Apollo’s Angels

by Jennifer Homans

  Balanchine made American ballets too: not by narrating folktales or searching for a native musical or choreographic idiom, but by melding ballet to traditional American music. Western Symphony (1954), to music by Hershy Kay (including folk tunes such as “Red River Valley”), simultaneously celebrated and poked fun at the old West, and Square Dance (1957), to music by Vivaldi and Corelli, drew the link between eighteenth-century court forms and their later derivatives in the old South—the production featured fiddlers and a professional square-dance caller onstage calling out instructions (grand right and left!). Stars and Stripes (1958), to music by John Philip Sousa (adapted by Hershy Kay), was an exuberant but also tongue-in-cheek patriotic extravaganza, with a huge red, white, and blue unfurled across the backdrop in a grand finale. Union Jack (1976) commemorated Britain during the American bicentennial: the ballet ended with hand flags signaling “God Save the Queen” in a marine semaphore code. All of these ballets were danced with irony (often lost today) and wit; kitsch too had its place.

  If Balanchine drew deeply on tradition and the past, he also created radically disjunctive dances that broke sharply with anything that had come before. The two were not mutually exclusive: Balanchine’s most classical dances had a radical edge, and his most revolutionary dances were always rooted in classical forms. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Agon (1957), created in close collaboration with Stravinsky. It was a pathbreaking ballet, but it had none of the rebellious bile or satirical edge long associated with the avant-garde. Agon did not attack tradition; it changed it from the inside.

  Balanchine and Stravinsky’s work together stretched back to Apollon Musagète (1928) in Paris, and the two artists knew each other well. Stravinsky was twenty years older than Balanchine, who had long looked to the composer as a mentor and father figure. But although they belonged to different generations, they shared a common past: like Balanchine, Stravinsky had grown up in St. Petersburg at the Imperial Court and the Maryinsky Theater, and he too was Russian Orthodox. He had come to western Europe in the wake of war and the Russian Revolution, and moved to America in the 1930s (he eventually settled in Los Angeles). Stravinsky was well versed in ballet, but their collaborations revolved primarily around music, and the two men were often seen bent over a score. “Stravinsky made time,” Balanchine once said, “not big grand time—but time that worked with the small parts of how our bodies are made.”56

  Agon was conceived as the third part of a Greek trilogy that included Balanchine and Stravinsky’s Apollo and Orpheus (1948). Like Apollo, which looked to Boileau, Agon began with a seventeenth-century text: in this case, a dance treatise by the ballet master François de Lauze, Apologie de la danse. Lincoln Kirstein sent a copy of de Lauze’s work to Stravinsky with a note explaining Balanchine’s idea for a ballet in which “the dances which began quite simply in the sixteenth century took fire in the twentieth and exploded.” Notably, the edition that Kirstein gave to Stravinsky was a modern one, which appended scholarly notes as well as excerpts of text and music by the Abbé Mersenne, the priest, musician, and contemporary of Descartes and Pascal whom we met in the seventeenth century, where classical ballet began.57

  Like his Renaissance predecessors, Mersenne was fascinated by the ways that “measured” music, poetry, and movement might be combined in an integrated spectacle. In Italy such inquiries led to the first operas; in France, as we have seen, they led to the ballet de cour. Court dances were strictly defined by rhythm and musical form (bransle, saraband, gaillard) and comprised small, precise, elegant steps, many of which remain integral to classical vocabulary today; they are the building blocks, the essential how-to-get-from-here-to-there transition steps that are the choreographic fabric of Agon. Ballet was also, as de Lauze was careful to point out, an ethical code: “the science of behavior toward others.” It was respect, manners, breeding. This was an idea that had, for so long and in so many ways, resonated with Balanchine.58

  Stravinsky marked his copy of de Lauze extensively, and referred to it and to Mersenne while composing his score. Indeed, as the scholar Charles M. Joseph has shown, his annotations demonstrated his keen interest in period discussions of meter, rhythm, scansion, and the affinity between musical, poetic, and dance forms. In addition, Stravinsky seems to have paid close attention to scholarly speculation about the religious and pagan origins of various baroque dances, such as ring dances with witches circling the devil. All of this was projected forward: Agon was rhythmically complex and shifted midstream to a twelve-tone scale. We know less about the sources of Balanchine’s dances, except that he and Stravinsky worked together closely on the ballet—they met at Stravinsky’s home, and the composer later attended rehearsals, where the two men animatedly discussed the choreography.

