Apollo’s Angels

by Jennifer Homans

  By the mid-1960s, then, classical ballet was on firm footing. In the space of thirty years it had moved from being a scattered and largely Russian art on the theatrical margins to the forefront of American cultural life. For the next two decades it would be a booming and popular performing art, centered in New York but also spreading out across the nation. In the 1960s and ’70s, American youth culture, with its emphasis on sex and free self-expression, was naturally drawn to dance, and public interest in the art of ballet intensified further still. It became at once the focus of innovation and an object of criticism, central to debates about the future direction of American culture. Moreover, as Cold War competition intensified and the Bolshoi and Kirov toured regularly to the United States, ballet seemed more important than ever. The highly publicized and symbolically laden defections of Nureyev in 1961 followed by Makarova in 1970 and Baryshnikov four years later, and the ongoing Soviet tours featuring artists such as Maya Plisetskaya fed the art.

  The “dance boom,” as it was known, really was a boom—and not only for Ballet Theatre and NYCB. Robert Joffrey, for example, an American dancer of Afghan and Italian descent with an iconoclastic vision and wide-ranging tastes, had his own youthful and off-beat company. Joffrey commissioned revivals of dances from Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and seemed to take his cue from the impresario’s proviso, “Astonish me!” Unafraid in other works to mix ballet with rock and roll, film, and popular culture, the Joffrey Ballet was a “bad boy,” youth-movement troupe with serious artistic ambitions—and another sign of ballet’s vitality and widespread appeal.

  Baryshnikov was another case in point. He settled at Ballet Theatre and won audiences with his pristine classical form, but like Nureyev, he also became an American celebrity whose performances attracted sell-out crowds and standing ovations. In 1977 he starred in the acclaimed film The Turning Point, a melodrama about the dance world that also featured the young American ballerina Leslie Browne. It had the impact of a modern-day Red Shoes. (White Nights, a Cold War thriller featuring Baryshnikov and the American tap dancer Gregory Hines, would follow in 1985.) Meanwhile, in 1976 PBS had begun a new series, Dance in America, that broadcast dances, including performances by Baryshnikov and ballets by Balanchine (who personally collaborated on the filming), into living rooms nationwide.

  It was not only ballet. In these years, American modern dance was also flourishing. In New York, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, and Paul Taylor (among others) were all making original work. The sheer variety of dance forms—from ballet to modern dance, jazz to flamenco—and the experimental energy of artists and performers made the city a spawning ground for talent and ideas. By the 1970s, a new generation of choreographers was pressing to integrate classical and contemporary dance forms. It was not that ballet and modern dance were merging; aesthetically and intellectually they were ever more opposed. It was the contrast and collision of ideas and techniques, hotly debated by dancers at the time, rather than any peaceful commingling, that stood behind the tremendous dynamism in dance in these years.

  The most obvious example, once again, was Baryshnikov: he was among the world’s finest classicists, but he also eagerly embraced American avant-garde trends. At Ballet Theatre in 1976 he worked with the choreographer Twyla Tharp to create a new dance, aptly titled Push Comes to Shove, to music by Joseph Lamb (ragtime) and Franz Joseph Haydn. In it, Baryshnikov and Tharp freely and playfully offset ballet steps with popular dance forms and Tharp’s own iconoclastic postmodern techniques. This was not a case, however, of dynamic popular or avant-garde forms invigorating a high classical art; if anything, ballet was the more radically experimental art. It is no accident that modern dancers were becoming increasingly serious students of ballet, which they saw not just as a base of technique but also a source of innovation. Never had the net of ballet been cast so far.

  But if historical circumstances set the stage for a burgeoning American ballet, the dances themselves mattered even more. It was the ballets, after all, that drew audiences night after night to the theater, and it was the ballets that represented the U.S. abroad. The men (for in ballet they were almost exclusively men) who made these dances, preeminently Antony Tudor, Jerome Robbins, and George Balanchine, presided over one of the most exciting artistic revolutions of the century.

