I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [118]
After opening at the Bolshoi, the company moved to the Kremlin and its Great Palace of Congress, a six-thousand-seat theater, I was told, built a year before. We were scheduled to perform there for a couple of weeks, before returning to the Bolshoi for a final few performances. After company class, I’d spend the day, and most evenings as well, totally immersed in a variety of exercises, driving to get back on that stage. Skill and strength were compounding, so occasionally I’d take an evening off to seek out performances of opera, theater, and ballet around Moscow.
Our bus was not allowed close to the Kremlin wall. Each day, leaving the warmth of our bus, we’d scurry up to the fortress walls and crowd through a narrow aperture to arrive in a low-ceilinged vestibule, where an awful doorman waited with a pair of flunkies. Each dancer had to show proof of his or her identity, and this surly clerk would scrutinize it, compare it to some ledger, peruse and mull over it, stare at you, stare back at the identity card, and, at last, wave you through. Endless! Every day for two weeks, the company allowed twenty minutes extra in our schedule just to get past this prick.
Pavel Gerdt was an early teacher of Balanchine, and his favorite. His daughter had come to watch our company class, and offered to teach the ballerinas the next day. She served up a difficult technique class, and Suki Schorer, Milly, Gloria Govrin, and Violette Verdy were outstanding. Violette, with her wild French passion, worked so intensely in class that it threw her into a nervous and excited state. Afterward, she couldn’t stop talking, and couldn’t rehearse for the rest of the day. Balanchine, observing the class with me, kept mumbling in my ear, “You know … I wish Diana was in class. Gerdt should see Diana!”
Ever the optimist, I told Balanchine I would be ready to dance by late October. Assuming that Diana would be ready, he scheduled us to dance Episodes at the matinee on the 27th.
Poor Balanchine was constantly plagued. Dancers were complaining and making demands; others were getting injured. The corps was exhausted, and creating ballet programs with enough variety, yet not overworking the cast, became impossible. Dignitaries and fans were pulling at him. The minister of culture wanted to take him around and show him off, and demanded he participate in various political and diplomatic activities. Journalists clamored for interviews, and Soviet musicians, writers, choreographers, and dancers all wanted a part of him. The Soviet pundits sought for him to declare publicly how great the Soviet Union was. “Better now, everything better now, wouldn’t you say?” Balanchine answered, “Nyet.” At the behest of the Soviet authorities, and probably for himself, Balanchine’s brother, Andrei, continually asked favors. A well-known composer, he boasted to Balanchine, “I make four hundred rubles a month. The average composer, maybe eighty-nine.” Andrei gave Balanchine one of his scores, urging him to create a ballet. He painted the picture, “Two brothers! One makes the music, the other makes choreography.” Balanchine told me, “I don’t know how to tell him his music is awful.”
Meanwhile, the Bolshoi Ballet gave a performance of their “modern” works, and our dancers were invited to attend. In the minds of the Soviets, the four ballets on the program represented the pinnacle of avant-garde choreography, but they turned out to be bad copies of modern dances seen in the West in the 1930s and ’40s. The closing ballet was a Marxist critique, a “message” ballet—the oppressed rising up against the landlords—full of excessive, earth-stomping energy, punching, and heroic sentiment. The finale included the entire cast onstage, waving red flags. Balanchine called it “Soviet garbage.” How easily art and artist can be tainted by imposed ideology.
The night of October 13, I was hanging around my dressing room backstage when Balanchine stopped by. “We need something easy to fill out program. What about pas de deux from A Midsummer