Apollo’s Angels

by Jennifer Homans

  If Nureyev’s defection was not enough, in October 1962 George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet (NYCB) arrived in Moscow for an eight-week tour, with stops in Leningrad, Tbilisi, Kiev, and Baku. It was a thrilling event—and another crack in the Soviet Union’s confident cultural façade. Balanchine, after all, had been one of Russia’s own: he had danced at the Maryinsky and worked with Lopukhov and Goleizovsky before emigrating to the West and settling in New York, where he founded the School of American Ballet (on the Russian model) in 1933 and the NYCB in 1948. More important, he had eschewed the story ballet in favor of a radically modernist and (as the Soviets put it) “formalist” neoclassical style. Many of his ballets had no story at all, only music and dances. And not just any music: Balanchine’s most radical works had been created in collaboration with the émigré composer Igor Stravinsky, whose own name and oeuvre had been banned in the USSR since the 1930s and had only recently been rehabilitated. Like Stravinsky, Balanchine was fiercely anti-Soviet; he consented to the tour only under sustained pressure from the State Department, and even then found the experience deeply disturbing.

  The New York City Ballet, however, was a sensation. When the company opened at the Bolshoi Theater on October 9, 1962, the theater had been sold out for weeks; Party officials and members of the Ministry of Culture were prominently arrayed. The company also performed at the cavernous six-thousand-seat Kremlin Palace of Congresses: it too sold out. The opening-night program began with Balanchine’s Serenade (1935), a lush, romantic ballet to music by Tchaikovsky and the choreographer’s earliest American composition; the dancers also performed Interplay, a jazzy dance by the American (of Russian-Jewish ancestry) choreographer Jerome Robbins, and Western Symphony, Balanchine’s tongue-in-cheek tribute to cowboys and the American West, to music by Hershy Kay. But it was Agon (1957) that left the Russians bewildered and aghast. Created in collaboration with Stravinsky, it featured an atonal score and dancers in simple black and white practice clothing against a plain blue backdrop. It was uncompromisingly abstract: Balanchine called it “a machine, but a machine that thinks.” Danced by Allegra Kent (the Russians called her the “Ulanova of America”) and Arthur Mitchell, it made a lasting impression, perhaps in part because it was performed with such intensity and abandon: Kent once said there was “a bit of Isadora and mountain goat” in her dancing, and Mitchell, as the ballerina Melissa Hayden put it, had “fire in his gut.”32

  The fervor with which the Soviet public greeted the New York City Ballet is difficult to convey. Night after night audiences rose to their feet and cheered, chanting “Bal-an-chine!” and often refusing to leave until the theater lights were put out. Those without tickets gathered outside and held vigil for hours; some followed the company to Leningrad and as far as Baku, where people clustered around the dancers on the street and even reached out to touch them, so exotic did they seem. The Soviet authorities did not always understand Balanchine’s work: they saw it through dram-balet eyes and habitually scanned the scene for a story. Someone told Lincoln Kirstein that Agon, which featured Kent (who is white) and Mitchell (who is black) was about “a Negro slave’s submission to the tyranny of an ardent white mistress.”33

  The NYCB tour was abruptly interrupted by the Cuban missile crisis. When President Kennedy issued his now-famous ultimatum, the company was still in Moscow, scheduled to perform once again at the Kremlin Palace of Congresses. The dancers were on edge, their nerves frayed by reports of violent demonstrations at the American embassy and the apparently imminent outbreak of war and a possible nuclear face-off. The theater stage had stairs connecting it to the house, and they worried that the audience might charge or riot. Instead, when the curtain went up on Serenade, with its Russian music and the corps de ballet in romantic tutus (created by the Russian émigré designer Karinska), heads bowed solemnly and feet together in the most basic of ballet positions, the audience stood and applauded wildly.34

