He’d say, “Let’s all go to the theater and have a class… .” That was Balanchine’s idea of a perfect schedule. He loved to teach dancers. He loved dancing, and he wanted it to be so wonderful; how you get it to be wonderful is to train people to do it. —Diana Adams, in I Remember Balanchine
In the 604 pages of I Remember Balanchine, Francis Mason’s interviews with eighty-five people close to the late ballet master of the New York City Ballet, hardly a page goes by without a reference to Balanchine the teacher. Questions of who he taught, what he taught, when, where, and why he taught are answered in tones of relish, reverence, and even resentment, but the picture is always consistent. Or, as one dancer said, “persistent … He just started from the beginning every time.” True, the classroom was a laboratory, an atmosphere of intense competition. But it was also a playpen, the crucible of esprit de corps. Of all the lines in the book attributed to Mr. B, the one Diana Adams quotes tells most. With its show-in-a-barn enthusiasm, gotta-dance devotion, simplicity, it’s a line you could love, and for me it reveals the man—his dependence on the group (“let’s all go”) as well as his implicit leadership (“and have a class”). Company class was George’s idea of a good time.
“Someday I’ll be known more for my teaching than for my choreography,” Balanchine told his third wife, Maria Tallchief. It’s hard to imagine exactly what he meant by that. The teaching and the choreography are inseparable halves of a whole—his art. Which is why Balanchine’s classroom was so important, and so philosophically and politically charged. Dancers who didn’t show up for his class, who studied elsewhere for whatever reason, missed out on the master’s day-to-day dialogue with the art form and, risking his indifference, risked roles. Those weren’t just new ballets on stage, they were the subject of the moment, be it Balanchine’s fascination with Suzanne Farrell’s otherworldly aplomb (Diamonds), or Merrill Ashley’s bravura pointe work (Ballo Della Regina), or, say, the formal tattoos of Scotland, so gravely weighed in Union Jack. They were lessons in what Balanchine was learning—from his dancers and from life.
That Balanchine’s choreography is teacherly was not lost on dancers or on fans. Tallchief tells of how the Mozart ballet Symphonie Concertante was actually an excruciating, if exquisite, exercise, Balanchine’s attempt to get his dancers to finish their fifth positions with precision, to get there, as dancers say. The audience, of course, was learning to get there too. Almost from the start the New York City Ballet has known the passionate involvement of intellectuals and dreamers of every stripe, and has been attended by a distinguished history of criticism, beginning with the work of its co-founder, Lincoln Kirstein. Balanchine’s idea—let’s all go—was the basis of a community that included anyone with open eyes and heart.
A community without teachers is no community, so it isn’t surprising that the first important Balanchine book to be published since his death in 1983 has been written by a teacher. Following Balanchine is a collection and expansion of the essays Robert Garis first published in journals and magazines, among them Ballet Review and Raritan. A professor of English emeritus at Wellesley College, Garis has been following Balanchine since 1945, when he was twenty. His book offers an intimate journey—the study of oneself and one’s beliefs nestled inside the study of an artist—and it is a tightrope walk over a net of narcissism. But the risk is worth taking, for if there is one point to remember about Balanchine’s enterprise— Garis’s encompassing, ongoing word for the classes, the company, the choreography—it is the countless identifications it required of the audience: the recognition of dancers’ faces and physiques, the reading of enigmatic steps and gestures, the repeated seeing that led to poetic empathy, each dance the flower of many destinies. Balanchine mattered personally to his followers, people who made the inner space of his theater part of their inner life.
Concretely, analytically, stubbornly, and imaginatively, Garis follows Balanchine, speculating on the master’s motives for dropping ballets, favoring certain ballerinas, editing masterpieces, making detours from what seemed to be sure paths. He is brilliant on the subject of the evolving collaboration between Stravinsky and Balanchine, compelling in his discussion of Balanchine’s choreo-musical structures. Garis labors in putting forward Violette Verdy, a special favorite, yet is memorably fretful and fair-minded in his view of the Farrell–Balanchine six-year estrangement (“I saw everyone’s side. I felt shame for everyone—for Balanchine’s jealousy and lack of self-control, for Farrell’s overestimation of her power, for Mejia’s insignificance as the bone of contention”). One thing Garis’s pursuit is not, however, is solitary.
