In the studio, Helen would be at the piano wearing her green eyeshade. Everyone took a place at the barre. Shoulders square, heels together, feet turned out, eyes straight ahead, one hand on the barre, elbow relaxed, the other arm down and slightly curved. Helen played a chord on the piano and you raised your outer arm through first position, your hand moving in front of your body to your chest, out to a straight line from your shoulder, keeping that elbow up and relaxed. Down you went into plié as the music played, knees opening to the side, as low as you could go.
Miss Craske calling out: “Don’t force. Don’t force. Do not roll over on your arches. It accomplishes nothing, my dears, nothing.”
And the unfolding of the pattern again. The loosening of the hip sockets, the turning out of the thighs so you can move laterally across the stage from side to side. Sort of like a Picasso, or an Egyptian fresco. The audience seeing your upper body from the front, your legs from the side, all at the same time.
Freedom, I think that is what it was all about. Freedom. Ronds de jambe, your leg pointed out so just the tip of your pointed toe touched the floor, and you make the shape of half a pie. To the front, to the side, to the back. Brush through with a flat foot past your standing heel, and around again. Then reverse it. So your hip sockets get very loose, yet your legs stay taut and strong.
And there were grands battements, your leg lifting as high as your nose in front, then high as your ears to the side, then high as your ass behind. “Do not tip forward.” Miss Craske would warn, walking about to inspect our grands battements en arrière. “It accomplishes nothing, do you hear me, nothing.” But we did.
We worked so hard, sweat pouring from our bodies. Stretching our muscles as much as possible; tightening them as much as possible. All so we could dart around the stage later, legs whipping front, back, lifting, lowering, yet always in complete control. Strong bodies that move fast or slow, as the legs and arms make their patterns. Heads stationary, arms moving slowly in their own separate orbits while legs did quicker, completely separate activities. All of this just so you can dance better. All of this training is not really learning to dance. This is just training the body to execute steps.
The Russian ballerina Natalia Makarova said, “Dance is not training. Dancing is something you do after you have been trained.” You felt that, you felt that inside you. Inside was the urge to float through the air, turn and twist your leg high, point your feet down to make sharp, pointed shapes like arrows to lead your body through the air.
With your teacher’s help, and your own concentration on which muscles did what, looking in the mirror to see if you were creating the shapes your body was capable of, you create a new body. Tight, lean, and trim. Legs made to open high and wide in any direction, arms to hold neat, fine lines extending your shoulders or framing your head.
You go to the middle of the room for “center,” as they call it, after doing the barre exercises. Slow movements, standing on one foot, your supporting leg immovable as you do slow patterns with the other leg. Slowly you revolve in front of the mirror, lean forward, your leg lifted in arabesque or attitude. You bend the knee of the leg you’re standing on and reach one arm forward and the raised leg back into first arabesque. Then change arms slowly into second arabesque, then slowly change legs into third arabesque. Dipping lower, stretching your body to its longest extent. Mesmerized by the fulfillment of your body’s potential.
Then, finally, the last half hour of the class: the allegro section, where you are set free, your body primed and ready to fly. Pirouettes in the center, little jumps, big jumps, entrechat quatre, whipping those pointed feet back and forth as you leap into the air, back and forth, back and forth.
