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By Root 1289 0

he played for ballet class and rehearsal, John Cage occasionally held lessons in theory and harmony for selected students. We gathered in the “little studio,” the smallest of the three at Fifty-ninth and Madison. I sat in on several, and had no idea what John Cage was talking about or doing. Several years later, I heard a piece for “prepared” piano by the Japanese composer Toshiro Mayuzumi which was gorgeous. I asked Gordon Boelzner, NYCB’s master pianist at that time, “How do you get that sound out of the piano?” and Gordon flipped off a tongue-in-cheek answer. “Oh, hardware. Nuts, bolts, bits and pieces of metal, they screw them into the soundboard and attach some of them to the piano strings.” He wasn’t kidding.

In 1966, Merce Cunningham revived his ballet Summerspace for NYCB, with music by Morton Feldman and scenery by Robert Rauschenberg. I watched rehearsals and, later, the premiere, and fervently wished that I had been asked to dance it. It was beautiful, all pointillist atmosphere. Sunlit, serene. A warm resonance filled the stage—a pale, caressing heat, versus a pressing, tropical one. Dancers, attired in dotted leotards, flitted, seemingly at random, entering and disappearing into the pointillist landscape, and melded into one unified work of art.

Everyone tried to educate me in my early years in NYCB. A fellow dancer in the corps, Dorothy Scott, insisted I see the Alwin Nikolais company. I went reluctantly, but after the curtain fell that evening, I walked out a fan. Who could resist a stage full of dancers as eggs—their bodies fetus-like inside spandex pouches? As they moved, the white ovoids shifted and changed shapes. Or dancers as strings erupting from the floor, and dropping down from the ceiling then stretching sideward into the wings? These eventually evolved using the arms, legs, and heads of dancers, to create an architectural network of cat’s cradles and spiderwebs all over the stage. Quivering, the whole scene would change color and texture through brilliant lighting and evoked a magical, futuristic dreamscape. Nikolais even invented a dance for cans—before Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup became art.

Before I was through my teens, I had been introduced and exposed to artists who would, in later years, become legendary. Balanchine, Antony Tudor, Frederick Ashton, Jerome Robbins, Michael Kidd, Lew Christensen, Merce Cunningham, John Cranko, Martha Graham: they were my mentors, teachers, and choreographers. From morning to night, music was my floor, and dance did sport with song as I traversed the day. Through dance, I was called upon to make music visual, interpreting the art of Stravinsky, Mozart, Bach, Tchaikovsky, Morton Gould, Leonard Bernstein, Benjamin Britten, and Maurice Ravel, among others. Often, Stravinsky, Gould, and Bernstein would be in the orchestra pit conducting or at the piano playing. Several times, Balanchine conducted. My wife, Carrie, remembers:

I was doing the semi-solo then, in the first movement of Bizet’s Symphony in C. We were onstage in position when the curtain went up. We were supposed to move with the conductor’s first downbeat, so all eyes were on the conductor’s podium. We went into shock. There was Balanchine, dressed as Toscanini with a gray wig, high collar, and a jabot. When his baton flicked, we were off to the races. The tempo was so fast. I couldn’t believe it. A five-minute movement sped by in less than three. We could barely keep up. I think the musicians had to skip notes to be able to play.

In the early fall of 1951, Balanchine was preparing for a fencing scene in his upcoming ballet, Tyl Ulenspiegel, starring Jerome Robbins. A handful of us were selected to learn fencing. I loved those lessons! At home, I would hang a shirt stuffed with assorted laundry inside my closet door, and, with the Swoboda epée, stab away at it for hours.

Meanwhile, on the block, my pals said to me, “We’re picking a team to play the Famwoods Sunday. So, Dancing Guy, you got any time to play football?” I knew nothing about football, had never played it, but felt flattered that