  Agon also had visible roots in Balanchine’s own dances: in the streamlined lyricism of Apollo, in the pure, mathematical precision of Concerto Barocco (to Bach’s Double Violin Concerto in D), but above all in the tense, analytic rigor and crablike, angular, and off-balance movements of The Four Temperaments (1946), to a commissioned score by Paul Hindemith. Four Temperaments grew out of Balanchine’s progressive experiments with extreme extensions (legs thrown over the head, hips askew) and undulating, contracted, and acrobatic movements. He had begun this kind of work in Russia in the years after the 1917 revolution, and it had since informed even his most classical ballets, including (as we have seen) the pristine white-on-white dances of Apollo. In another key, Four Temperaments also seemed to reach across to the world of modern dance: it was full of angular, contracted movement that used the torso and upper body in ways reminiscent of German and central European choreographers and Martha Graham.*

  Four Temperaments was far more extreme than the earlier Balanchine dances we know: more aggressively distorted and compulsive, almost Cubist in its deliberate shattering of conventional steps and anatomy. It was all tension and physical manipulation, classical positions tipped or broken and reconfigured with a hip or an arm thrust abruptly out. It encompassed jerky, pained, and clutching movements, too-deep back bends, deliberate and gyrating off-balance kicks, turns on pointe dissected and broken into their component parts, and ominous low-skimming bomber-like lifts—all performed with a sustained linear clarity that nonetheless linked the dances back to classical forms. Even today we can see that the dances have a cold rigor and precision—an angelic detachment. Thus when in “Phlegmatic” the man doubles over in agony, it is not because someone did something to him, or even because he is thinking terrible thoughts; the movement is its own cause. The effect is reflective and internal, but also disarmingly detached, as if the dancers are watching themselves from the outside, trying to understand their own movements, even when the movement is also fully engrossing.

  Agon was more extreme still: more steely and ironic, more dislocated and rhythmically complex—but also more lyrical and classically pristine. It is a suite of dances: duets, trios, and pas de quatres for twelve dancers (and a twelve-tone scale) performed against a neutral, cyclone-blue backdrop in black and white practice clothes. Its title gave it a classical reference—not the idealized sculptural beauty of Apollo or the tragic elegy to love and music inscribed in the story of Orpheus, but rather the idea of struggle and contest. In ancient Greek, agon referred to a competition, but also—as one of Balanchine’s dancers later pointed out—to a sense of collectivity and unity rooted in civic life and the agora. To judge from the reaction of those who were present on the opening night, it was an important point. Like the chorus of a Greek tragedy, the audience did not merely observe the ballet: the rhythms and tense visual, musical discipline of the dances were physically and intellectually gripping. (Marcel Duchamp later noted that the electricity in the theater that night made him think of the premiere of The Rite of Spring.)59

  From the moment the dance begins, ballet’s conventions are turned inside out. The curtain rises on four men—not the usual corps de ballet—and they are standing in a line far upstage with their backs to the a
udience. They turn front and catch the beat, signaling the ballet’s syncopated pulse. At the end of the ballet, these same men will stand once again in a line, facing the audience: the music stops and they turn their backs—the last beat is also theirs. Throughout the music is fierce, driving, and at times atonal, but it is also gracious, witty, and courtly. The movement pulls between twisting introspection and humble grace as the dancers thrust headlong through space, only to stop and dissolve gently into a noble bow. It is, as Balanchine said, an “IBM ballet”: “a machine that thinks.”60

  Agon has no clear narrative, no melodic or lyrical line: rather, it piles blocks of movement and music one on top of another. Groups of dancers surge forward, swallowing up space in long dense phrases of dance until they suddenly stop, suspend in midstep, or exit. These episodes are stacked rather than linked, accumulated rather than told. The rhythms shift constantly and abruptly, with the dancers often keeping their own time, weaving in and out of the beat until the suspense breaks and the music and dance meet. There are very few steps: rather, the dances are composed almost entirely of transitions. Dancers run, skip, jut, hop, turn, whip their legs high, and, above all, move. The women perform on pointe, but not to elevate or extend their line: rather, they stab the floor, dig in, pull themselves along, thrusting their weight down to push further off balance.

