kutcha—the whore. When the Revolution erupted the following October, a vengeful mob was quick to descend first on Kschessinska’s house, in search of the ballerina who symbolized the decadence and nonchalant privilege of the ruling class. If they had found her, they most certainly would have hanged her. But she had escaped to Paris, via the Côte d’Azur, fearful for her life and that of her bastard son. She ended up as a ballet teacher who could barely earn a living. While fleeing the Bolsheviks, Kschessinka had squandered her precious jewels on a roulette table in Monte Carlo. As for her precious palace, symbol of her reign as one of ballet’s last great courtesans, it was taken over by the Bolsheviks; in an ironic twist of fate, Kschessinska’s pleasure dome was handpicked by the revolution’s ruthless leader, Vladimir Lenin, who occupied it next, addressing the masses on the street below from the ballerina’s ornately decorated balcony and using her sunken bathtub as a giant ashtray.
Kschessinska was among the last of her kind, largely because society had irrevocably changed: mass democratization and the emancipation of women, among other social movements, rendered aristocratic privilege and concubinage increasingly unacceptable. The overt sensuality and bejeweled glamor of the old-style ballerina was being swept aside by a new asceticism and factory-like discipline in ballet.
The idea of the ballerina as chaste and obedient, a full-fledged devotee of the dance, had been established by a fellow Russian, the great Anna Pavlova (1881–1931), who approached ballet as something akin to a religion; she was fiercely devoted to it, to the point of self-sacrifice, literally dancing herself to death. Pavlova gave her all to her art. She married but remained childless. She lived by her own saying: “God gives talent. Work transforms talent into genius.” Agnes de Mille, the pioneering American dancer and choreographer, met Pavlova once and described her as a victim of her own desire to meld with the essence of her dance: “What was gross had been burnt and wasted off her. She had kept no part of her body that was not useful to her art, and there was about her the tragic aura of absolute decision.”10
Pavlova came from humble origins; she was the daughter of a washerwoman, and her father was unknown. She had learned early that success depended on a fighting spirit. She was nine when she attended her first ballet at the Mariinsky, The Sleeping Beauty, and was instantly smitten by the onstage fantasy. To the young Pavlova, the ballet represented a world of beauty and transformation. She wanted badly to become a part of it and, according to her biographer, Keith Money, had to overcome the doubts of the examiners at the Imperial Ballet School, who at first refused her entrance, believing her too small and sickly. Pavlova worked for two years to make her body more pliable and strong and was finally accepted at age ten, making her older than the other girls in her ballet classes but also more determined.11 She became a première danseuse when she was only sixteen.
Once Pavlova was accepted into ballet, she became utterly focused on spreading its gospel of discipline and rarefied beauty to the masses, becoming something of a ballerina-missionary who made a career of performing one-night stands across the globe; her signature role was The Dying Swan, a solo created for her in 1907 by Fokine, and from 1910 until 1931, she logged over 350,000 miles over six continents performing this poignantly beautiful role, a eulogy of feathers, as the head of her own classical ballet touring company.12 No town was ever too small as long as it had a stage where she could share the magic that had first entranced her. Pavlova was the world’s first international ballerina superstar, loved and admired by all those who saw her. In America, which had barely seen ballet before, her performances were hailed as “ocular opera.” “Everywhere our dancing was hailed as the revelation of an un-dreamed of art,” Pavlova said.”13 Her dancing was perceived as existing beyond the here and now; Pavlova had that elusive something, an inner glow and gravitas, which enabled her to turn even the most basic of ballet steps into a kind of personal prayer. Audiences were reportedly spellbound by her; Russian critic André Levinson said of Pavlova that she was the embodiment of emotion saturated by form and of form saturated by emotion.14 That limpidness shone most brightly in classic ballets like Giselle and La Bayadère, in which she danced Nikiya, Kschessinska’s own role. When briefly she danced with Diaghilev’s troupe in Paris in 1909, performing opposite Nijinsky, she performed only work from the old repertoire, nothing avant-garde. She cultivated roles in which she appeared as a dragonfly, butterfly, snowflake, or swan, phenomena associated with lightness and flight, to which her diaphanous dancing style was suited.
That Pavlova was a ballerina possessed became tragically clear when she contracted pneumonia while on tour in The Hague and yet insisted on dancing even when doctors told her to rest. She danced The Dying Swan, and the role ultimately killed her. She died of double pleurisy just three days l
ater, on January 23, 1931. She was fifty years old.
