Balanchine’s emphasis on technical and musical precision, and on formal composition as opposed to stories and dramatic acting, has at times been misunderstood. Some critics (then and now) have characterized his dancers as cold and unfeeling, technically impressive but without soul or individuality, and his ballets as flatly abstract. Balanchine himself seemed to encourage this misconception with his oft-repeated “just the steps” doctrine. Asked what a ballet was about, he liked to respond, “About twenty-eight minutes.” Similarly, he cautioned his dancers against unseemly “emoting,” insisting that they restrict themselves to clear, musically precise execution of steps. Sweeping theories and fancy critical or literary interpretations did not interest him. “Horses don’t talk,” he said. “They just go!”40
But when Balanchine told his dancers, as he often did, “Don’t think, just dance,” or “Don’t act, just do the steps,” he was not telling them to erase themselves or stop thinking—to become blank or cold or abstract. He was asking them to have faith and submit to the ordered laws of ballet and music, cosmic and physiological. It was not an invitation to plunge into an inchoate spirituality, but required acute self-awareness, clarity, and training. To master the truth, a dancer first had to know exactly why she did a tendu this way and not that. Thus although a quip like “About twenty-eight minutes” sounded like a just-the-steps modernist doctrine, it also pointed to a religious and classical sensibility: dance and music made according to universal, divine laws do not require explanation. “Sometimes,” as the ballerina Merrill Ashley astutely put it, “I feel like I am talking about a religion.”41
If NYCB was distinctly Russian in cast, however, its dancers were not. They were overwhelmingly American. They danced Balanchine’s ballets and entered his Russian world on their own terms, threading his beliefs and ideas, consciously or otherwise, through their own knowledge and experiences. And Balanchine never choreographed a ballet in the abstract; his dances were always for the particular dancers he was working with at the time (as he once said, “these dancers, this music, here, now”). The result was a remarkably productive clash of cultures: a complicated melding of Russian ballet and American bodies, of the manners of Imperial St. Petersburg with those of New York, Cleveland, and Los Angeles. American dancers had their own gait and disposition: open, energetic, and direct. It is no accident, moreover, that very few of Balanchine’s dancers had theatrical backgrounds and that with rare exceptions none of them was Russian. His dancers—the dancers he chose—came to ballet without preconceptions or pretense. Compared to the more sophisticated performers Balanchine had worked with in St. Petersburg, Paris, and London, they were wide open—and it showed in their dancing, which was unusually fresh, eccentric, and daring.42
Consider just a few of Balanchine’s finest dancers. Maria Tallchief (Elizabeth Marie Tall Chief, b. 1925) was a Native American raised on an Osage reservation, and her dark, exotic beauty and sensitive musicality (she was an accomplished pianist) marked her as Balanchine’s first American ballerina. She was also, however, a link between Russia and the New World. For although she was Native American, her training was perfectly Russian—she had studied with Bronislava Nijinska in California. She had the strength and formal presentation typical of the Russian school, but there was also something simple and naive about her dancing. It is no accident that she made her greatest mark in Balanchine’s version of Stravinsky’s Firebird (1949), a ballet originally choreographed by Fokine for the Ballets Russes in 1909. With Tallchief, Balanchine recast Diaghilev’s first self-consciously Russian ballet in a newly American image.
Melissa Hayden (Mildred Herman, 1923–2006) was born in Toronto to a Russian Jewish émigré family. She started dancing as a teenager (very late) and came to New York City Ballet via Radio City Music Hall. Hayden was sharply analytic, gutsy, and independent: her dancing was razor-edged in its precision, and full of the risks and drama that also characterized her life. Allegra Kent (Iris Margo Cohen) was born in 1937 and raised in Texas, California, and Florida by her mother, a Polish Jew from a shtetl in Wisznice; the family moved constantly, fleeing poverty, and Allegra was poorly educated and raised on a mix of Christian Science and superstition. She started dancing just after the war and later recalled competing with—and outjumping—burly GIs (the GI Bill covered ballet as well as college). Her dancing was big and uninhibited, but it was also intensely inward and sexual, with great rushes of exhilaration and delight at strange and beautiful things.