Miss Craske then gave us combinations of steps. Across the room on a diagonal, one by one, as Helen bent over the piano, trying to give us the surge of music to lift us even more. Stepping back, lifting your leg in front of you in a pose, looking up towards where the imperial box would be if there were any such thing, holding your pose just one moment, smiling as incandescently as you could, the Tchaikovsky races on and you lift out of your pose. Rush across the floor to catch up with the music, racing forward in a glissade, tossing your front leg sideways into the air, pulling the after one with it, ankles meeting before you land neatly, feet together in fifth position. A grande assemblée. If you’re advanced enough your feet flutter back and forth in entrechats like flames flickering. From your locked-in position, feet side by side, toes pointing in opposite directions, a quick pointed toe to one side and around to the back, you’re off into a perfect double (shall we say triple?) pirouette. Up on the ball of one foot, twirling around, the other foot’s toes pointed and touching your knee, like a weathervane in a high and prevailing wind. And you stop … up! No slopping into a fourth position like a sandbag heaved into a corner. But up, perfectly placed, smiling, completely controlled. Miss Craske calls out, “A double pirouette is enough. But stay up. Let them see you….” You sink down into your fourth position like a feather coming to rest. Then further, until your knee is on the floor behind you. You make a grande révérence to your invisible audience. In your head, you hear them applauding you, loving you. You rise in one movement to the ball of one foot to take a first arabesque, one arm extended in front, your leg lifted and foot pointed behind, a perfect and classic profile, you are looking into the wings. You lift leg and arm slightly as though you are about to fly away, and you are gone into the wings. In the thunder of their hands beating upon each other.
You imagine someone else appears upstage from the opposite wing. Your partner on pointe, fingers just touching the edge of the circle of her fragile, platterlike tutu skirt. The music shifts and ripples, and she’s off in her own magical floating and rippling and darting around the stage.
Oh, it was wonderful. Dancing–the perfect art. Consuming itself as it happens. Leaving you only with the feeling of having seen … or felt … moments of actually doing what you once only dreamed of doing.
For it is like a dream, one of those weightless dreams, where you are hovering in the air, quickly moving here, hovering there. So much faster and lighter than an ordinary movement. Lifted by the music. It’s no wonder that you become obsessed with making your body more aerodynamic, ridding it of excess weight that holds you earthbound.
This was the fantasy in class. Preparing for performance. Then imagining, in the brief moments of performing at the end of the class, that you were there: dancing in St. Petersburg or Paris or London, on stage with Karsavina or Massine or one of the baby ballerinas–Toumanova, Baronova, Riabouchinska.
I was never interested in modern dance, though we had a class in it at the opera from the beautiful Mary Hinkson. So beautiful you almost became convinced there was something in it. But none of us wanted to throw our bodies to the floor like Martha Graham, or strain our bodies up from it. We hated turning our thighs in, clenching knees together, when we had spent hours straining them apart.
We always said that modern dancers were people whose thighs were too large to do ballet. Though Mary Hinkson was there to show us differendy. But there was something to it. The great goddess Graham never showed her legs, only outlined under tight-stretched skirts. I’m sure she had Oriental blood, with a kimono body and a Javanese princess’s head.
I saw her dance in one of her last performances. Could she have been near eighty? She flung herself to the stage. I felt sick. Surely she would not rise again. But she did. Only to fling herself down again. This is not good, I thought. But it was the apogee, the pinnacle, for someone whose body loved to dance but whose legs precluded classic ballet. She had created an entire way of dancing all her own, and many followed her.
But Martha was never to know the thrill of the orchestra playing, your cue coming, and out you went, whirling and spinning through the air, only lightly touching the stage with the ball of your foot or the tip of your toe.
The Yellow Opera House and the White Virgin
If it can ever be said that on
e loved a building, I loved the old opera house. And it wasn’t even beautiful. It was rather ugly. It was yellow for one thing, the old Metropolitan Opera. It was built of yellow brick and really didn’t have an imposing facade on any one of its four sides. It was rather like Carnegie Hall in that respect. You got the feeling that the architects had decided upon all the things that had to be inside, arranged them, and then slapped brick on the outside of all these cubes and squares and horseshoes of opera boxes. There was a large flat front on Broadway that looked like one of those unfinished churches in Italy, the ones where they spent all the money on the lavish interiors and never had the money to finish the facade. The Metropolitan had a glass-topped Victorian carriage entrance along all of the ground floor of this facade, and an even more important one on the Thirty-ninth Street side. It was at the Thirty-ninth Street entrance that all the high-steppers and big spenders of the latter part of the last century arrived. There they swept in, with trains, piled-up hair, and lorgnettes. That was the women, of course. The men were in top hats, white tie, and smelling of bay rum and violet toilet water, with their hair slicked down tight and collars standing high.
