I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [101]
Episodes, 1962 (image credit 10.9)
Opus 34 (1954) was a ballet set to Schoenberg music that has become legend, at least as long as those who danced it, or saw it, still live. The score was so dense that two conductors in the pit were needed to handle its complexity, with Balanchine—the third conductor—onstage, hidden, tucked in the wings, gesturing and counting out loud for the dancers. Quite often in his ballets, Balanchine would fill musical phrases with the dancers holding hands, getting tangled and tied up in knots, and then unraveling through his choreographic legerdemain. In the ballet Concerto Barocco, it happens in the second movement. Every time I see it, I smile with delight at its invention and beauty.
In Opus 34, he had maneuvered twenty-four dancers, ensnaring them in a seething mass. As the movements continued, it disentangled—as if some mathematical formula, defying solution for centuries, had been solved in front of your eyes. The choreography so described the architecture of the music as to make you exclaim, “Oh, it’s the Truth we’re hearing.” In another part of Opus, there was a macabre dance for Tanny LeClercq and Herbert Bliss that took place in an operating room, where they represented two flayed bodies in a flopping pas de deux—a pair of medical models of veins, blood vessels, muscles, sinew, viscera, and nerve endings that had slipped off the surgery table.
In the 1954 ballet Ivesiana, Balanchine invented haunting choreography to Charles Ives’s composition The Unanswered Question. It starred the teenage ballerina Allegra Kent and caused a sensation. The nubile Allegra is borne by four males, as if they are transporting a sacred icon. She falls and swoops, twisted, contorted, bent into a ball, then spread, her legs akimbo. Her airborne peregrinations, at one time, have her being passed around the waists of her bearers as if they were threading a belt through loops. And always that beautiful, serene face, staring innocently and unaffectedly at the audience, as if she were in another world. Never does she touch the earth. Throughout this procession and meandering around the stage, a bare-chested man follows her, with outstretched arms, yearningly seeking her, never leaving his knees. Waiting in the wings with my partner, Tanny, for our entrance in the dance Balanchine invented for us, George Washington’s Barn Dance, I remember reflecting that there will never be a choreographer to equal him. Inventing some four hundred ballets. Analytic, spiritual, the musicality of him, the quality of taste, the surprises, inventing worlds outside of the ordinary as if he had conjured planets and satellites, other moons, right outside of our globe, that we had never imagined existed. And his generosity was unmatched. When you read the letters of Stravinsky, you get a sense of his tightfistedness, his concern about royalties—you never got that with Balanchine. The god of dance touched him. He was blessed, so he gave. “You diminish yourself by putting a price tag on your work. One does not own dance.”
When I see his ballets danced today, I realize they miss his presence. Anyone who tries to teach Balanchine ballets somehow fails. We are the dancers who danced the roles, and are trying to express and re-create what was taught us, but it’s not the same. Besides, Balanchine would re-create movement—he’d change the steps to challenge a different type of dancer! He was the pinnacle. If Balanchine did it or said it, it became dogma. Carrie,