There were many, many others: Suzanne Farrell (Roberta Sue Ficker, b. 1945) was from Cincinnati, Ohio, Catholic, lower-middle-class, raised by her mother (her parents were divorced), and among the first to come to New York on a Ford Foundation scholarship. By her own account, she lived in a closed ballet universe, tinged with Catholic imagery and heightened by the intense love affair she had with Balanchine. (One of Farrell’s classmates was impressed when her picture appeared in a glossy magazine next to that of the Beatles: she, on the other hand, had never heard of them.) Jacques d’Amboise (b. 1934) was a Catholic street kid from Washington Heights who came “south” to SAB and NYCB and plunged into the part-real, part-imaginary world of noble manners and Russian classicism via Obukhov, Vladimirov, and Balanchine. The point is that for all of these young dancers ballet was never a pretty tutu art but something far more urgent and personal. They came to it for different reasons, but none of them came to it easily, and none of them ever saw it as merely a job. They were drawn to Balanchine, who became their education: at his school and in his company they received a classical training as disciplined and intellectually rigorous as any available at the time. They, in turn, were his materials: their personalities, quirks, obsessions, and physical characters were the instruments of his art, and his dances were always in some measure about them.
All of Balanchine’s great dancers were of course talented, but not in the ways that people often assume—long legs, turned-out feet, small heads, and unusual flexibility. In fact, his featured artists never fit to this (or any other) type. Some had beautifully proportioned bodies (Suzanne Farrell), but others were odder (Melissa Hayden). What they did share—and this was far more important—was an unusual physical luminosity. When a Balanchine dancer performed a step, you could see more in the movements—more dimension, more depth, more range—than you could with another dancer, no matter how perfectly shaped her legs or feet. Unconsciously or otherwise, the dancers Balanchine chose made you see. (He said of audiences: “They look but they do not see, so we must show them.”) This is a form of physical and musical intelligence, difficult to define but clear to the eye. These were smart, often unusual people, and many became Balanchine’s close collaborators—not necessarily because of what they thought or said, but because of the ways they moved. Like Russian icon makers, Balanchine’s dancers had a special capacity to illuminate.43
Balanchine did all he could to preserve his American dancers’ natural gifts, and he worked hard to insulate them from what he took to be the corrupting effects of success and stardom. NYCB had a stringent no-stars policy: no Russian prima donnas (Rudolf Nureyev was politely declined), no exorbitant fees (all dancers were salaried), no special billing (dancers were listed alphabetically). The idea was not to level or democratize the company—the dancers had always been clearly ranked, and everyone knew that even within the hierarchy some were more equal than others. Rather, the point of “no stars” was to prevent posturing and ego from creeping into the dancing—to keep the dancers honest, direct, and (in a way) innocent, to keep them American and not allow them to become (as performers sometimes do) a theatricalized version of themselves.
Balanchine’s dancers, and the women in particular, were riveting performers for other reasons too. Foremost among them was love. Not love for dancing, although that was part of it, but Balanchine’s love, for at different times and in varying ways he was in love with them all. These were often unusual relationships, based in part no doubt on sexual attraction but always pulled through the work, whi
ch was intimate even—especially—when its practices were formal. Over and again Balanchine’s ballerinas recall that he was “choreographing their lives,” and that when they danced his ballets they were more engaged, more themselves, than in their real offstage lives. Many of his dancers, moreover, were young, barely out of their teens and full of heightened adolescent emotions, which fed into their dance. Thus when Balanchine restaged Seven Deadly Sins (Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht) for Allegra Kent and Lotte Lenya in 1958 (he had staged the original with Lenya in 1933), Kent saw the involved relationship between the ballet’s two lead women as a reflection of her own difficult relationship with her mother. More dramatic still, when Balanchine staged Don Quixote in 1965 with Suzanne Farrell as Dulcinea and himself in the role of the Don, Farrell experienced the ballet as a deeply personal reenactment of their mutual but unconsummated passion and shared religious beliefs; she did not just dance the role, she lived it.