You could easily imagine you were back in that past when you scurried down Fortieth Street in the late afternoon to the front of the building where we took our extra classes. We entered a door that led up to the rehearsal studios in that part of the opera house. In other studios, sopranos would be rehearsing Così fan tutte. The floors were covered in shiny brown linoleum, and the walls were a kind of beige that must have been customary at the turn of the century. The dark brown woodwork, the transoms above the doors, the building fairly reeking of the days of Evelyn Nesbit and the Red Velvet Swing–of brunettes in high pompadours and tight corsets, the swing of their skirts showing off a little foot, tightly booted.
This was the decor of a bygone era, still living on in the 1950s. Watching over us as we slipped off the raincoats we had flung on to run down the street, still in our ballet slippers even if the streets were wet or icy or packed with hard snow. We had little time to get ourselves around the corner from the rehearsals that ended at four o’clock and take our place at the barre for the 4:15 class.
Alfredo Corvino was our usual teacher. We all loved him. He was small and dark, solidly but beautifully built, with a classic but slightly rounded profile. And the gentlest of natures. He never raised his voice, and only when you looked hard into those eyes–so brown you couldn’t even see the pupil–did you see that he was deeply amused by the pretensions and folly that flowed around him: the students and dancers, all determined to get their legs and their careers higher with every passing day, and the singers swaggering through, their legs buckling under the weight of their stomachs and their egos.
Alfredo had been slated for an important career. He was being noticed in solo roles by the critics. Then World War II started and he was drafted. When the war was over, his hopes for a career were also. He was married and had two small daughters, and he inevitably turned to teaching. There was never a clue as to whether Alfredo was disappointed in the hand the game of life had dealt him. Like a Zen monk, he accepted cheerfully his daily round. Teaching class after class after class. Like most dancers, he actually loved dancing and loved seeing his students improve. I wonder if he was from Argentina originally. He wasn’t from Italy, and I don’t think he was born in the United States. You rarely see very masculine men with such a quality of sweetness and gentleness. He had to have been foreign–Americans are never like that.
While we were doing our pliés and ronds de jambe, the cleaning ladies were getting ready to leave the opera house, having prepared it for the evening performance. Down in the lower corridors, lights shone over the paintings of the stars of earlier days. Almost like a votive light, there was a single illumination shining down on Amelita Galli-Curci, Caruso, and Rosa Ponselle, stars who had made their names in this house. Our own stars were not there yet, though we heard that Zinka Milanov’s portrait was being done. We had seen pictures of her in the New York Times after opening night. She had appeared in the Grand Tier smothered in white fox to see how Maria Callas would be received by “her” public. Zinka was Yugoslavian. I always thought she was pleasant and untheatrical at rehearsals, though she clearly knew that respect was due her. She had an imperial manner–something like Queen Marie of Romania or the Queen Mother of England. Always smiling and pleasant, but unbending.
The red velvet staircases swept up to the upper corridor where you entered the boxes. Everything was red velvet and gold leaf, as you might expect in an opera house, but the lighting was very discreet. Small lights above the doors; golden, shadowy lights in the corridors. Even on the grand staircase there were no blazing lights to show off gowns and jewels. There was something very confidential about the opera house, as though you were in a jewel case, which was even more pronounced when you entered a box, or took your seat in one of the tiers above, to find yourself on the edge of a cavern of space.
Music flowed through these boxes, perfectly and clearly. Even when you were seated among hundreds, the yearning quality of the tenor’s voice in Il Trovatore was very personal. It made you remember what yearning was all about. And made you feel like crying.
