Near-Death Experiences_And Others

by Robert Gottlieb

  It was not until 1944, when she was nineteen, that she encountered George Balanchine professionally. The first thing she grasped about him was that he “approached a score like a musician.… He broke down the inherent rhythm of the music to make the steps more exciting.… When I saw what he had done, I was astonished.… The musicality of the man was magical.” Undoubtedly it was Tallchief’s own musicality, and her understanding of his, that focused Balanchine’s attention on this young dancer. That and her capacity for hard work, combined with her ready acknowledgment of her technical deficiencies. He saw what she could become and she was prepared to become it, at whatever cost: “I virtually had to retrain myself, work harder than ever before. But … I knew he was right.” She had already learned from Nijinska how to present herself, to “fill the stage with my presence.” Now, “dancing with confidence and authority in his ballets allowed me to show people exactly who I was and what I could do.” No wonder that soon after they began working together, Balanchine startled her one night by saying, “Maria, I would like you to become my wife.” The idea was so new to her (and to others) that the next day, when she told a fellow dancer, “George asked me to marry him,” her friend replied, “George who?”

  Francisco Moncion and Maria Tallchief in George Balanchine’s The Firebird

  The story of their marriage and collaboration is, naturally, the heart of this book—and Tallchief lovingly chronicles their domestic as well as their professional life together. (How moving are his little notes to her, most of them beginning “Hi Darling!”) Balanchine is always calm, courteous, affectionate, reasonable—interested in her clothes, her perfume (he chose L’Heure Bleu for her—she still uses it), her increasing fame. But “work took precedence over everything.… Passion and romance didn’t play a big role in our married life. We saved our emotion for the classroom.” Dryly, she informs us that “he made sure we slept in twin beds, perhaps to conserve his energy.” Nevertheless, she wasn’t disappointed. “I was half George’s age and didn’t know what to expect.… Our relationship fulfilled me.” Until it didn’t, and she went on to further marriages and motherhood and he went on to marry Tanaquil Le Clercq.

  Meanwhile, Tallchief’s tremendous abilities and Balanchine’s deployment of them resulted in a series of great ballerina roles, among them the revised version of the first movement of Symphony in C, never danced by anyone else with her dazzle and command; the pyrotechnical Firebird, City Ballet’s first great popular success; Eurydice in the Stravinsky-Balanchine Orpheus; Odette in Balanchine’s Swan Lake; and the Sugar Plum Fairy in his Nutcracker (in its first season she danced every Sugar Plum—no second casts in those days). In Tallchief, Balanchine had found a ballerina who through these central dozen years of his life was able to embody and extend his artistic ambitions. It was the combination of choreographer, ballerina, and sponsor (the City Center) that—fifteen years after Balanchine’s arrival in America—made possible a full-scale company with continuity and a dedicated audience.

  Tallchief’s autobiography provides us with many stories, insights, even passing remarks that shed light on both this crucial moment in dance history and Balanchine’s elusive personality. Some of it we’ve read before, in Tallchief interviews, and certain stories have been told and retold—for instance, her dropping the boiled potatoes on the kitchen floor as the Stravinskys toil up the stairs for dinner. (Is there such a thing as a new ballet anecdote?) But such repetitions don’t matter; what does is that Tallchief has now given us her definitive and convincing account of Balanchine as choreographer, teacher, husband, friend.

  As for Tallchief herself, her book’s title, Maria Tallchief, accurately reflects the woman in its rejection of metaphor or allusion to a role or an event; she had, indeed, learned how to present herself. Nor does her subtitle—America’s Prima Ballerina—suggest any ambiguity. She was—is—deeply American and deeply proud of her Osage background (Balanchine was fascinated by it). She was a “ballerina” in the classic sense—grand, glamorous, authoritative: a diva. And she certainly was “prima,” until she couldn’t be any longer, at which point (and at only forty-one) she retired.

