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By Root 1299 0

disaster trying to create a resident ballet company at the Metropolitan Opera. In 1946, he decided to hell with trying to curry favor with the public, and he formed the Ballet Society, a group of American aristocrats (meaning members of the moneyed class) to commission performances in New York—evenings of ballet to be performed in rented spaces. In the public announcement that circulated among the New York elite, Lincoln promised “completely new repertory, consisting of ballets, ballet-opera and other lyric forms … [with] the planned collaboration of independent easel-painters, progressive choreographers and musicians, employing the full use of avant-garde ideas, methods, and materials.”2 In mid-September, Ballet Society was born, and the first ballet at the birth was The Spellbound Child, with music by Ravel.

Balanchine wanted me to play the young boy in Ravel’s mini-opera L’Enfant et les Sortilèges. It was to be called The Spellbound Child, and an ecstatic Boss escorted me to the first rehearsal. I was to be that Child. In the course of rehearsals, I discovered the action in L’Enfant centers on a child and the magical, dreamlike adventures he conjures. A hodgepodge of moving furniture, ticking clocks, threatening math numbers (the “Arithmetic” dance), flirting cats, croaking frogs (my brother Pat, recently renamed Paul, was a frog). These assorted creatures appear and dance to Ravel’s sumptuous music. Learning the role of the Child, I was terrified. There were many consultations among Lincoln, Balanchine, Leon Barzin, the conductor, and various unknown people, talking about me, staring at me. I didn’t know it then, but they were deciding whether to go with a dancing lead (me) accompanied by a boy soprano singing from the orchestra pit, or with the boy soprano singing onstage, but not dancing. Just simple staging. I lost out to the voice. His name was Joseph Connolly, and he was sweet and scared, like I was. Relieved, I became his understudy. In case laryngitis struck or he croaked, I would perform his stage movements while an adult female soprano sang from the pit. Every performance, I sat watching from the audience, in the chilly and drafty Central High School of Needle Trades auditorium on Twenty-fourth Street.

I liked the “Arithmetic” section the best. The rest of L’Enfant has faded from memory, and I blame the second ballet on the program for overwhelming my imagination.3 To this day, on any dance program, The Four Temperaments (we called it Four T’s) will not be eclipsed. Balanchine’s realization of Hindemith’s music—his choreography, the dancers, costumes, lighting, and scenery—still haunt me. I can even conjure up the scent of the high school auditorium, dank and blended with the intoxicating heated air generated by the stage lights and the aroma of sweat and rosin.

I was a mouth-gaping, unblinking twelve-year-old watching that ballet—the Sanguinic section, with Nicholas Magallanes lifting Mary Ellen Moylan in a series of slow-motion waves in a circle; the Choleric section, with Tanny flaying her mile-long limbs in a circle, reminding me of the Boss’s eggbeater whipping up heavy cream; as Melancholic, the pantherish Bill Dollar was all amorphous softness. But Todd Bolender took the crown. In the Phlegmatic section, he stole the show. Among the many great artists who have subsequently danced this role, none can touch Todd’s slinky, feline magic. His face, covered in pale white makeup, was bisected by a giant painted slash of a mouth, drawn with one side curling downward in a sneer and the other upward in a smirk. A lavender floppy hat crowned his bizarre face. Every night, seated in the audience, I awaited my favorite moment, stretching my neck to see him better, while placing my hands under my buttocks to make myself a little taller. Phlegmatic, at one moment, leans over and, in slow motion, wraps his right hand around his ankle as if it were a snake slithering around the stem of a flowering plant. Then, slowly, he lifts his foot toward his face. Motionless, balancing on his other leg, he stares unblinkingly