I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [214]
13. Where did Lincoln come up with that? Is it true? Most accounts agree that Balanchine was born January 22, 1904, which would have made him seventy years old.
14. Saltarelli (May 30, 1974), music by Antonio Vivaldi, and scenery and costumes by John Braden.
15. When NYCB was spending summers in Saratoga, we had Mondays off. I would ask Elise Ingalls, a lovely ballerina, to join me at a theater in Woodstock, New York, where we would perform various pas de deux and variations from Balanchine’s ballets. They paid us maybe a thousand dollars for the performance. One memorable Monday, I introduced the pas de deux from Swan Lake. Elise was perhaps nineteen years old, and I had rehearsed and rehearsed her, but she was quivering with nervousness. The music began and she danced so exquisitely, a performance full of innocence, tenderness, and fragility, and trembling the whole time. After the final note, the audience, rapt, sat in silence, then burst into applause. After our bows, I announced to the audience, “I have never danced this pas de deux with a ballerina that gave a more moving interpretation than the one Elise just gave you.”
16. Today, when I teach at NDI, I’ll demonstrate a step for the group, and when a student is having difficulty, I help up to a point—“Come here. Let me show you.” If, after a minute or two he or she still doesn’t get it, I’ll say, “Great. Marianne [or some other teaching assistant], could you work with her?” Or sometimes I’ll ask another student who knows the step well (a “peer mentor”) to help, and they go off into a corner. And then I keep going, and I know that the assistant will be working with the struggler, and out of the corner of my eye, I’m watching. When they return, I’ll have the struggler and his teacher demonstrate for the rest of the class. We do that all the time. It’s an excellent way to train teachers and, at the same time, make sure no one falls behind in class.
A Close Call with Death
1. The story of the Brad Bishop murders has been featured on a number of television shows, including America’s Most Wanted. I believe the State Department, CIA, FBI, and police continue their search for Brad Jr. to this day.
The Years Leading to Balanchine’s Death, Continued
1. Charlotte had no doubts that she would be a Broadway star, and Cate, full of doubts, had opted for Denison University and a career in pedagogy.
2. Two brothers, Joseph and Dan Duell, joined NYCB and eventually became principals. As a student at SAB, Dan lived with Carrie and me at our home. Joe was the type of dancer that was a magnet to Lincoln—pale white skin, muscled, handsome, quiet, soft-spoken, gentle, serene.
3. I once asked Balanchine, “Jerry is such a big Broadway star, but he has been willing to work under you for all these years? Why?” His answer: “He wants to be close so he can analyze what makes Balanchine Balanchine—and steal it.”
4. Martha Swope was NYCB’s premiere photographer for many years. Each season, Balanchine, while setting the lights for his ballets, would demand, “We need it brighter,” and Martha would have to adjust the f-stop on her camera to a lower setting than her records for the previous season indicated (the f-stop controls the size of the iris opening of the camera lens—higher settings create a smaller iris). Those mysterious and murky pools that defined the early lighting plots of Jean Rosenthal were gradually being erased. I knew his eyes had been fading for quite a while. Subsequently, when Carrie became the company photographer, she noticed it, too. “Mr. B’s eyesight’s going,” she said, “but the brighter lights he’s demanding are great for taking pictures!”
5. When it was announced that Jerry and Peter would share the role of artistic director (they called themselves “ballet masters in chief”), I called Rosemary Dunleavy and suggested, “The company needs you. Jerry and Peter