  After the New York City Ballet had returned home, Hans Tuch, who had been assigned by the State Department to accompany the dancers, filed a lengthy report. “No one,” he wrote, “has questioned Soviet superiority in ballet training, musicality and choreography. The New York City Ballet comes along and shows that in exactly these three vital areas of ballet their director and their dancers are superior in many respects. This deep impression will … lead them [the Soviets] toward individual expression and liberalization in thought.” Indeed, the Soviets were acutely aware that for the first time since the late nineteenth century, Russian ballet was not necessarily unique in its achievements. The French and British, but especially the Americans, now had their own impressive artistic arsenals. Khrushchev’s confident assertion—“the best ballet is in the Soviet Union”—no longer appeared self-evident. When Soviet reporters had welcomed Balanchine to Moscow, “home of classic ballet,” he had sharply countered: “I beg your pardon, Russia is the home of romantic ballet. The home of classic ballet is now America.” The Soviets did not take the point lightly. At a meeting of the Party Congress in 1963, ranking officials expressed alarm that the Americans—and the NYCB in particular—might overtake Russia in this, the country’s proudest national art.35

  Exposure to the West, however, did not necessarily open Soviet dancers (or the Party) to change or liberalization. It was often assumed that once the door to the West had been cracked open the Russians would rush to emulate their Western counterparts—to catch up with all they had missed. And they had missed so much: Balanchine and Robbins, but also jazz and atonal music, abstract expressionism, Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, and more. But that was not necessarily the way things looked from Moscow. The tremendous success of the Bolshoi Ballet abroad seemed proof enough of the superiority of their way of dancing, and if Erik Bruhn, Nureyev’s defection, and especially the New York City Ballet had sown doubts, this did little to change the rigidly ideological cast of Soviet thinking about ballet. If anything, the Bolshoi retrenched, certain of its superiority and special path. On a subsequent tour to New York, Lavrovsky took the opportunity to lecture Balanchine on his “clever-clever” approach and wrong turn away from the story ballet. The thaw, moreover, proved uneven: in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis, Khrushchev tightened cultural policy, and the ongoing and numbing ideological debates over dram-balet and formalism resumed their course.36

  In Leningrad, however, the effects of the opening to the West were more serious and debilitating. The Kirov had not been nearly as successful abroad: their style of dancing was too similar, too close in origins, to that of Europe and America to make a strong impression. They had none of the exoticism and extravagance that characterized the Bolshoi and made it such a hit with foreigners. Their biggest splash had been Nureyev’s defection. This, combined with the knowledge that the West—and the Americans in particular—had ballets (and dancers) at least as accomplished as their own, severely undermined the Kirov’s prestige and morale. The Kirov/Maryinsky, after all, was tied to the West by history and tradition in ways that the Bolshoi was not, and its identity had always depended in part on its ability to meet and surpass Europe in balletic achievement. Under Stalin, the Kirov’s dancers had been cut off and isolated, turned in on themselves or focused instead to the east and Moscow. Now, as artistic developments in Paris, London, and New York came into sharper focus, the Kirov’s self-confidence wavered. Ever since Petipa, they had led the West; now they were in its shadow.

  The Kirov, at a low ebb and with few internal resources to sustain it, began to weaken. Nureyev was not the last dancer to defect. The next generation was too savvy—and cynical—to feel much involvement in “building the socialist paradise,” and too young to know firsthand the patriotism and sense of common purpose born of the Great Patriotic War. More detached and skeptical, they found the postures and pieties of their elders old-fashioned and quaint. The ballerina Natalia Makarova (b. 1940), for example, later recalled her scorn for the “dilapidated style” of ballets like Romeo and Juliet and The Fountain of Bakhchisar
ai and her embarrassment at the way Sergeyev, who still danced the lead romantic role in Giselle, wept with Stanislavsky-inspired emotion onstage. Even Ulanova—whom she saw only on film—seemed to her “magical” but “a bit contrived.” She idolized Yakobson, but his difficulties with the Party only deepened her cynicism and frustration. In 1970, when the Kirov was on tour to London, she defected. Sergeyev lost his job.37