Balanchine famously said, “Ballet is woman,” and many of his dances openly idealized the “eternal feminine.” The ballerina was on a pedestal and the male dancer was cast—in Balanchine’s own image—as her devoted chevalier. Writing to Jackie Kennedy in 1961, Balanchine explained: “I mean to distinguish between material things and things of the spirit—art, beauty … Man takes care of the material things and woman takes care of the soul. Woman is the world and man lives in it.” His taste in male dancers followed. Jacques d’Amboise, one of Balanchine’s most powerful interpreters, was an avid reader and immersed in the imaginary and heroic worlds of Orlando Furioso and Lancelot, of chivalry and romantic love. He partnered his ballerinas accordingly, with decorum and grace. Nor is it a coincidence that Balanchine was drawn to Danish male dancers: they were beautifully trained in the Bournonville style and had been raised in a nineteenth-century frame, with restrained taste and manners.44
Not surprisingly, all of Balanchine’s wives were ballerinas who worked with him closely. And although none of his marriages lasted, the romantic yearning he felt for the women he loved (including many he did not marry) was reflected, like so much else in his life, in his ballets. He choreographed many pas de deux involving a man and a woman who come together but cannot stay together, dances that show the man alone, or abandoned by a woman who is too independent, too powerful, too goddess-like to give him the solace he needs. For example, in La Sonnambula the poet falls in love with a woman imprisoned in sleep; they dance, but she is a sleepwalker, and when he kisses her, she does not—cannot—awaken. Allegra Kent, who danced this remote and unattainable woman, called the ballet “Sleeping Beauty, Balanchine-style.” Similarly, in Duo Concertante Kay Mazzo appears in a spotlight and is then abruptly gone, leaving her partner (Peter Martins) frozen and anxious.45
He also choreographed many passionate love dances. In a pas de deux from Chaconne for Farrell and Martins, for example, her hair was down, and instead of the regal gold-trimmed costumes that characterized the rest of the ballet, she was dressed in wispy white chiffon. It was a world apart—she called it an Elysian Fields. At one point Farrell stood on pointe and leaned back softly but stiffly into Martins’s arms; he supported her, straight-backed but sharply inclined, as she walked forward on toe. It was an emblematic moment: there was nothing classical about this step, which was tensely off-balance and angular. But when the shape is taken as a whole, with the two dancers together, the balance is restored. The tension and its resolution coexisted, and depended on a romantic attachment; Balanchine showed the work and the glide, his support and her trust. The relationships Balanchine had with his dancers were never peripheral. They were part of the choreography.
Serenade, to music by Tchaikovsky, was Balanchine’s first American ballet. It featured students from the newly opened School of American Ballet and was initially performed outdoors at the estate of Edward Warburg in Hartsdale, New York, in 1934. It has since been recognized as one of Balanchine’s great ballets, and today it is performed by dance companies around the world. The ballet has changed over the years. Music and dances have been added (the Russian dance was inserted in 1940 and further elaborated in the 1960s) and steps modified. Karinska did not design the long, luminescent blue tulle skirts that we know today until 1952; the ballet was originally performed in short tunics.46
Peter Martins and Suzanne Farrell in Balanchine’s Chaconne. (12.2)
Serenade has no plot. It begins quietly with a group of seventeen women asymmetrically spaced across the stage as if they had been placed there by chance. In a way they had: this was the number of dancers who had shown up at the first rehearsal. Another day only seven came, and on another a dancer accidentally fell to the floor: these things too were incorporated into the dance. Accident and fate were themes of the ballet, and Balanchine also used them in its making. As the curtain rises, these seventeen women stand, hushed and still, facing the audience. Their feet are turned in and each has one hand raised as if to shield her eyes from the night sun. These are not Petipa ballerinas, festooned and bejeweled: they are simply women, poised and quietly waiting. The music starts, and the raised hands drop at the wrist and each arm moves slowly to the brow and falls gracefully across the chest as the eyes follow. It is a simple but profound movement, amplified seventeen times. The dancers’ feet then open into first position, the starting point of all ballet, and the leg points side to second position and closes into fifth—home—as arms and chests open in unison to the sky. It is simple, classical, reverential.