  In spite of its unconventional language, Agon holds together: it does not feel fragmented or alienating. Partly this is because the music and dance interlock in such a tightly calibrated visual and aural design. But there is another reason as well: Balanchine could dispense with narrative because he worked with human beings, not paint or bricks. It is the dancers who “think” in this musical and balletic “machine.” This does not mean that they “act.” On the contrary, there is nothing to hide behind—no character, no story, no glimpse of a recognizable tradition in sight (one dancer reported that she had never felt so alone and exposed onstage).

  Instead, the dancers are simply and unselfconsciously there. They face the audience as they are, with no constructed feelings or expectations to orient them (or us). The open stage, with no scenery and flooded with light, accentuates the effect, making the dancers the only focal point: there is no horizon. And if the ballet refers back to the seventeenth century, that too highlights its modernism. At the court of Louis XIV dances were colorful and ornate affairs, spectacles of costume, manners, and decor. Balanchine, by contrast, strips the body and the stage to essential (black and white) forms. All of this creates a disarming honesty and sense of here-and-now time. The distance between us and them, stage and life, past and present collapses.

  Agon had none of the timeless, world-apart qualities of Balanchine’s Russian, Italian, or waltz-themed ballets. It was firmly rooted in the present: New York City, 1957. There are two points to make here, one personal and the other political. The personal had to do with the difficult circumstances that surrounded the making of the ballet. In October 1956 Stravinsky suffered a stroke and was rushed to the hospital, and although he soon recovered, Balanchine was anxious—worried, no doubt, by the possible loss of this anchor in his life. Less than two weeks later, Balanchine’s wife and muse, Tanaquil Le Clercq, was stricken with polio. Balanchine was crushed and took a leave of absence until the fall of 1957 to care for her.

  When he returned he made Agon, and the ballet previewed at a benefit for the March of Dimes in November. Some observers, among them Melissa Hayden (who performed the trio), saw a direct link between the tragic events of Tanaquil’s life and Balanchine’s new dance. The ballet’s central pas de deux, for example, was overtly—some said shockingly—sexual, with split legs and entwined limbs, but it was never steamy or passionate. Instead, the man took the woman’s legs—holding her, for example, by the ankle—and moved her limbs into extreme extensions and poses; she was flexible but practically inert. “The girl is like a doll,” Balanchine explained to the dancers, “you’re manipulating her, you must lead her. It’s one long, long, long, long, breath.”61

  The pas de deux, moreover, was originally performed by Arthur Mitchell and Diana Adams. He was black—one of very few black dancers in the field of classical ballet—and a vital, physical dancer. Adams, by contrast, was pale and icily detached. The intense sexuality of the dance, and its deliberate black-on-white aesthetic—her leg wrapped around the back of his head—also had obvious political overtones. Agon premiered at a critical juncture of the civil rights movement, one year after the Montgomery bus boycott and less than three months after the riots at Little Rock High School in Arkansas. At the time, black and white artists rarely performed on the same stage, much less danced together in tangled, half-dressed embrace. People who were there later recalled their astonishment at Balanchine’s daring, but the ballet was danced with such concentration and analytic rigor, with such objectivity and ironic detachment, that it seemed to exist outside and above any political fray. It was taken as an aesthetic statement, although few who saw it failed to notice its racial cast.

  Agon was the culmination of years of work and experimentation and the clearest statement yet of Balanchine’s modern style. Other ballets were reworked and followed in its wake: Four Temperaments and Concerto Barocco had already been stripped to practice clothes in 1951, and in 1957 Apollo followed (Balanchine would later also pare the scenery and narrative). Bugaku (1962) on a Japanese theme—delicate, strange, acrobatic, and coldly sexual—was another descendant. Indeed, by the early 1960s Balanchine’s company had acquired a distinctive style, reflected in the innovations of Agon: his dancers looked and moved differently than any other dancers in the world.

  Partly this had to do with technique, developed over years of experimentation and dancing Balanchine’s ballets. NYCB dancers had elongated lines that seemed to stretch to infinity. In arabesque (one leg extended behind, back arched), they broke the rules of traditional placement which required the dancers’ hips to remain squarely front, like car headlights, as the leg lifted behind; Balanchine’s dancers opened the hip as if someone were pulling the extended leg out of its socket, thus dislocating and reordering the body placement to achieve a longer line. It was still recognizably arabesque, but the organization of the body was dynamic and asymmetrical. It was not a position; it was a movement.

