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January 23, 2004
TT: Centennial
Last night I went to the New York State Theater to watch New York City Ballet dance Apollo, Prodigal Son, and Serenade on the hundredth anniversary of the birth of George Balanchine. It was bitterly cold in Manhattan, but the house was still full of familiar faces: balletomanes and critics, aging ballerinas and budding bunheads, old friends of Balanchine and young choreographers looking for inspiration. Though I'd seen all three ballets danced the week before, I couldn't imagine staying home. I've witnessed most of the great occasions of state since Balanchine's death--the company's 50th-anniversary celebration, Suzanne Farrell's last Vienna Waltzes and Jerome Robbins' last bow, the memorial services for Robbins and Tanaquil Le Clercq, Balanchine's fourth wife--and so I thought it right to be on hand to celebrate the birthday of the man who opened my eyes to ballet 17 years ago.On paper, it was just another repertory program, the kind that rarely inspires anything remotely approaching a sense of occasion nowadays, but no sooner did the lights go down than I knew something was different. The orchestra launched into the fanfare-like introduction to Apollo, the curtain flew up to reveal Nikolaj Hübbe standing at center stage in front of a Balanchine-blue cyclorama, and all at once I felt my skin prickle. As Hübbe strummed the fake lyre he held in his hands, I thought of all the times Balanchine told his dancers that he'd been talking to Stravinsky or Tchaikovsky the night before. Such fanciful tales had always made me smile, but for the first time I had an inkling of what he meant. The evening was full of uncanny encounters and events: the unseen message that Calliope scribbles in her hand and shows to Apollo, the ominous flapping of the Dark Angel's wings at the end of Serenade, the terrible moment when a mob of bald-headed goons strips the Prodigal Son naked, their hands skittering over his limp body like the paws of greedy mice. All had sprung from the mind of the genius we were there to honor.
It was one of those nights when past and present are hooked together like the cars of a speeding train. The company Balanchine had founded was performing his three oldest surviving ballets in the house he built. Apollo was danced in the cruelly abridged revised version of 1980, shorn of its prelude, décor, birth scene, and secondary characters, but Prodigal Son looked much the same way it did on the stage of the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt in 1929, right down to Georges Rouault's thickly brushed backdrops. The dancers on stage included Darci Kistler, Balanchine's last protégée, now married to Peter Martins, NYCB's ballet master in chief, and Kyra Nichols, who in the hard years since Balanchine's death has come to embody the poised, transparent purity of which he dreamed his whole life long. An old man sitting next to me reminisced out loud about seeing Edward Villella dance the Prodigal Son, and I in turn remembered my first Serenade, performed by Dance Theatre of Harlem at City Center, where I sat in the cheapest seats in the highest balcony, wondering if there could possibly be anything in the world half so beautiful.
Miniature bottles of Russian vodka were handed out in the second intermission, and after the final bow was taken, Martins and Barbara Horgan, the head of the Balanchine Trust, came on stage to lead us in a birthday toast to the man of the hour. "What he gave us," Martins said, "is all about love. There are young dancers on this stage who were not born when Mr. B died, and they love him." We raised our plastic glasses, the orchestra thundered out a fanfare, and balloons dropped from the fifth ring. As we filed out, the old man who remembered Villella shook a finger in my face. "Your grandchildren will see these ballets," he said.
And will they? If precedent is any indication, the odds are discouraging. Only a handful of pre-modern ballets continue to be danced in their original form, and fewer still can be taken seriously as major works of art. By and large, 19th-century ballet is remembered more for its music than its steps, just as one inevitably wonders about the extent to which choreography per se was responsible for Serge Diaghilev's triumphs. Fokine, Nijinsky, Massine, Nijinska: all made dances for Diaghilev that set the tongues of the world to wagging, most of which are now half remembered or wholly forgotten. We know more about the Ballets Russes' costumes than its choreography.
Why, then, should Balanchine be different? He himself affected to believe that his ballets would not long outlive him, at least not in any recognizable form. "When I die," he told Rudolf Nureyev at the end of his life, "everything should vanish. A new person should come and impose his own things." But he also founded New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet, which exist to preserve authentic versions of his ballets and teach the techniques necessary to dance them idiomatically. And though Balanchine was not the first choreographer to start a company or a school, what sets him apart is the existence of a worldwide network of other institutions and individuals whose purpose is to disseminate his ballets as widely as possible, and to give them a permanent life in repertory. No other choreographer has attracted so many followers, and no other choreographic oeuvre has been the subject of so thoroughgoing and committed an attempt at long-term preservation.
The many "Balanchine companies" led by alumni of New York City Ballet are not the only important dance companies in America, but their common emphasis on Balanchine, and the consistently high quality with which they stage his ballets, is a development of near-unprecedented significance, a sign that the Balanchine style may be evolving into a lingua franca for ballet in the 21st century, just as the Franco-Russian style of classic ballet provided a firm foundation on which the tradition-steeped Balanchine was able to build his neoclassical idiom. It helps, of course, that most of his dances are well suited to the restrictive circumstances under which repertory ballet is presented in this country. A piece like Concerto Barocco, for example, has no set and no costumes--it is danced in simple practice clothes--making it relatively cheap to produce. Nor does the plotless Barocco require elaborate direction to make its effect: it contains no significant glances, no labyrinthine subtexts, just music and steps. And unlike the myriad dialects of modern dance, the steps of classical ballet are for all intents a universal language. Thus Balanchine's ballets, radically innovative though they are, can be executed by any reasonably proficient classical company. "You know, these are my ballets," he told Rosemary Dunleavy, New York City Ballet's ballet mistress. "In the years to come they will be rehearsed by other people. They will be danced by other people. But no matter what, they are still my ballets."
I wish I could speak with absolute certainty about the future of his ballets, but the jury of posterity is still out. That they ought to live and flourish, however, seems to me beyond question. After spending countless hours looking at dozens of them, I have come to believe that George Balanchine was not merely the greatest ballet choreographer of the 20th century, but the only one to have created a body of work that deserves to be remembered in the same way we remember the work of Stravinsky or Matisse. And while I'm sure the balletomanes of 1929 felt the same way about the repertory of the Ballets Russes, Balanchine's lean, stripped-down dances, unlike Diaghilev's evanescent spectacles, were built to last. This is not to say they can thrive in a vacuum, but the world of ballet is full of talented men and women determined to make sure that Apollo, Serenade, and Prodigal Son last at least as long as The Rite of Spring or The Red Studio. Which is why I wouldn't be at all surprised if my grandchildren see them--and their grandchildren, too.
Posted January 23, 2004 1:06 AM
