I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [127]
At the end of his performance, the entire audience leaped to their feet, and many left their seats to run down the aisles to be as close to the stage as possible. The Tbilisi theater was trapezoidal in shape, with the stage the wider part, and box seats on each side shaped like stacked blocks, rising overlapping, and abutting the edges of the stage. Chabukiani’s bows were theatrical marvels, as dramatic as anything I’ve ever seen.
He entered and stood down center, close to the footlights, with his arms spread into a wide V, then started walking backward until he touched the red velvet curtain behind him. Then, instead of stopping when his back grazed the curtain, he kept going, leaning against the curtain and pushing with his feet, moving the volumes of red velvet slowly back upstage, leaning his weight more and more into the curtain, until he was almost horizontal, as if shoving a locomotive back down the tracks. By now, the audience was clapping rhythmically and stamping while chanting his name. As if a crimson brush was sweeping him slowly toward his fate, Chabukiani allowed the weight of the red velvet to sweep him forward, until it shoved him right to the edge of the footlights. Another inch, and he would have nosedived into the orchestra pit. There, he stopped. Then, this master of theater slowly drew in his outstretched arms, as if gathering every member of the audience and clasping them to his breast, hugging and squeezing them into his body. To top it off, he put a kind of wild, ecstatic expression on his face, his eyes wide as if having a vision, then bent his head forward in a bow. Taking a big breath, as if inhaling every fan, he suddenly looked up with an enormous, jubilant grin beaming like sunlight. During all these shenanigans, he was being pelted with flowers from the screaming fans from the boxes and aisles, even from members of the orchestra.
When it was NYCB’s turn to be in that theater, I had Chabukiani’s dressing room, and it had its own private toilet. In the middle of a very large concrete room, some twenty by twenty feet, stood a wooden riser of five by five feet, approximately two feet high. Triumphantly, on top of the riser sat the toilet. A single wire with one dim light bulb dangled from the high ceiling, the switch for it on the wall near the door. There was nothing else in the room. I imagined the riser covered a hole in the floor below (I hoped). I sat there on that toilet throne and thought, “Chabukiani sat here!”
As in Leningrad, accompanied by my trusty camera, I went with Balanchine on a tour of Tbilisi. We met up with a tall, imposing man. The pair of them talked in both Russian and Georgian, and then Balanchine introduced me: “This is my brother.” I knew Balanchine had a sister, and I’d met his brother Andrei, but knew nothing of another brother. “He is seventy-seven years old. Priest!” Did I hear Balanchine wrong? Did he say “my brother”? Could he have meant brother-in-law? Or brother, as in a religious title? Was there an unknown and secret relative? A mystery never clarified.
“What do you think of Chabukiani?” I asked Balanchine. He twitched a bit and said, “Opening night here, Chabukiani said of us, ‘Amateur choreography!’ but, you know, years ago, when Chabukiani was