  One’s homeland is not a geographical convention, but an insistence of memory and blood. Not to be in Russia, to forget Russia—you fear that only if you think Russia is outside yourself. Whoever has Russia inside will lose it only along with his life.

  —MARINA TSVETAEVA

  Superficial Europeans are accustomed to say that American artists have no “soul.” This is wrong. America has its own spirit—cold, crystalline, luminous, hard as light … Good American dancers can express clean emotion in a manner that might almost be termed angelic. By angelic I mean the quality supposedly enjoyed by the angels, who, when they relate a tragic situation, do not themselves suffer.

  —GEORGE BALANCHINE

  You should never dance anything for the audience. It ruins it if you do. You should dance only to each other. As if the audience weren’t there. It’s very hard.

  —JEROME ROBBINS

  on Dances at a Gathering

  CAME to ballet haltingly and from the outside. Born William John Cook in 1908, he was the son of a butcher and raised in the Finsbury section of North London. His upbringing was solidly lower-middle-class Edwardian: his mother insisted on proper manners and piano lessons, and every Saturday night his father took him to music hall performances at the Finsbury Park Empire or in nearby Islington, where he saw the popular singer Harry Lauder and the spectacular scarf and light acts of the American dancer Loïe Fuller. During the First World War the family was evacuated, a harrowing experience that left a lasting impression on Tudor that would later also mark his art.

  When the war ended, he had trouble settling. He won a scholarship to Dame Alice Owens School for Boys but left at sixteen to take up a clerical job in the Smithfield Meat Market, although this too left him cold: it was tedious work and he looked for respite in theological studies—he considered a career in the ministry—and at the theater. Performances by Anna Pavlova and Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes inspired him to take dance classes, and in 1928 he found his way to Marie Rambert. He worked and played the piano for Rambert in exchange for room, board—and ballet lessons.

  Rambert represented an entirely different world. The theater she ran with her husband, the playwright Ashley Dukes, was literary and very upper-middle-class: performances were swish events attended by London’s artistic and social elite in full evening dress. Tudor liked being there and worked hard to fit in. Intellectually curious, he read widely from Rambert’s extensive library, and she sent him to a fashionable Wimpole Street diction teacher to rid him of his cockney accent—although he never quite internalized the BBC English she (a Polish Jew) probably had in mind.

  Tudor’s approach, to this as to everything, was ironic and humorously detached: he did not plunge into Rambert’s society but instead (as de Mille later put it) watched “with remembering eyes and drank his tea quietly wrapped in his dreams of world ambition. He was a kind of hibernating carnivore.” Suspended between Rambert’s aristocratic milieu and the shopkeeper world of his youth and acutely aware that he belonged to neither, he stood on the outside and peered in. He even changed his name from William Cook to Antony Tudor: it seemed suitably grand and English “with just that touch of Welsh,” but it was also his uncle’s telephone prefix.1

  Tudor studied ballet with Rambert, but Mim’s (as she was called) central European background and work with Dalcroze and Nijinsky also figured strongly. Together they attended performances by the German choreographer Kurt Jooss, whose ballet The Green Table (1932) had been rightly recognized as a breakthrough in European dance. A highly stylized but nonetheless balletic depiction of the vain, gesticulating “old men” who had driven Europe into the First World War, the ballet was representative of Jooss’s interest in cre
ating a new and modern dance—not by rejecting ballet but by building on a classical foundation.* It was a path Tudor would also follow. Interested in a wide range of dance forms, Tudor studied German Ausdruckstanz and even dabbled in Javanese dance, but above all he immersed himself in classical ballet. Yet his training was piecemeal and incomplete: he had only studied with Rambert for a year before he started performing on the British circuit, where he worked with Frederick Ashton and Ninette de Valois, among others. Two years later he created his first ballet.

