I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [211]
Quentin Keynes
1. In 2003, at the age of eighty-one, Quentin died of spinal cancer. For over fifty years, he brought high school students, on their summer breaks, to Africa, believing the experience would change them from adolescents to men. Many of them did follow that change during those summers. His library of books and manuscripts brought in well over six million dollars at auction.
2. Early on, Brooks and Shaun had given me the nickname Daisy. Another backstage ritual—everybody called you by your mother’s name. They’d say, “Who’s dancing Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux tonight? Georgette!” Deni Lamont was Alice, and Shaun was Elsie.
3. A Russian friend, Grisha, tells me that Russia’s boss, Vladimir Putin, recently banned Borzhomi and Georgian wine, in an effort to punish Georgians for their rebellious separation from Russia.
4. Arthur Mitchell joined the company in 1954, and became a principal dancer within a year or two. Every time we toured Europe, he was a sensation—this beautiful black American ballet dancer of such accomplishment and grace. There would literally be hundreds of fans at the stage door waiting for him after perfor-mances. At that time, as far as I know, there wasn’t a black dancer in any other major ballet company in America.
5. Several years later, I put that dream to a test, dancing Nutcracker in Salt Lake City. I invented and danced a different variation every night to the same music, for ten performances in a row.
6. Bert Martinson died from an insect bite. In 1989, I would lose my right index finger to the bite of a brown recluse spider.
7. Earlier, Mr. B had described to me his plans for the premiere of his full-length Midsummer Night’s Dream. The tall and regal Diana would be his Titania, and a canopy of fat leaves created by the set designer David Hays would be lowered to make her appear even taller. “She will look like giantess, big, beautiful.” Her choreography would be slow, with long, sweeping movements, and her handmaidens, the tallest girls in the corps. Whereas when Oberon was onstage, a new canopy of leaves above would be smaller and suspended as high as possible, so the compact Eddie Villella would seem diminutive by contrast. His choreography would be quick, electric, virtuoso, and buzzing all over the stage. To further enhance the effect, Oberon would command a court of tiny creatures of the forest, butterflies and elves—danced by bevies of children from SAB, to contrast with Titania’s tall entourage. But as it happened, when it all came to pass, Diana didn’t make the premiere. Melissa replaced her as Titania. Before Balanchine died, he left Midsummer Night’s Dream as his gift to Diana, whom I never saw dance the role.
Every time Diana opted out, Milly came to the rescue. To his ire, Balanchine had to depend on her. Eventually, Milly won him over, but it took most of her career.
8. I did my best to become a mixture of two styles: Chabukiani’s excessive, grand, powerful gestures, macho, folk-derived; and Vladimiroff’s, with gentle ease, tossing off virtuoso steps as if glory was the day-to-day garment he wore, all simplicity. Chabukiani was out there, arms flying, full of bravado. The great Russian dancer Vladimir Vasiliev could swim easily in both styles, but the superb Danish dancer Eric Bruhn would find it hard to be Chabukiani—he was inherently a pure, simple classical dancer. Besides Chabukiani, the other male dancers who inspired me as a boy: Igor Youskevitch, in my memory flying out of the wings in the ballet Coppélia; and in every performance of Ballet Society, the art of Todd Bolender, and the smooth bouncing power of William Dollar. When André Eglevsky joined NYCB, he became my mentor and a model for me.
9. Balanchine insisted that he be listed only as ballet master. “I am not big director. Just ballet master.” When you have the power,