I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [206]
7. If I had to reflect on the finest classical male ballet dancers of my time, Vladimir Vasiliev of the Bolshoi and the Danish dancer Eric Bruhn were, I feel, without peers.
8. As opposed to classical ballet—the term “character class” meant ethnic or folk dance, primarily Central European and Slavic.
9. Muriel Stuart collaborated with Lincoln Kirstein to write a technique manual, The Classic Ballet (1952), which has few peers.
Maria Tallchief, Balanchine, and Marc Chagall
1. Le Figaro, May 12, 1952. Quoted in Chujoy, The New York City Ballet, pp. 347–48.
2. This and other Balanchine quotes in this episode are from Nancy Reynolds, Repertory in Review: 40 Years of the New York City Ballet (Dial Press, 1977), p. 100.
3. Reynolds, Repertory in Review.
4. Paid for primarily by tax dollars, the New York State Theater changed its name to the David H. Koch Theater when the billionaire donated a reputed $100 million for renovations.
Balanchine and Cranko
1. Sadler’s Wells Ballet evolved into the Royal Ballet, and a second company was formed, the Sadler’s Wells Theater Ballet.
2. In the “Black Fog” of London, England, in the winter of 1952, at least four thousand deaths were due to stagnant air masses of coal smog.
3. Three translations of this stanza from Eugene Onegin:
Nabokov translation (revised ed. 1975):
Gently he lays his hand upon his breast
and falls. His misty gaze
expresses death, not anguish.
Thus, slowly, down the slope of hills,
in the sun with sparks shining,
a lump of snow descends.
Walter Arndt translation (1963):
In silence to his bosom raising
A hand, he took no other breath,
And sank, and fell. Opaquely glazing,
His eyes expressed not pain, but death.
So, gently down the slope subsiding,
A sparkling sheet of snow comes sliding.
Douglas Hofstadter translation (1999):
And on his breast he gently places
His hand, then crumples to the dirt.
The foggy look upon his face is
Of death expressive, not of hurt.
Once, slowly down some sloping mountain,
Aglow as though sun’s frozen fountain,
A lonely snowball fell and rolled.
Lincoln and Lew
1. This city built by Tsar Peter the Great juggled the names Petrograd, St. Petersburg, and Leningrad.
2. Danilova and Balanchine never actually married, but they lived together in what may be considered a common-law marriage.
3. Lydia Ivanova, a promising ballerina, was included among the original members of the group. Before the group received permission to depart, she drowned in a mysterious accident. Ivanova was rumored to be mistress to a high party official, Danilova told me: “He did not want her to leave, so he had her, as you say in your country, rubbed out.”
4. At the Royal Opera House, empty between matinee and evening, a fellow corps de ballet dancer, Kaye Sargent, and I would slip into the Royal Box to neck passionately, panting in regal style. She subsequently married the head electrician at the opera, Bill McGee, and moved to London for good. In later years, we would get together with several dancers from the Royal Ballet and laugh, gossiping over the conditions we overcame on ballet tours. The worst I remember was the Liceu in Barcelona—the one toilet in all of Europe, it seemed, that did have a bowl sporting a wooden rim, only the rim was encrusted with dried feces (other toilets were just holes in the ground). Shaun O’Brien, a fellow dancer, solved our Liceu problem by saving local newspapers and cutting out covers for the rim. (“The problem, Daisy,” Shaun called me endearingly, “is the newsprint rubs off and tattoos your buns.”) Dancers from the Royal Ballet described their tours in the deserts