  The book itself, written with Larry Kaplan (and sadly under-illustrated), is an apt expression of her nature—forceful, assertive, tough on herself as well as on others, suffering few people gladly. She is not introspective, certainly not literary, and Kaplan’s prose is hardly distinguished. But there is a positive side to his lack of polish: The flatness of much of the writing underlines her directness. We know exactly what she thinks, with no holds barred and no mitigation for reasons of modesty, tact, fanciness, or apology. Perhaps she doesn’t tell us everything about her marriages (why should she?) or her relationships with Erik Bruhn and Rudolf Nureyev. But we feel we can trust what she does tell us. And when she is disapproving, as she is about the current state of the Balanchine repertory at New York City Ballet, she is relentless. “I’m afraid the pure classical technique George demanded from his dancers isn’t being asked for anymore” is a mild example of half a dozen such remarks. Some of her onetime colleagues agree with her about this (if less outspokenly); others do not. But it is certain that no one—not even the great dancers who succeeded her—can ever know Balanchine’s Eurydice, Firebird, Sugar Plum the way she does, because they were created not only for her but of her. Tallchief’s testimony about such roles as these, and their maker—whether on paper, on film, or in the studio—should be eagerly embraced by today’s Balanchine dancers, by dance historians and critics, and by those of us who were there.

  The New York Times

  APRIL 27, 1997

  Russian Ballerina

  MAYA PLISETSKAYA

  MAYA PLISETSKAYA: her father (a loyal Communist) executed in the Stalin purges of the 1930s; her mother (a onetime silent film star) exiled to Asia; Jewish; close relatives in America; and perceived, always, as a rebel, a troublemaker, and, worst of all, a potential defector. Oh, yes—she was also undertrained, her ballet schooling interrupted by the terrible traumas of her childhood. How, then, did this woman with so many strikes against her not only survive but prevail, becoming the Bolshoi’s leading ballerina for decades, dancing on and on to celebrate her forty-seventh anniversary on the Bolshoi stage and, at seventy-six, still going strong? At its best, her autobiography, I, Maya Plisetskaya, is the fascinating story of how this artist of implacable will confronted and defied the Soviet regime—and eventually had her way.

  Russian dancers of the twentieth century had three choices: get out, accept the regime and its restrictions while enjoying its favors, or stay and struggle. Only Plisetskaya took that third route and triumphed. She was talented, of course, and wonderful-looking, with her thin body, long legs and arms, and flaming red hair. From the first she stood out: Hers was not a slow ascendancy; she was always headed for great things unless she self-destructed or was destroyed by others. She was partly protected by association with her mother’s family, the Messerers, who constitute a dancing dynasty in Russia; and eventually she had the unconditional support of her husband, the composer Rodion Shchedrin.

  But all that was secondary. What drove her past all obstacles and hazards were her unbending determination and her refusal to do things any way but her own.

  Maya Plisetskaya as Kitri in Don Quixote

  She began as she meant to go on: “I was a willful child, and they called me neslukh, the ‘not-listener.’” And: “Everything in me, in my nature, resisted ‘socializing.’” They want her to attend Komsomol meetings and learn about dialectical materialism? She goes twice, and that’s it. Advisers want her to leave the KGB and the “vileness of the Bolsheviks” out of her book? “No, I won’t change anything. I won’t touch things up.” She’s always on the barricades; defiance is not only a principle and a tactic but also an essential element of her nature.

  Her credo: “I don’t want to be a slave. I don’t want people whom I don’t know to decide my fate. I don’t want a leash on my neck. I don’t want a cage, even if it�
�s a platinum one.… I don’t want to bow my head and I won’t do it. That’s not what I was born for.” It’s admirable, it’s heroic, but it’s not very cozy; I would think it would be easier to be in love with her than to love her.

  The strongest parts of her book are, indeed, those that deal with the KGB and “the vileness of the Bolsheviks.” Of course we have encountered this story many times before, and in truly great books, like Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope. But as with the Holocaust, each telling is different, and each is worth listening to.

  Plisetskaya’s is unique in that her story is that of an artist who loathes her circumstances (“Endless suffering and humiliation fill my memory”) yet overcomes them without (too much) compromise. And who chooses not to defect—a decision she provides a number of reasons for, ranging from pride in her position as prima ballerina at the Bolshoi to love for the Bolshoi Theater’s stage. (Besides, she promised Khrushchev she wouldn’t.)