  Four years later Mikhail Baryshnikov followed. Born in Riga, Latvia, in 1948, Baryshnikov owed his beginnings in ballet to his mother. She was poorly educated but adored ballet; she took him to performances and enrolled him in the prestigious Riga School of Choreography, the city’s state ballet academy, where he received excellent training. When he was twelve, however, tragedy struck: one afternoon his mother left him with his grandmother and committed suicide. Baryshnikov’s father, an army officer and dedicated Communist, was a cold and distant man and appears to have been little help to his son. In 1964, when he was just sixteen, Baryshnikov traveled to Leningrad with the Latvian National Opera Ballet and successfully auditioned for the Vaganova School. He was taken in by the teacher Alexander Pushkin, who had also kept and trained Nureyev (the older dancer’s clothes were still in the closets when Baryshnikov arrived at the Pushkin home). Pushkin became a mentor and surrogate father. Baryshnikov rose rapidly: he joined the Kirov in 1967 (“when it was falling apart,” as he later recalled) and became the star of the company’s 1970 tour to the West.38

  On tour he saw American Ballet Theatre, visited the Royal Ballet, and met secretly with Nureyev. The Soviet authorities were wary: sensing the danger, they lavished the young dancer with privileges. Anointed “Honored Artist of the USSR” in 1973, he was given a large apartment, a cleaning lady, and a car. An offer to join the Bolshoi Ballet followed, and was politely refused—Baryshnikov knew too much and cared too little to be bought or seduced by the trappings of Soviet power. When Pushkin died in 1970, the dancer felt increasingly depressed and artistically isolated. He was given opportunities to perform new work, but nothing came easily. In 1974, for example, he staged a “creative evening” at a small theater, but the authorities meddled incessantly: they insisted that the costumes were too skimpy and the choreography worthless. Later that year, he defected in Canada.

  There were others. Alexander Filipov had left in 1970 and Alexander Minz in 1973. The dancers Valery and Galina Panov emigrated to Israel in 1974 after years of persecution and a hunger strike which made their plight an international cause célèbre. Then in 1977 the dancer Yuri Soloviev, one of the Kirov’s greatest talents, was found dead at his home in a purported suicide—another heavy blow to the company’s morale. The Bolshoi was not immune to such troubles: in 1979 three of its top dancers defected while on tour in the United States, and the following year the teacher Sulamith Messerer and her son (relatives of Plisetskaya) also took flight. But the pull to the West was not nearly as strongly felt in Moscow: its dancers were too stylistically different to fit easily in the West—and too taken with their own prestige and power to imagine leaving the Soviet State.

  In 1977 the choreographer Oleg Vinogradov took over the Kirov and would stay until 1995. He expanded the repertory, and the dancers learned works by Balanchine, Bournonville, and Fokine. But if this provided much-needed stimulation, it did little to offset the sense of loss and moral decay that had taken hold of the company. Vinogradov’s tenure was also marked by financial scandal and declining artistic standards. As the Kirov fell into disarray, its dancers retreated into their schooling. This is what Nureyev and especially Makarova and Baryshnikov had brought to the West, and it would sustain Kirov dancers at home for at least two generations to come. Artistically adrift, they clung to the old texts and painstakingly copied and recopied (repeated and rehearsed) the steps and teachings that had been passed down to them, binding them into their own bodies. This mattered: by focusing narrowly on the rules and practices Vaganova and others had left them, dancers in Leningrad managed to preserve the core of their tradition.

  The Kirov’s slow eclipse coincided with the Bolshoi’s rise. The Bolshoi’s triumphs in London and New York in 1956 and 1959 had set the stage for a new phase in the development of dance in the USSR. As if to mark the moment, in 1960 Ulanova retired from the Bolshoi, and four years later Lavrovsky also departed. The old Kirov-trained Bolshoi generation, with their classical elegance and poise, was passing. Henceforth, the Bolshoi would no longer depend on Leningrad for talent or ideas. Indeed, its own native traditions, its taste for the colloquial and its rawer, more vulgar, and folkish manners, were turning out to be its greatest asset. The Bolshoi’s rise, however, was not only a matter of the resurgence of old habits and practices. Nothing in its past could account for the scale and sheer ambition of the dances and dancers that now took its stage. This was something new: a bigger and bolder Bolshoi style.

