I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [47]
On her deserted stage, the Firebird moves backward in a bourrée, and, fluttering, turns and glides off into the forest. The gold light irises down to nothing, and the scenery starts to move. I would remain, mesmerized, staring at the spot where she’d just vanished. The scenery’s movement brought me back to reality, and I frantically rolled into the wings rushing, late for costume change. Many others have danced Firebird, and beautifully, but for me, Maria was the Firebird.
Over two years later, mid-May 1952, Firebird highlighted our opening at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. Before the second performance, Balanchine burst into our dressing room in a rage, equipped with a big pair of scissors, followed by agitated members of the costume staff. He zigzagged among us in our crowded dressing room, cutting up the monster costumes. He ravaged the painted unitards that dressed our bodies and left intact only the varied feathered monster masks that encased our heads. Chunks and pieces of old Chagall costumes accumulated on the dressing-room floor. “Throw out! Throw out!” he stammered to the wardrobe crew, and stalked away. The scraps disappeared and were quickly replaced by tights and leotards—black, brown, and gray. Oh, what a delight! We hated wearing those unitards; they were old, moldy, thick, and stiff with cracked paint. Insects that had taken up residence in the interstices and crevices would sometimes crawl out on us. My dance mate in Firebird, Brooks Jackson, was allergic to something in the paint and would be covered with a rash after every performance. If Firebird was on the program, he protested like Job all day. That night, he danced a jig of joy. “Oh, Mary, thank God we’re rid of those costumes! They were killing me.” “What got into Balanchine?” I asked. Brooks knew all about it. He’d read it in the papers.
Marc Chagall had come to the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, seen our Firebird, perhaps in dress rehearsal, and launched a public controversy, the kind the French love. He published an open letter to Balanchine in the French newspaper Le Figaro. “The … costumes are an outrageous caricature … the harmony [between sets and costumes] is now completely broken … the sets … betrayed by the unfavorable lighting …” He issued an ultimatum: “I demand that you remove my name (in so far as the costumes of the Firebird are concerned) from all posters, programs, and advertising.”1
Infuriated, Balanchine had cut more than posters, programs, and advertisements. The Chagall costume scraps were never found. Like the floor cloth, they vanished.
Seventeen years after this incident, Balanchine restaged Firebird. It was 1970. In the revival, I was cast as the Prince to Gelsey Kirkland’s Firebird. Balanchine had some of the original Chagall designs recreated for the much larger stage of the New York State Theater, with Karinska executing her version of the costumes—cartoonish cutouts of Chagall’s birds, dinosaurs, trees, bushes, and forest beasts.
The buzz in the company was Gelsey was Balanchine’s latest muse. She was a teenager and already an electric performer, a standout in the company. He chose Gelsey precisely because she was young and unformed. “The Firebird … is one of God’s natural creatures.”2 Balanchine told me that Gelsey would dance it brilliantly as she had a spark of greatness. For the monster scene, he handed over the choreography to Jerome Robbins, and the dancers struggled to move in Karinska’s enormous, foam-rubber costumes. Perhaps dictated by the costumes, Jerry’s choreography was minimal and cutesy. Despite Gelsey’s star-quality performance, Balanchine’s new choreography lacked the visceral excitement, fire, and passion of the original. The ballet premiered May 28, and reviews were lukewarm at best. However, Gelsey had a triumph.
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