What follows is an extraordinary story—not a narrative, but a series of dances, gestures, and swirling formations that nonetheless build to a dramatic climax. The dancers of the corps de ballet frame the events, but they are neither decorative nor neatly arrayed like wallflowers along the sides of the stage. To the contrary, they fill the stage, pressed on by the swell of the music and the rush of their own steps. There is no why, just a whirl of movement that feels improvised and spontaneous but is nonetheless purposeful. Their dancing is urgent, and the steps are classical but far more bending, lush, and fluid than anything Petipa would have imagined.
In today’s productions there are soloists, but in the original dance the ballerinas all emerged seamlessly from the corps de ballet. There is a lone woman who is “late” and wanders through the maze of seventeen women standing with their hands shielding their eyes until she finds her place and raises her hand too. There is a man who loves. There is a dark angel who drapes herself over a man’s back with her hands covering his eyes; blinded and with arm outstretched, he feels his way and pulls the weight of the angel, like fate itself, behind him. There are images drawn from art: at one point the dancers take a pose recalling Canova’s neoclassical white Cupid and Psyche, with the lovers laced in embrace. At the end of the ballet a girl—lost or forsaken—runs urgently down a diagonal corridor of dancers and throws her arms around a woman standing at its end, as if to say good-bye. She then turns and is lifted on high, still standing upright, as if she were rising to another plane. Aloft, she is carried glidingly back along the diagonal toward a distant light, followed by a small group of dancers below—mourners or worshipers who mirror her movements. Echoing the opening movements, she raises her arms slowly and arches deeply back, this time in complete surrender.
Serenade marked an extraordinary change in the history of ballet. Heretofore, ballets were almost always spectacular and performed in the third person: audiences watched at a distance, across the proscenium arch, as the ballet told its story or displayed its magnificence. In Swan Lake Lev Ivanov had tentatively begun to break the mold and introduce a more internal, first-person voice; Fokine had briefly taken up the idea with Pavlova and The Dying Swan. Tudor and Robbins had each used inner feelings but nonetheless settled on third-person forms. Balanchine, by contrast, used both. Serenade has great formal and ceremonial beauty, but at the same time we are drawn into the inner sanctums of emotion—into the uncertainty of the girl who comes in late, and into the angst of the man blinded by fate. It is not that we know them or sympathize
. Rather, watching Serenade is like having a dream: we don’t feel emotion, we see it. We are both of it and apart from it at the same time. This is perhaps what Balanchine meant when he called his American dancers angels, explaining that “by angelic I mean the quality supposedly enjoyed by the angels, who, when they relate a tragic situation, do not themselves suffer.”
What then is Serenade about? It has themes: blindness and seeing, love and fate, death and submission. It has the arc of a lifetime: from innocence to experience, from the first simple positions of ballet to the final ritual procession into a distant unknown. There is tragedy woven through—not the cathartic tragedy of antiquity but a more melancholy and romantic evocation of loves that cannot last, deaths that must come. Formally the ballet shatters traditional symmetries, both in the body—arabesques, for example, that plunge to sharply off-balance angles—and in its patterns of movement, which are shifting and unstable, if also beautifully resolved. Asked about the meaning of Serenade, Balanchine was characteristically elusive: “I was just trying to teach my students some little lessons and make a ballet that wouldn’t show how badly they danced.” (About the opening formation he commented, “Looks like orange groves in California.”) Later, however, he also confided to a friend, “It’s like fate … each man going through the world with his destiny on his back. He meets a woman—he cares for her—but his destiny has other plans.” The friend asked if the dancers ever knew this: “God forbid!” Except that of course they do know, even if they do not wish (or know how) to put it in words.47
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