  What was this new Bolshoi style? It was not classical or refined, and it had nothing to do with the Kirov’s high Romantic lyricism, elegant simplicity, and dram-balet intensity. Instead, it was brash and physically bold, crassly monumental, and churned by a deep undercurrent of defiance and even anger. It was a refutation of “civilization” and the West and bore all of the marks of a hardened Slavophilia. We think we know it well. The Bolshoi, after all, performed repeatedly in the West during the Cold War and its artists were widely seen and much discussed; those who saw them perform will never forget their ferocious energy and zeal. Yet there are enormous gaps. We can say what the Bolshoi dancers looked like and describe the character and eccentricities of their movement, but until recently we in the West have known very little about where their style came from and how the dancers’ lives tied into their art. This is true for dancers from the Kirov as well, but there at least we are familiar with the training and approach—we know it firsthand from émigrés and defectors, and even from our own dancers, many of whom drew directly from the Maryinsky source. The Bolshoi was stranger: more oriental and driven less by rules than by passions—and politics.

  Fortunately, however, we now know quite a lot about one of the Bolshoi’s greatest ballerinas, Maya Plisetskaya, who has written her autobiography. As a dancer, Plisetskaya exemplified the Bolshoi’s postwar style, and in her writing she has told us something of the complicated political, personal, and artistic dynamic that made her the dancer she was. We shouldn’t believe everything she says, but her life and art are nonetheless a case study—and one of the best guides we have—to the sources and inner workings of the Bolshoi’s distinctive way of dancing in these years.

  If Ulanova represented Leningrad and a pure Kirov style, Plisetskaya was her opposite: a woman of Moscow with no “real school” (that is, no sustained Vaganova training), no tradition, “no beliefs,” and a childhood bloodied by the twentieth century. Her life in dancing began in 1934, when she was admitted to the school of the Bolshoi Ballet at the age of nine. Her father had been a committed Communist, proclaimed a national hero for his work on behalf of the Soviet coal industry and presented with one of the first Soviet-manufactured cars by Molotov himself. He was also, however, a Jew. In 1937, at the height of the purges, he was arrested (and eventually executed) and her mother was deported to a camp in Kazakhstan. Barely a teenager and faced with terror, war, and dislocation, Maya took refuge in ballet and the Bolshoi Theater; like so many other dancers, she found a home there and in 1943 was invited to join the company. Thus the little girl whose father Stalin had murdered would soon become the de facto prima ballerina of the USSR. But her devastating personal loss and profound—and profoundly ambivalent—relationship to the Soviet state did not go away. They lay the foundation of her art.39

  As a performer, Plisetskaya excelled in the hard-edged, technically demanding roles that Ulanova eschewed: Raymonda, the black swan in Swan Lake, Kitri in Don Quixote. She never danced the role of Giselle (“something in me opposed it, resisted, argued with it”), but instead played the iron-willed queen of the wilis. She was also the jealous, seductive harem girl—not th
e “good” Maria—in The Fountain of Bakhchisarai. Physically this made sense: Plisetskaya was beefy and strong, with thick legs and a muscular back. Stylistically, her movements were hard and unyielding, never elegant or polite. Her technique was raw but powerful—she lacked the refinement of the Kirov school, but could save a step or pull herself back into alignment from a dangerously off-balance position by dint of sheer force. Films of Plisetskaya’s performances show her throwing herself into dancing with an abandon few ballerinas would dare, and in her sharp light, Ulanova’s restrained purity can take on the paler glow of piety. She was brazen and often moved with questionable taste. “I knew some things, others I stole, some I figured out myself, took advice, blundered through. And it was all haphazard, random.” But there was also something appealing about her garishness: she was unpretentious, refreshing, direct. She did not hold back.40

  Behind her exuberance, however, lay years of struggle and defiance. In 1948, just after Zhdanov issued his infamous decrees, her career—which had just taken off—came to a screeching halt. Her family history made her a natural target: she was publicly humiliated and excoriated for not attending political meetings, roles were taken away, privileges rescinded. Eventually, and worst of all, she was categorized as “non-exportable” and allowed to tour only within the Soviet bloc or to points east, such as India. After Stalin’s death and during the thaw this was a kind of artistic death. Tours to the West, as we have seen, conferred prestige, power, and fame (not to mention suitcases of material goods). Without the imprimatur of the Western press, moreover, Plisetskaya knew she would not be taken seriously in Moscow. She would become a provincial artist, consigned to grimy, unrewarding bus tours, exclusively for local consumption.