Following Balanchine presents and depends upon a network of relationships that are symmetrical and ascending—and utterly representative of the Balanchine enterprise. The recurring dynamic is that of the teacher-student, and we see it first in Garis’s relation to his father, and later, more profoundly, in his long friendship with the influential critic B. H. Haggin, an authoritarian scorekeeper of art’s better and best, a self-appointed patriarch to younger critics. It is clear that the push and pull of this relationship, the respect expected by the elder and the inevitable independence of the younger, leads Garis to a sharper hearing of discontented pitches between Balanchine and Stravinsky. As the book and Garis gather strength, and the youngers grow up to the elders, Garis looks solely to Balanchine for both questions and answers. We see social connections transmute into a spiritual one.
Garis shows us how this happens, and it helps to explain why the New York City Ballet and its problems of leadership since Balanchine’s death are so personalized, so public, so to the heart of art in our lifetime. Sure you could say that Balanchine serves as a kind of Freudian father figure for a sky-scanning sector of society, each follower claiming to understand him best, but that’s reductive. Balanchine and the New York City Ballet were a community founded on ideals of discipline, competition, beauty, culture. An ethic of inspired expression held audience and company together, a more powerful and life-affirming value than likeness based on genetic codes, on skin or sex. For those who like to look at Balanchinians as escapists, well true, they do escape—into a continuum that stretches between good feet and faith, sweat and light.
Furthest into the faith and light stands Suzanne Farrell, who upon hearing Balanchine say “Suzanne doesn’t sweat,” never again did. Farrell is a monumental figure in the Balanchine enterprise, the dancer Balanchine had been working toward all his life and whom he dwelled on during his last twenty years—an obsession that became a collaboration. She receives the longest chapter in Garis’s book, and dominates as well the recently released first installment of videotapes from the George Balanchine Trust. Part of a series called “The Balanchine Library,” this effort too is implicitly pedagogic, a preserve in which we see the ballets as they looked with Mr. B in the wings. The series includes tapes of class-like demonstrations that focus on how Balanchine wanted key steps performed, and also a copy of the documentary Dancing for Mr. B: Six Balanchine Ballerinas, which does not include Farrell, except in sighs and stoic mention. She’s a presence made phenomenal by absence.
The tapes are wonderful to have alongside Garis’s book, especially Dancing for Mr. B. Each ballerina is queenly in her domain —her repertory—but each in her turn must give way to a younger queen, releasing Balanchine into new country. The attentive eye will see, in the clips of Tanaquil Le Clercq and Allegra Kent after her, premonitions of Farrell. As the critic David Daniel said to me, “Farrell already existed, by inference,” in Le Clercq’s crane legs, delicate yet fantastically decisive, in Kent’s luminous forehead and impressionable classicism. Add to that the elemental force of Farrell’s strength, her oneness with risk, and you have a dancer of whom Balanchine could ask anything. He had always wanted total animal attention from his ballerinas, from big toe to tiara; with Farrell he got heat lightning, an Olympian daring that flooded the stage with sensation.
It was shocking when Farrell was fired from the New York City Ballet two years ago—a third daughter herself, her banishment felt like Cinderella’s or Cordelia’s. These days, though, that’s the way many corporations are run—get rid of the old guard, get rid of the teachers. There are those who are happy with the way Balanchine is being danced at the New York City Ballet, who in the name of moving on would rather not question the current laws of natural selection. But it takes only fifteen minutes with the Library tape of Divertimento No. 15 to see the jaw-dropping difference between yesterday and today. When the company danced the Mozart ballet last spring, it was a race, machine-tooled, as if someone’s life depended on flat-out attack. Indeed, among the younger dancers, attack is the prevailing energy at NYCB (and a sad subtext ever since ballet master-in-chief Peter Martins made the papers for hitting his ballerina wife). One saw the coarsening most symbolically in the company’s steeply squeezed version of The Sleeping Beauty, where the fairy variations, that normally nuanced suite of endowments, were danced at tempos of unseemly push and speed. Fairy riffs, no gifts.
When I finally sat down to the tape of Divertimento No. 15, it was with increasing astonishment that I watched this big, buttery confection, an odd, contradictory mix of stateliness and air, of butterfly poise and serene muscularity. It was taut yet paced— not at all fast or thin or Zeitgeisty—and I was reminded of a friend’s observation that NYCB tempos are now revved up beyond recall in an attempt to spark phrases dancers don’t know how to fill with pure physical charisma.