Yet, Pavlova appears to have been in control of her fate; certainly, for the most part, she called the shots as far as her own career was concerned. During her lifetime, Pavlova had been an astute ballet entrepreneur, carefully stoking the fire of her own legend by attaching her name to any number of commercial enterprises, from face creams to silk stockings; a light and frothy dessert bears her name today. Pavlova had been her own boss, dictating not only what she would dance but also where and when and how, driving herself even if her frailty could barely sustain the effort. After her, ballerinas the world over would pay her homage by adopting her Dying Swan solo, imitating her fluttery dancing style, which had been preserved on film. But what they would not be able to recreate was the business model that Pavlova had created to ensure her autonomy as a ballerina entrepreneur. In her wake, ballerinas would come to lose control over their own careers in subordinating themselves to the new star of twentieth-century ballet—the choreographer. Typically male and sometimes doubling as an impresario, the choreographer had begun nudging the ballerina from center stage during the Diaghilev era. But after Pavlova, the choreographer’s dominant role in the art became more apparent. A Svengali-like figure, the choreographer demanded that the ballerina become his inferior, a docile handmaid serving his artistic needs more than her own. Strangely, and at a time when the rest of the world was starting to embrace women’s rights, the ballerina almost unquestioningly obeyed, subsuming her will to the choreographer’s in ways unprecedented in the history of ballet.
The choreographer who almost single-handedly brought about a cataclysmic change to the status of the ballerina in modern times was George Balanchine (1904–1983), an undisputed genius of twentieth-century ballet who also is responsible for some of its more negative aspects. While he was ballet-master-in-chief of New York City Ballet, Balanchine intensified the tyranny of artistic director and sparked the epidemic of eating disorders arising from his preference for lean and leggy ballerinas. Balanchine claimed to idolize ballerinas and publicly called them his muse. But behind the scenes, he subtly and systematically degraded them, denying them sex (unless it was with him) and sustenance, both in the form of food and domestic fulfillment. If his ballerinas married or had babies, he grew angry and was known to shun them. If they did not capitulate to his sexual advances, he was known to have them banished from ballet. He was a god-like figure to whom scores of ballerinas completely devoted themselves while submitting to his tyranny. As the zealots became teachers themselves, the almost unattainable Balanchinean feminine ideal took root and flourished in all corners of the world where ballet is performed—despite its now proven deleterious effects on ballerinas’ health and well-being. This remains Balanchine’s legacy, as much as his repertoire of brilliantly crafted, vibrantly musical works.
Born Georgi Melotonovich Balanchivadze in St. Petersburg, the son of a respected Georgian composer who bestowed on his son, one of two, the gift of music, Balanchine was the fiendishly prolific progenitor of ballet’s neoclassical style. He created works not only for Les Ballets Russes but also Hollywood, Broadway, and the circus after moving to the West in 1933 at the request of wealthy American philanthropist Lincoln Kirstein, with whom he would eventually form New York City Ballet.
Balanchine had formulated his ideas carefully throughout a lifetime of meticulous study and association with some of the leading creative minds of his day. He was old enough to have experienced the heady days of the Imperial Ballet School, where he had been a student; the ballerina Karsavina was one of his favorites, and it is said that as a boy he loved watching her. However, Balanchine had been too young to decamp from Russia on his own when the Bolsheviks took over. He ended up being partly schooled in the Soviet system, which influenced his emerging choreographic style as much as did Petipa’s ballets under the tsar.