  Nothing that was to follow compared in horror to what she witnessed when they took her father away. Maya was eleven—“skinny, scared, not understanding what was going on.” They came for him at dawn. “My mother, unkempt, pregnant with a big belly, weeping and clutching. My little brother screaming, rudely awakened. My father, white as snow, dressing with trembling hands. He was embarrassed. The neighbors’ faces were remote. The witness, the blowsy janitor Varvara, with a cigarette between her lips, didn’t miss a chance to suck up to the authorities: ‘Can’t wait for all of you bastards to be shot, you enemies of the people!’” And finally, “The last thing I heard my father say before the door shut behind him forever was, ‘Thank God, they’ll settle this at last.’”

  When they sent her mother to Kazakhstan, all that stood between Maya and an orphanage was an aunt who took her in, somewhat grudgingly. But it was ballet that really saved her. She had great natural gifts—in particular a dazzling leap. (“Nature had not passed me over when it came to jumps.”) What she lacked was solid technique. Just as she is wise and generous in her estimation of other dancers—particularly her exalted coeval and rival Galina Ulanova—she is honest about her own deficiencies.

  In Paris, she tells us, referring to an overwhelming triumph (twenty-seven curtain calls) in Swan Lake, her friends agree that “I had forced the audience to switch its interest from abstract technique to soul and plasticity. When I danced the finale of the second act, people’s eyes were glued to the line of the swan’s arms, the angle of the neck; no one noticed that my bourrées were not so perfect.” She even reports that when she met Balanchine in New York, in the early 1960s, he said to her, “Being your own boss isn’t bad. But, don’t be angry, Maya, you need a good teacher.” As usual, he had seen and understood everything.

  She was kept from the West for years—a matter of supreme frustration and rage—and when she was finally allowed to come, the conditions were onerous: not only unrelenting KGB watchdogs, but barely enough money for food; all earnings went back to the bosses in Russia. In 1959 she received forty dollars a performance, and on days when she didn’t dance, “Zero.” The corps de ballet got five dollars a day.

  Bizarrely, before setting out for America, the touring dancers would stuff their luggage with food. Then, when their supplies ran out, “cat and dog food were particularly popular. Cheap and vitamin-rich. You felt very strong after animal food. We fried canine beefsteaks between two hotel irons.” (When not munching canine beefsteaks, Plisetskaya was hobnobbing with the great, including Robert F. Kennedy, with whom she had a mystifying palship.)

  Despite being undertrained and underfed, she made an indelible impression here. Although, as she acknowledges, her fouettés were erratic, she was an outstanding Odile in the Black act of Swan Lake, a cold and blazing dominatrix. Her Odette, for me, was always more about being a bird than being a vulnerable captive princess, but Swan Lake remained her signature ballet: She danced it more than eight hundred times. Her Dying Swan likewise seemed to me more about undulant arms than about death. (I once saw her “die,” then respond to the applause with a second “death” and then a third. Why not? It was all showiness. When Ulanova’s swan died, she was dead.)

  But her passionate, flirtatious, swirling, seductive Kitri, in Don Quixote, remains unparalleled. And her dramatic power in such Soviet pieces as The Stone Flower and Spartacus was incontestable, though all in the service of kitsch. (Does she realize that?) When she gets to commissioning ballets and ultimately choreographing her own, they’re all diva vehicles: Carmen, Anna Karenina, The Lady with the Dog. I don’t think it ever occurred to her that she was more suited to some roles than to others. Only blinders—or undifferentiated ego—could have led her to write, “I have been endlessly asked why I didn’t dance Giselle.… I could have done it, but something in me opposed it, resisted, argued with it. Somehow it just didn’t work out.” Plisetskaya as a fragile peasant girl betrayed in love? It’s inconceivable—except to her.

  I, Maya Plisetskaya has the virtues of candor and directness, and it has a real story to tell. She may have her vanities, but what star doesn’t? And how many stars have had to exhibit such an indomitable spirit? She insists that she wrote her book herself, and it reads as if she did—or rather, as if she had dictated it into a tape machine. (It’s as if she was her own ghostwriter.) In Antonina Bouis’s energetic translation, she comes across as the same person we knew on the stage: glamorous, exciting, voracious. Larger than life. Not always pleasing but never to be ignored and certainly never to be trifled with.

