I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [50]
Balanchine and Cranko
Lincoln, while buzzing around London promoting NYCB, met John Cranko, a twenty-two-year-old up-and-coming choreographer. Born and raised in South Africa, Cranko had followed his muse to London and the Sadler’s Wells Ballet.1 He was the “hot boy” on the scene, and Frederick Ashton, the dean of British choreographers, had recommended him. Lincoln impetuously commissioned him to create a ballet for us, and announced his plans to Balanchine as a fait accompli.
We were a small company doing eight performances a week, the schedule was grueling, and now we had to fit in a new work by an unknown choreographer. We had early-morning ballet class, followed by nonstop rehearsals preparing for the night’s repertoire and replacing injured dancers. When could we find the time? And who was this Cranko? We were intrigued. The company hummed with excitement. Balanchine was peeved.
The ballet would be called The Witch, and Cranko had chosen Melissa Hayden and Francisco Moncion to star. The music? Ravel’s Piano Concerto no. 2 in G Major, and Dorothea Tanning, a dramatic and provocative designer, was commissioned to create costumes and decor. On the company’s bulletin board, I was stunned to find my name listed, to be featured as one of a pair of ghoulish butlers, with Eddie Bigelow as my twin.
Cranko looked like one of us, a sandy-haired corps de ballet boy, undramatic, his demeanor quiet and unpretentious—but fascinating to watch in rehearsals, especially with Melissa and Frank. There were no definite steps or set movements, just vague suggestions of a dramatic effect he wished to achieve. As a director/playwright experiments with two great actors in developing a scene, Cranko collaborated with Melissa and Frank, and all three developed the choreography together through trial and error.
At last, Cranko got around to Eddie and me. “Let’s start,” he said. “Try moving forward, heavy-footed and stuck together at the hip, like Siamese twins.” I mumbled to Eddie, “I don’t think he knows what he’s doing!” Eddie replied with a grunt, “Do it. Just do it.” “Do what?” I queried, and then gave up and copied Eddie.
Cranko was deeply influenced by Freddie Ashton, and developed choreography similarly. I realized this later, when Freddie was choreographing his first ballet for NYCB (Illuminations), and I was in it. In the following year, when Freddie was creating his second ballet, Picnic at Tintagel, I really got it, particularly when he was choreographing the love pas de deux between Isolde (Diana Adams) and Tristan (me). Freddie, who looked like the Penguin from Batman comic books, would curl up his fingers, clutch my shoulder, and, scrapping a little, say earnestly, “Jacques, my dear boy, I want you to listen to this passage in the music. Then I want you to spin to it, leap passionately, wildly, insanely, all around Diana”—one of the greatest beauties ever to go on toe. Freddie would pause for a moment, stare at me with rounded, watery eyes, then continue his direction. “Then, at the end of the musical phrase, throw yourself to the floor with both hands on her foot.” Bewildered, I asked, “Freddie, what spins? What leaps? How many counts? What steps?” Exasperated, he answered, “Just do something, dear boy, invent anything, we’ll worry about counts and steps later.”
Balanchine, by contrast, would come to rehearsal understanding the structure of the music down to its DNA. He had taken the orchestral score and written his own piano breakdown—no waste of time, no doubts. He would go to the piano, look at the score, and then come over to us, invent and demonstrate a dance step, and we would execute it. We were trained by him, and so attuned, we could take his movements and transform what to others might seem a vague shuffle into a finished dance step. He was never vague about time or counts—and would make sound with his feet, beating out the rhythms