  Tudor and Ashton soon became rivals. They could not have been more different, in style or temperament. If Ashton made his way artistically by plunging into London’s high society and artistic bohemia, Tudor remained resolutely standoffish. This was partly a matter of class: he simply did not have the background or education to feel comfortable in London society, nor is it clear he ever really wanted to. Tudor was naturally reclusive and a bit odd, too serious and cynical to bend fully to social custom, and although (like Ashton) he was homosexual, he was very private and uninterested in the casual affairs and parties that proved such a vital source for Ashton’s art. Tudor preferred his own intensely loyal circle of dancers, who worked, ate, and at times even lived together. And although many of Tudor’s early dances were (like Ashton’s) satirical and sexually tinged—some said lewd—the difference was clear. If Ashton captured English mores with consummate skill and excelled in the frothy and exuberant style of the 1920s, Tudor was more keyed to the anxieties of the 1930s. Ashton used music by Franz Liszt and Lord Berners; Tudor gravitated to Prokofiev and Kurt Weill.

  In London in 1936 Tudor created his first important ballet, Lilac Garden, to Ernest Chausson’s eerily lyrical Poem for Violin and Orchestra. The ballet is set at a party in a bourgeois Edwardian family and tells the story of Caroline, who must marry a nouveau-riche gentleman, not for love but for money. To complicate matters, the man she really loves is at the party too, and so is the old lover of her new fiancé. The characters are stiffly formal and quasi-allegorical (The Man She Must Marry, An Episode in His Past, The Lover) and the party unfolds in a series of fleeting episodes and dramatic encounters between Caroline and her old and true love—and between The Man She Must Marry and women in his past. The dances are formal and elegant, in a ballroom style, but the dancers are really living in an intimate, Proustian world of memory and nostalgia. (To accentuate the effect, Tudor sprayed lilac scent into Rambert’s theater on opening night.) At the end, the couples are forced from their misty memories back into the present: Caroline and The Man She Must Marry walk offstage together, although each is wrapped in thoughts of the past. Caroline’s former lover stands alone onstage, his back to the audience.

  The real subject of Lilac Garden, then, is not what happens: it is precisely what doesn’t happen and isn’t said that interests Tudor, the turbulent undercurrents of memory and desire that flow beneath the polished surface of convention and social etiquette. “This ballet,” as Tudor himself once put it, “concerns itself with the concealing of emotions from outward display.” The idea, however, was not to convey these concealed feelings through acting or melodrama. Tudor hated what he called “ham acting” and wanted the subterranean story of the ballet to emerge from the movement alone. The goal, as one of Tudor’s dancers once explained, was paradoxical: to “convey that you are feeling emotion without showing it … You can feel people’s muscles tensing on stage even if you can’t see them.” Although the steps in Lilac Garden are strictly classical, as Tudor liked to emphasize, the body is also at moments tense and withheld, or at others unexpectedly soft and yielding—one sees both the ballroom dance and something else underneath it at the same time.2

  A year later and in a very different key, Tudor produced Dark Elegies to Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder for a small group of his own dancers. It was a ballet about grief and mourning in a vaguely central European peasant community. Once again, however, the emotional power of the dances lay in understatement and restraint. Tudor asked the dancers not to wear stage makeup and not to show any facial expression: “Sit very simply, with your hands laid in your lap. No nail polish.” The curtain rises on a semicircle of women in drab dresses and head scarves. Another woman enters their midst on pointe, performing a small, stiff, and uncomfortable jabbing step, arms limp at her side: the step does not show suffering exactly, but indicates instead her urgent desire to hide its most painful aspects. There are solos and duets, dances that seem to arise spontaneously, like testimony in a Quaker meeting, and then fade back into the group. The movements are clean and classical but never ornamented or decorative: hands are flat, arms held low, the look pedestrian.3

  In Dark Elegies, grief is present but never expressed; instead we see its ritual forms, and above all the physical (and thus emotional) control—repression, even—needed to manage it. There is nothing showy or presentational, and in fact the ballet proceeds as if the audience does not exist. It is not narrated to us; it is just happening and we are there, as if in passing or peering in from the outside. Dark Elegies ends as the dancers walk off the stage together, hands joined in pairs, while the lone woman—forever scarred—repeats her pained jabbing step as she follows behind. The effect is inconclusive: the ballet is over but the ritual is not. The procession merely moves out of our line of vision, off the screen, where it will continue. It was a powerful and original work. London critics, however, were not always convinced: one found it overly serious and complained that the ballet was like watching “a very serious dress-reform colony going through its morning exercises.” Echoing the sentiment, Frederick Ashton noted sardonically that Tudor’s ballets were full of “depth charge.”4

  But if Tudor’s almost Puritan severity seemed to some out of place in Britain, it found a welcome audience in the United States. In 1939, just two days after Britain declared war with Germany, the choreographer accepted an invitation from Lucia Chase to represent “English ballet” on Ballet Theatre’s inaugural program: he stayed in New York for the rest of his life, and his dances became the cornerstone for a whole tradition in American dance.

