City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [83]
Fans felt so possessive of Balanchine that no one wanted to admit that he or she shared this passion with others. Fellow fans were seen almost as romantic rivals, but like rivals were drawn to one another in the end since no ordinary person understood their obsession. They wanted to talk about their great love, and who better as an interlocutor than another bewitched swain or maiden? Balanchine proved to New Yorkers that world-class genius had found refuge and expression in their city. His use of Mozart and Bach as well as of the twentieth-century scores of Ives, Stravinsky, and Hindemith pointed toward a way of combining innovation within tradition, just as his classical ballet vocabulary was thrown into relief by eliminating the cumbersome apparatus of nineteenth-century storytelling and replacing tutus with black-and-white practice tights and tops. Balanchine had said that there are no mothers-in-law in ballet, but in almost all his dances even mothers had been eliminated. What was left was a narrative impulse stripped of story, a sense of drama without exposition or denouement, everything in constant crisis. The New York City Ballet was presenting new work every season. It was not a museum, as was the Metropolitan Opera, for instance, or the Philharmonic, the ballet’s two neighbors at Lincoln Center.
To watch a genius at work is the highest civilized pleasure, and Balanchine was our resident genius, at the peak of his powers. We saw not only his newest ballets but also the two great works preserved from the 1920s and the Diaghilev years of his past, Prokofiev’s The Prodigal Son (with sets and costumes by Rouault) and Stravinsky’s Apollo, not to mention Tchaikovsky’s Serenade from the 1930s, Balanchine’s first ballet composed for an American company. For us something about that ballet was touching as a fossil record of the first rocky rehearsals at Balanchine’s brand-new school up in White Plains. As he explained it, “It seemed to me that the best way to make students aware of stage technique was to give them something new to dance, something they had never seen before. I chose Tchaikovsky’s Serenade to work with. The class contained the first night seventeen girls and no boys. The problem was, how to arrange this odd number of girls so that they would look interesting. I placed them on diagonal lines and decided that the hands should move first to give the girls practice.
“That was how Serenade began. The next class contained only nine girls; the third six. I choreographed to the music with the pupils I happened to have at a particular time. Boys began to attend the class and they were worked into the pattern. One day, when all the girls rushed off the floor area we were using as a stage, one of the girls fell and began to cry. I told the pianist to keep on playing and kept this bit in the dance. Another day, one of the girls was late for class, so I left that in too.”
Because Balanchine had studied music as well as ballet, he had an uncanny way of “seeing” the deep structure of the music he was setting and of rendering it visible. Whereas lesser choreographers might respond to the ornamentation of the score and set a trill, say, or a clash of cymbals, Balanchine ignored the surface irritation of the music and went right to its unfolding principles of development and contrast. That was the source of the exhilarating beauty of those evenings. On the one side there were the young, superb bodies of men and women entering and running and leaping through strong allées of lighting projected from the wings, all the rush and sparkle of the corps and the dignified, gravity-defying combinations of the soloists, those cantilevered arabesques on point and thrilling female flights into space facilitated by noble, self-effacing male partners. If that component was pulse-quickening, a perilous spectacle, on the other side was the abstract