I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [150]
I suspect Balanchine drew more out of Gurdjieff than Lincoln, who, when he was young, seemed mainly to have wanted a guru in his life who would “shape him up.”3
Without Lincoln’s invitation in 1933, Balanchine might have tried to wrest back control of the Paris Opéra from Lifar, or gone to opera houses in Denmark, London, Argentina, Milan, or Monte Carlo. But the U.S. was the future, and the right place for Balanchine. Nowhere in the world would Balanchine ever find a patron to equal Lincoln. Besides, with his riotous imagination, extensive connections, knowledge, willpower, and drive, Lincoln had the tenacity to stick it out with the ungovernable genius Balanchine. Thanks to them, SAB and NYCB were born, and my attendance there allows me to claim that this wild, untamed youth learned nobility through art.
The Years Leading to Balanchine’s Death
When Balanchine was in the hospital in the early 1980s, Carrie brought him soup every day. His favorite was borscht, but not the Russian Tea Room version. “Not enough cabbage!” Balanchine complained. So Carrie prepared borscht of her own, based on a recipe from the artist Robert Indiana.1 It called for wedges of cabbage, and Balanchine slurped and gulped it down like a starving mouse gobbling cheese. He always ate that way, seeming to inhale food, while his taste buds danced, analyzing every morsel with full attention to the texture, spices, and mixtures of flavors.
He was highly sensitive to scent, and gave his favorite ballerinas perfumes selected to match their personalities. “This one is elegant and gentle. Good for Kay.” In the elevator or hallways of NYST, Balanchine would sometimes sample the air, and pronounce, “Patricia Neary just came in,” or in class, “Ah! Diana, I knew you were here. I smelled your perfume in the hall.”
The same with music: he seemed to sniff the harmonies, and no outside noises or distractions disturbed his concentration. At rehearsal, he would sometimes say to the accompanist, “Play something, invent!” and as the pianist improvised, you could see Balanchine silently asking himself, “What’s the music doing? Where is it going, what’s the structure?” I believe he paid more attention to the architecture of the music than to the choreography he was inventing. When I watch dance, a small part of my mind attends to the music. With Balanchine, it was the reverse. He was a musician who choreographed.
In the end, he couldn’t listen to music. Carrie brought him headphones, a tape player, and a carton full of tapes. But the music hurt his ears.
One afternoon, he was sitting on the side of the hospital bed, his bare feet dangling off the edge. As I settled next to him, my dance bag brushed his foot, and he recoiled, as if touched by burning coals. “Ah! Ah! Ah! Don’t touch! It hurts!”
I thought of Balanchine’s mantra: “If you want to choreograph, you have to get on your feet and show. If I couldn’t show, I’d be finished.”
During his illness, no one knew what was happening to Mr. B:
[I]t was not until an autopsy was done [on Balanchine] that the disease was identified. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is rare and the diagnosis is ordinarily made only by microscopic postmortem examination of tissues. (Francis Mason, ed., I Remember Balanchine [Doubleday, 1991], p. 604)
Today, reviewing my diaries with hindsight and an understanding of Creutzfeldt-Jakob (CJD), the human form of mad cow disease, the symptoms all seem clear.
“Symptoms of CJD include forgetfulness, nervousness, jerky trembling hand movements, unsteady gait, muscle spasms, chronic dementia, balance disorder, and loss of facial expression.” (Medical Dictionary on MedicineNet.com)
Affected individuals also commonly suffer visual loss and early death. (New England Journal of Medicine 339, no. 27 [1998])