I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [212]
10. At the Carter Barron, on its enormous stage, I had to cross 120 feet of space with three cabrioles. It meant making tremendous preparations, trying to eat up space. Melissa, my ballerina, threw herself into dives, flinging herself off a cliff, and trusting me to catch her. Backstage afterward, Shaun gave his imprimatur: “Daisy, you and Milly just gave the performance of a lifetime.” That night at the Carter Barron, the humidity remained in the air but the temperature dropped suddenly, so hot bodies literally smoked. Inhaling my own body’s steam, I was trembling with joy.
Memorable, but in a negative way, was my first Apollo in 1957, where I was so ashamed of my performance, I wanted to quit dance. In a later positive memory, I was on a high, performing Apollo at the Staatsoper in Hamburg, in honor of Stravinsky’s eightieth birthday, with him conducting. Three nights in a row. Still later, a low that bothers me to this day, again in Apollo, dancing the role in the outdoor theater at Ravinia, in Highland Park, Illinois, I cheated myself by not preparing adequately to be at my peak when the curtain rose, and felt my performance reflected it. But that never happened again. There was joy in every Apollo after that—in each one, I worked on something different to master. And each performance became a challenge, and an achievement, but never the pinnacle.
Balanchine’s Muses
1. Extremely gifted as a designer, Ruth created the costumes for Jerome Robbins’s masterpiece The Cage in 1951.
2. In 1956, Maria married a sweetheart of a man, Henry Paschen Jr., “Buzzy,” a Chicago businessman who had long courted her. They soon had the baby Maria so desired—and named her Elise. That love child evolved into a stunning woman of high intelligence; deeply passionate about poetry, she earned a Ph.D. from Oxford. You may find, while riding the NYC subway and avoiding eye contact with fellow travelers, your gaze wandering to the printed announcements. If lucky, you’ll come across short poems among the ads—“Poetry in Motion”—Elise’s baby.
3. Balanchine admired Tudor, in particular the ballet Lilac Garden: “I could never make ballet like this,” he commented. “Lucia [Chase, director of Ballet Theatre, later American Ballet Theatre] made mistake. She should have built her company around Tudor and given him everything, to see where his choreography could go.” Nevertheless, when Diana divorced Hugh, Balanchine soon got rid of both Tudor and Hugh.
4. Although inspired by and choreographed for her, most of these works were not premiered by Diana, but by replacements. Diana would work out—consciously or unconsciously—something to keep herself off the stage.
5. Months later, Allegra gave birth to her first child, the lovely Trista (meaning sad or sorrowful).
6. Richard Rapp did perform the role and superbly, and in later life went on to teach at SAB, and did so masterfully. He truly understood Balanchine’s technique and aesthetic.
7. A very young Judy Fugate, who grew to grace the stage in later years as an exquisite ballerina.
8. Francis and Paul are highly intelligent and unconventional, with the blood of Spanish caballeros running in their veins.
9. Shaun and I had dubbed Suzanne “the Princess” because Balanchine had referred to her as “my alabaster princess.” We nicknamed Balanchine “Breath” or “the Breath” because, like God, he breathed the essence of life into his dancers.
10. Robert Weiss presently runs Carolina Ballet, a company in Raleigh, and is a brilliant choreographer—inventive and tasteful.
Lincoln
1. One painting always stopped him cold. “This is my favorite painting,” he’d exclaim. On a giant canvas, it depicted the rear end of an enormous white horse—a horse’s ass.
2. If Balanchine were alive today, how he would have worshipped Lisa Randall, a gray-eyed, golden beauty whose specialty is exploring ideas of other dimensions and other universes. Today she is a world-class cosmologist and professor at Harvard University.
3.