  Similarly, a balance was no longer a static pose with the parts of the body carefully aligned to create a still point. Instead, Balanchine dancers achieved balance by unleashing (and controlling) a dynamic pattern of energy crisscrossing through the body. The still point came through opposition and countercurrents, and the effect was one of constant movement rather than stasis. It was more powerful and energetic, but also more unstable. Long balances on one foot, however, were not something Balanchine dancers much aspired to. In his ballets, balance was only a foundation—something you had to know in order to push the body off balance. The same was true of preparations—the small bend of the knees that precedes a jump, or the windup of the upper body before a turn. Balanchine dancers shortened or hid these steps (they never sat in a squat to announce a leap or series of turns), so their movements seemed to burst from nowhere and dissolve into nothing. Other steps and movements were so bastardized or free-form that they fell outside of the traditional lexicon: they had no names.

  Agon was a culmination, but it also marked a break. The period stretching from Serenade to Agon had been strenuous but tremendously creative. Balanchine had assembled a loyal and interesting group of artists and collaborators, many of whom stayed with him for decades and through uncertain circumstances. Now he was getting older and (like Robbins and Tudor) his tastes did not easily mesh with the 1960s. Ballet everywhere was changing and becoming more melodramatic or being pulled into the fast current of youth-culture fashion.

  In 1959 the Bolshoi Ballet arrived from Moscow and the American press was overcome by their confident, bombastic style. Then came the star partnership of Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn. They drew vast crowds, and their tremendous success seemed to signal the v
ictory of exactly the kind of hype and ego Balanchine hated. By the late 1960s the cultural landscape had become littered with postmodern and hippy ballets: in 1968 Joffrey’s psychedelic Astarte made the cover of Time magazine, which proclaimed dance “the most inventive and least inhibited of the lively arts.” Dancers, it said, were no longer limited by stale conventions but could “writhe on the floor like a snake on the make.” Closer to home, the blockbuster success of Jerome Robbins’s Dances at a Gathering led some critics to wonder (a bit hastily) if Balanchine’s time was over. His personal life, moreover, was difficult: still married to Le Clercq, he fell passionately and agonizingly in love with Diana Adams and then with Suzanne Farrell, neither of whom would have him in the ways he wanted.62

  NYCB was changing too. The company’s growing success, along with its increased funding and move to Lincoln Center in 1964, meant that the old loyalties and close-knit spirit were fading. Farrell, who joined in 1961, belonged to a new generation of dancers. Thanks in part to SAB, this “new breed” (as Newsweek later hailed the younger cohort) had more consistent training and did not always appreciate what they saw as the intense theatricality and eccentricity of their aging peers. And indeed, they looked and moved differently. Their dancing was smoother and more honed, but also more openly sexy and rebellious. Balanchine thrived on the change: A Midsummer’s Night Dream (1962), Don Quixote (1965), and the three-act Jewels (1967) were the proof. But even here he pushed against prevailing cultural fashions and took his cue from classic texts or—in the sensational, hip-thrusting, and syncopated “Rubies” section of Jewels (to music by Stravinsky)—from American jazz-age chic. Rubies was danced by Patricia McBride, who performed the angular and wildly off-balance choreography with playful and ironic ease. By comparision, Astarte was predictable and conventional.63

  Yet there were also signs of fraying. Electronics (1961), to a taped electronic score, reportedly featured dancers in black and white underwear with lots of cellophane and d’Amboise and Adams rolling on the floor in a tight embrace (the ballet has since been lost). Metastaseis and Pithoprakta (1968, also lost), with music by Iannis Xenakis, presented Farrell with hair down and loose-limbed in a fringed bikini and Mitchell crouched bare-chested in shimmering black pants. What had been strict and taut in Agon was here becoming undone. With Farrell in particular, Balanchine used this undoing to further expand ballet technique, and her dancing was ever more mellifluous and daring. But in 1969 she married a fellow dancer her own age; Balanchine was so devastated that he fell into a deep depression and fired them both. She would return, but their work together was suspended. Two years later Igor Stravinsky died.