In the Soviet Union as a young man, Balanchine was inspired by Constructivist theories and the idea that art could be stripped clean of emotional encumbrances to make it more a reflection of pure energy. He approached ballet as a formalist, seeing it as a distinct and autonomous art form that was expressive not in a literary sense but through its own physical movement, its own centuries-old style.15 As such, Balanchine’s ballets emerged as non-narrative vehicles for showcasing the ballet’s new machine-age aesthetic. In ballet terms, this involved manipulating the body to make it move faster, sharper, and higher, with more musical complexity and breadth. In his predominantly abstract or plotless works, he used intricate interlacings of bodies to create sculptural effects, an approach influenced by the Soviet avant-garde dance artist Kasyan Goleizovsky in the Soviet Union. “I did not imitate him,” Balanchine once told an interviewer, “but he gave me a desire to do something, a desire to move. He started to move differently.”16
Balanchine made the ballerina symbolic of his new direction in ballet, even redesigning her image according to his own idea of what the ideal female dancer should look like: tall, with long legs, highly arched and flexible feet, narrow hips, long arms, and a small head. The look quickly became iconic, replacing all past images to the point that all ballerinas who have come since bear his stamp: “[When] you think about dancers—long-legged, slender girls who move as quickly as delight,” observed American dance critic Joseph Mazo, “you are thinking about Balanchine. He invented them.”17 The prototype was said to have been Ballets Russes dancer Felia Doubrovska (1896–1981), with whom Balanchine had worked, casting her as the Siren in the original production of his 1929 Diaghilev ballet, The Prodigal Son.18 Doubrovska described Balanchine’s approach to ballet as an art that spoke with the legs: the accent was on pointe work, which only the ballerina could perform.19
“Ballet is woman,” Balanchine famously declared. But it wasn’t really a compliment. Balanchine wanted to control women, to make them look, move, feel, be as he wanted. A more accurate statement would have been “Ballet is Balanchine,” because under his direction, the art became his. The ballerina would be stripped of the independence she might previously have enjoyed; the ballet master demanded of his ballerinas total devotion bordering on self-sacrifice. Any progress ballerinas might have made while under his watch was tied to Balanchine’s own desires as a heterosexual male and machine-age artist. “If you marry a ballerina,” Balanchine once told an interviewer, “you never have to worry about whether she’s running around with somebody else or anything like that. You always know where she is—in the studio, working.”20 Ballerinas who did strive for a life outside ballet were punished; the Canadian-born ballerina Patricia Wilde, a vivacious dancer for whom Balanchine created principal roles in Scotch Symphony (1952), Swan Lake (1951), and Raymonda Variations (1961) when she danced with New York City Ballet from 1950 to 1965, says that when she dared wed, on the eve of the master’s staging of The Nutcracker, Balanchine punished her by refusing her a wedding night: “After rehearsal, I did tell him. He was fine about it,” Wilde recalls. “Then he said that he would need me for rehearsals that evening between seven and nine. I was taken aback but came to rehearsal anyway. In the meantime, my husband and my in-laws were having dinner and waiting for me. This, after all, was my wedding night. Anyway, I was rehearsing and nine o’clock came around. Mr. B. wasn’t looking at the clock. He asked me to do incredible things, like entrechat-six from pointe to pointe, tours en l’air, and one incredibly difficult variation which had no end. We finished at ten o’clock. I rushed to join my wedding party. But you know, Mr. B. didn’t call me again for two weeks. That rehearsal was his wedding present to me!”21
Ballet demanded a ballerina’s allegiance to her art to the exclusion of everything else; perhaps it made sense for the day. New York City Ballet in the 1950s and 1960s was frequently on tour, sometimes on the road for five months at a time, making domesticity difficult, if not impossible—especially when dancers’ salaries ran on average $85 a week. Joysanne Sidimus, a native New Yorker, danced in the New York City Ballet from
1958 to 1962. Today she works as a répétiteur licensed to stage Balanchine ballets around the world through the Balanchine Trust, an organization that enshrines and perpetuates the choreographer’s genius through careful presentation of his work. She says that Balanchine never understood why a dancer would want a life outside ballet anyway; married women were expected to devote their lives to their husbands and families—it was the social norm. “So it’s not so much that Balanchine was a dictator,” she continues. “Society itself made it very difficult for ballerinas to get married. I remember meeting guys and then it would come down to one sentence: ‘Marry me and give up dancing.’ But how could I? It was my life.”22
But was it society, or was it Balanchine? In the 1960s and 1970s, when the master’s influence on ballet was keenest, North America was being rocked by the women’s liberation movement. Everywhere, women were burning their bras, but within the confines of Balanchine’s ballet company, they were being told to park their brains at the stage door and submit themselves to his rule. Certainly, Balanchine could not be called a feminist choreographer for putting women on pedestals of high choreographic art. The act itself suggested that he, and he alone, was in control.
“We are under the dictatorship of one man, whom we adore and respect,” said Toni Bentley, an Australian-born dancer who wrote about her experience dancing under Balanchine from November 1980 to February 1981 as a New York City Ballet corps de ballet dancer, “and his every whim is our law, no questions asked.”23
After Balanchine, it can be argued, the ballerina was no longer a real-time woman but a translucent cipher serving the vision of a hyper-possessive heterosexual male who, while claiming to love women, deemed them inferior, in need of controlling. “Man is a better cook, a better painter, a better musician, composer,” Balanchine said. “Man is stronger, faster, why? Because we have muscles, and we’re made that way. And woman accepts this. It is her business to accept. She knows what’s beautiful. Men are great poets, because men have to write beautiful poetry for woman—odes to a beautiful woman. Woman accepts the beautiful poetry. You see, man is the servant—a good servant. In ballet, however, woman is first. Everywhere else the man is first. But in ballet, it’s the woman. All my life I have dedicated my art to her.”24
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