When the announcement came that, for one week this fall, Farrell would stage seven Balanchine ballets at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., it caused a considerable stir. She has taught in a summer program there for the last three years, but this was something else. The corps would come from the Washington Ballet; the principals were handpicked by Farrell, men and women she’d worked with before, or had wanted to see in specific Balanchine roles. Rehearsal was wrested from a host of schedules, with a mere two weeks before opening night. I probably wasn’t the only one heading south with visions of Farrell dancing in my head, a fantasy that blurred the bigger issue: how do you review a company that isn’t?
Not only was it your basic pick-up company, but the repertory included three pieces of late Balanchine tailored to the gifts of a mature and imperiously omnipotent Farrell—Tzigane, Chaconne, Mozartiana— ballets that urged her farthest out on her own limbs, and have been problematically passed on since her retirement. There were two programs, one consisting of Scotch Symphony, Tzigane, and Chaconne, the other of Mozartiana, Monumentum/Movements (two ballets that are now performed as one), and Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.
Of instant note were the secure, reasonable tempos, free of the feeling that a steam engine was coming through. Even more striking was the clarity of the corps. Their coherence was not in-the-groove slickness but shared directness with a stress on energized precision. Corps parts dimensionalize and shape a ballet—they are conscience, character, context—and the group oomph and care these dancers achieved was a triumph. Watching this corps I felt much as I had while watching the tape of Divertimento No. 15, that here was a lovely sunlit stretch on Balanchine’s path to a more perilous kind of classicism (Farrell’s kind).
The principals had their triumphs too. Maria Calegari, fit and slim as we haven’t seen her in years (undetected Lyme disease stole her from the stage), filled Monumentum/Movements, a double role bleached out since Farrell left it, with her solemn red-gold glamour. The return of this pointy-shouldered siren was cause for much excitement in the audience, not least because her dancing was in full song, articulated and intense. Helene Alexopoulos, NYCB principal and perfumed beauty, took the sexpot roles in Slaughter and Tzigane, shimmying up a gorgeous storm in the former~dash\laugh-out-loud luscious!—yet looking too inside the steps of the latter, uncomfortable in its insolent gypsy free form (and not in touch with her own insolence). Elena Pankova turned in a fleet, filigreed performance of Scotch Symphony, a ballet she first performed with the Kirov Ballet, under Farrell’s coaching, and has now made her own shade of St. Petersburg pink. Chaconne belonged to the corps, who dispatched its celestial orders with a bright, almost giddy, lift. But Marie-Christine Mouis and Tamas Detrich, in the terrifying Farrell–Martins pas de deux (nimble and ethereal), found moments of flow if not breadth in this virtuosic volley.
The great performance in the two programs I saw belonged to the cast of Mozartiana, Balanchine’s masterpiece of 1981— his last—set to Tchaikovsky’s homage to Mozart. I’ve never much liked the dancing of Susan Jaffe, the principal with American Ballet Theater who took the lead in D.C. She is a technical powerhouse, and holds herself to high standards, but the very high curve of her forehead is bland and cold—she’s an ice angel. No doubt Farrell cast Jaffe in Mozartiana because of her strength. The ballet sets tests of stamina and balance, and asks for simple steps performed largely and slowly and roundly at once. Farrell transcended the test with witty musicianship. Letting herself loft and dip in the little whirlwinds and dark thunderclaps of the Theme and Variations, she brushed playfully against the shadow of death, then ducked away. Other ballerinas have been graced just to pass through in one piece (though I remember a Calegari performance of heat and color).
Opening to the Preghiera, the prayer that begins the ballet, Jaffe opened to herself. Here was a warm, confident, honest performance, shimmeringly sure, touching in what it showed to have been inside Jaffe and in what Farrell knew she could bring out. The glow was everywhere—in the charged and rakish Gigue of Shawn Mahoney, a Cherubino in black satin, and in Peter Boal’s sterling support in the Theme and Variations. Mozartiana has always made me think of a Gothic church, a reliquary with Farrell under the arch. But its black velvet curtains and four little girls in black pouf skirts, followed immediately by four big girls in black pouf skirts, also suggest a school performance. The dancers appear in growing importance, a sort of recital-hall hierarchy. And yet when Balanchine brings all the dancers on for the last dance, we find ourselves in the finale of a Mozart opera, the happy reprise in which the moral trots out with the characters, and the audience feels equilibrium restored. That’s what Farrell did in D.C. Peace on stage, a teacher in the wings.
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Laura Jacobss most recent novel is The Bird Catcher (St
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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 14 December 1995, on page 47
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