  Los Angeles Times Book Review

  NOVEMBER 4, 2001

  The Coach

  ELENA TCHERNICHOVA

  IT’S NOT ONLY STAR DANCERS and choreographers and impresarios who contribute significantly to the art of ballet. Crucial, too, are the teachers, coaches, and ballet masters who keep classical technique—and classical dancers—honest. In our day, Elena Tchernichova, who was trained as a dancer in the Soviet Union and later immigrated to the United States, has been a conspicuous example of a person who has performed all three roles. Her Dancing on Water is an important account of “A Life in Ballet,” as its subtitle has it: a book as illuminating as it is interesting, revelatory about how ballet works, and fascinating as an account of a life devoted to an art—and to survival.

  The immediate interest stems from the extraordinary arc her life has followed, and the clearheaded intelligence with which she (and her excellent co-author, Joel Lobenthal) recounts it. For someone who has experienced the tragedies that have fallen her way, she’s remarkably free of self-pity and, more remarkable, of self-dramatization. Which doesn’t mean she’s free of self-regard. But why should she be? She has more than fulfilled her early promise. That she’s not a household name only reflects her uncommonly early understanding of where her talents really lay and of how she might best deploy them, rather than spending her considerable resources pursuing a fame and fortune that didn’t attract her.

  Elena Tchernichova was born in Leningrad in 1939 as the war broke out in Europe, and her childhood was all too typical of many others who lived in that place at that time. When she was three, her father, of German origin, who oversaw a munitions factory, was summoned by the KGB and never returned from the meeting; there was never a definitive account of his fate, but Elena distinctly recalled him muttering, “I don’t want to go; I just don’t want to go!” Her mother, Maria, was a beauty, an aspiring actress, an indulged young wife: “She liked to bake, do needlepoint—and of course dress flamboyantly.”

  Then, with her husband having vanished, she was on her own during the siege of Leningrad, trying to keep herself and her little girl alive: “Government rationing had dwindled to one scrap of bread a day. We were forced to eat anything we could snatch, uproot, or improvise. We crowded around my grandmother as she fried pancakes from a batter of rice-based face powder.”

  Maria took a lover, then when the war ended got a job managing a warehouse, but by this time she was an alcoholic. One day she slashed her wrists and Elena, aged
eight, came home early from school and found her just in time. On her thirtieth birthday Maria threw herself a “farewell gala,” and that night took poison and died. Elena’s aunt forced her to go to the morgue to identify her mother’s body—an ordeal she never forgave or forgot.

  Elena was now officially an orphan, although she was living with her grandmother, and a distinguished family wanted to adopt her. The mother was Evgenia Vecheslova-Snetkova, a leading teacher at the Kirov’s school, by far the most important ballet academy in Russia, among its graduates Fokine, Pavlova, Nijinsky, Karsavina, Danilova, Balanchine, Ulanova. Elena refused to leave her grandmother—“As long as you’re alive I’ll be with you”—but she often visited the family. Snetkova saw a future in ballet for the child, brought her into the school to be auditioned, and Elena was accepted. She was ten.

  Her account of her training is consistent with other accounts we have (like Danilova’s): “Our school was something like a cross between a naval academy and a British public school, with a bit of Dickens peeking around the edges of our ruthlessly regimented lives. Punishment followed misbehavior as inevitably as night follows day.… Our teachers weren’t really cruel, but oh, were they tough!”

  It was a nine-year course, and for all those nine years Elena’s teacher was Lidia Tyuntina, who had been a favorite of the great Agrippina Vaganova, after whom the school was eventually renamed.

  Elena Tchernichova coaching Susan Jaffe and Andris Liepa in Swan Lake

  * * *

  ELENA WAS CLEARLY TALENTED, but she wasn’t easy. “The other kids obeyed me. I was never afraid of teachers or directors, and they respected that.… Sometimes I would just have a fit, running out of a class and out of the building while a teacher screamed, ‘Where do you think you’re going? Don’t you realize that class isn’t over yet?’ ‘I have to see the sun!’ I cried, and threw myself into the street.”