The opera house was rather narrow for the depth of the space. The house occupied the entire block bounded by Broadway and Seventh Avenue, Thirty-ninth and Fortieth Streets. It was big. When you pass the ugly green-and-maroon skyscraper that now occupies the space, you can’t ignore that there was a lot of floor space there. But much of the sides were taken up with corridors, spacious boxes, and rehearsal rooms, so that the distance from the boxes to the stage was accentuated by the fact that the sides weren’t all that far apart. It was probably created in that way so that operagoers could observe what others were wearing and what appropriate or inappropriate people were accompanying their friends.
That was the atmosphere of the old, ugly yellow Met. Outside, the look of a beer factory. Inside, a hushed, vast, murky, low-lit jewel box just waiting for the lid to go up and reveal the glittering jewels on the stage.
Which could be both symbolic and real. For some reason, I was out front one night when Lily Pons was doing her Lucia. In the first act, she wore her own real diamonds. It was amazing. Under the spotlight, her diamond necklace ringed her neck in fire. It blazed as she sang. I have never seen jewels perform their role so burningly bright, perhaps to make up, in some way, for Lily’s diminishing brilliance in her last season.
Backstage, there was no muted anything. Everything backstage made you realize that the theater was made of wood. The pock-marked and beaten wooden stage itself: could it have been the original, after millions of nails had been driven into it and pulled out again? It hardly seems possible, but then again, nothing else had been changed since the opera house had been built.
The hallways and dressing rooms smelled of old wood. The old mirrors had reflected thousands of faces, and their old wooden frames had been repainted many times. They were encrusted like the frosting on a birthday cake, paint dripping here and there.
Many of the sets were originals from productions as long ago as the 1920s. The sets for La Gioconda were painted with realistic views of Venice, with no attempt at all to resemble fine art. The most beautiful sets of all were the Eugene Berman creations for Don Giovanni. They were enormous paintings, actually. One between-scenes drop was orange with a sharply painted black wall of ruins, foliage sprouting from the crumbling pillars. Acres of orange and black. How wonderful it would be to have a house so enormous that such a painting could be hung in the living room.
Eugene Berman was nowhere to be seen during the rehearsals for Don Giovanni, but Cecil Beaton was very much present when the sets were put up for Vanessa. Eleanor Steber was Vanessa, in large black hats with sweeping plumes. Beaton had done the sets in the style of Aubrey Beardsley. There was one brilliant ballroom scene, where the set was the entrance to the ballroom, with the effect that an enormous room swept away to the left, through a huge
arch. You really did have the feeling there was a vast room through that arch, one that reached all the way to Thirty-eighth Street. As I recall, everything was in black and white and orange in this set, too. Cecil shouldn’t be underestimated. He was like one of the great designers and set builders to Louis Quatorze. He knew his profession well, and when an effect was needed, he knew how to create it.
In comparison to these sets, the dressing rooms were squalid. They smelled of greasepaint, even though no one was using greasepaint anymore. Also, the dressing rooms had low ceilings, turn-of-the-century low lighting, and long tables with yellowish lights around the mirrors. When you looked into them and saw people moving behind you, it was always as though they were against black. Their bare bodies, trussed in with dance belts that made the waists smaller and the buttocks and crotch bulge, passed to and fro behind your bare shoulders as you daubed shadow over your eyes, glued your lashes together with sticky mascara, drew your eyebrows on above your real ones.
Minda Meryl
Was it strange, my friendship with Minda Meryl? She was a big star. Well, almost.
I was just a kid in the corps de ballet, one of the least important people in the opera company. Mr. Bing had just brought her in from Europe to do the Risë Stevens roles. She was a sensational Carmen and evidently had set all Vienna ablaze with envy. At least that was the way she told it. She was going to do Orpheus and Eurydice and Der Rosenkavalier the first season I was there. Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier, a “pants” role.
We met because I was going on as part of her entourage in Der Rosenkavalier on her second-act entrance. We had done our rehearsals with Risë Stevens, so I had never seen Minda.
The Sex Squad Page 9