  Tudor brought Lilac Garden and Dark Elegies with him. He also brought Hugh Laing, his most trusted dancer, lover, and lifelong friend. Laing had a strong, muscular physique, with none of the aristocratic airs typical of ballet’s princes: he had very little classical training, and his sexy but compressed and rough-hewn look suited Tudor’s emerging style perfectly. In New York, Tudor found Laing’s counterpart and partner, and one of his closest collaborators: Nora Kaye.

  Kaye was a child of Russian immigrant Jews. Born Nora Koreff in New York City in 1920, she was named after Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Her father was an actor who had worked with Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theater before immigrating to the United States, and Kaye studied ballet with Russian émigrés and danced with Fokine. She was a founding member of Ballet Theatre in 1939, but in a sign of the changing times she did not wish to be thought of as a Russian ballerina: therefore, reversing the usual trend, she Americanized her name, substituting Kaye for Koreff. Like Laing, Kaye was a gutsy performer. She was not glamorous or elegant—instead she had sinewy legs and a muscular torso, short black hair (no prim ballerina buns), and a smart, streetwise comportment. Her biting wit and unforgiving directness seemed to inure her to the kind of overwrought sentiment and melodrama Tudor so hated in ballet.

  In 1942 Tudor created Pillar of Fire, featuring Kaye and Laing, to Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht. The ballet’s title came from a passage in Exodus: as the Jews fled Egypt “the lord went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud to lead them the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light.” The story, however, was inspired by another biblical tale about Hagar, handmaiden to Abraham’s wife, who was asked to give Abraham a child and was then abruptly cast out when his wife, Sarah, gave birth to her own son. Schoenberg’s music had its own backstory of outcasts: it was inspired by a poem by the German poet Richard Dehmel about a woman who walks through the forest at night w
ith her beloved and confesses that she is carrying the child of another man. Her love and his forgiveness “transfigure” them—and the night.

  In Tudor’s ballet, Hagar is an outcast too, a good woman from a respectable family who goes astray. Distraught when her flirtatious younger sister (a beauty in pink) steals the man she has set her sights on (an upright gentleman in suit and tie danced by Tudor himself), Hagar finds herself drawn to a disreputable roué, the Man Opposite (danced by Laing). They have an affair and perform a pas de deux with obvious sexual overtones, tense and interlaced bodies and legs. She is a fallen woman and consumed with guilt. The ballet nevertheless ends happily: her true love finally saves her and they walk away together, hand in hand, transfigured.

  As in Lilac Garden, however, the story is only a pretext for emotions, and Tudor, following Schoenberg, paints a portrait of Hagar’s inner life. There is nothing romantic or emotional about this: it is a clinical account, distant and detached. We watch Hagar from the outside, and although we feel her anxiety and self-doubt, we do not empathize with her or relive her feelings: instead we are watching her inner agony up close, studying it as if under a microscope. But we don’t see everything: the ballet is structured in part like a film, and Tudor pulls the audience’s eye to the cropped corners of the stage and zooms in on the smallest of movements for effect. For example, when the curtain rises, the center stage is empty, but we see Hagar in a “close-up” sitting on an uncomfortable wooden chair outside her home on the far side of the stage. She is tense and turned into herself, with legs tightly together and arms pressed to her sides. Nothing happens until she slowly and deliberately lifts a hand—only a hand (we zoom in tight)—and brings it heavily and with great effort to her forehead in a gesture of apprehension. With this simple gesture we are immediately drawn into her anxieties.