I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [54]
Early October, I was back on the block. My buddies were hanging out on the corner, a cigarette in every mouth. All of them were heavier and taller. Despite my enthusiastic accounts of London and Paris, their sole preoccupation was who could best fake that they were old enough to get the beer, and whose parents weren’t in, so we could party in their apartment. After twenty minutes of discussion, it was decided that the biggest and oldest looking, Peter Heevy, could pull off the beer, and we could use Joe Keene’s pad; both his parents were at work. “Come on, Jock,” they urged. Six or seven of us squeezed into Joe’s tiny room—some on the floor, some on the bed. Behind the closed door, we munched potato chips and drank beer, and every other word was a street expletive. The room soon filled with cigarette smoke and my eyes and nose dripped. Someone started passing around a deck of dirty playing cards with photos of naked women copulating with unappetizing men, animals, and objects. I sat there numb, thinking, “I have grown into another world, stratospheres away from the life of gangs, the streets, and its dead-end culture.” Saved by dance, the arts, and, of course, choucroute and Gewürztraminer! I mumbled excuses and left.
After my adventures in Paris, our tour recommenced in Manchester, a factory town still devastated five years after the Battle of Britain and never considered a mecca for the arts. Manchester’s damp, clammy air was thick with oily soot, generated by chunks of bituminous coal, the only available fuel to burn in the fireplace grates of most homes throughout the British Isles.2 A half hour in that environment and your skin was speckled. Imagine your lungs! Many buildings were facades, bodiless and eviscerated … compliments of the Luftwaffe. Our visit was to be a morale-building Band-Aid for the citizens, sponsored by the government. The Witch was a bonus.
Two hours before our first performance, I walked down the narrow cobblestone streets, heading for the theater. There was minimal electric power. Buildings pressed around me, and after the second or third floor, their architecture vanished, rising up into formless gloom. Near the theater, the streets were empty—no cars, no people, nothing. My footsteps were the only sound. Were there any citizens in this town? A single light bulb occasionally dangled at intersections. How perfect. I loved it! The light’s alchemy transformed the black soot dust into green soup, served by a malevolent host, in honor of the opening night of The Witch.
Going through the stage door, there wasn’t a doorman. Would we have an audience?
They came! The curtain opened to a full house, and a triumph for The Witch. Applause roared from a standing, cheering audience. Melissa and Frank’s performances were hair-raising, riveting; company members packed the wings to watch them. This was a wonderful ballet … at least, I thought so.
Less than a month later, back in New York, and preparing for our fall season, I noticed The Witch was not in our repertoire. Rumor had it that Ravel’s score had copyright problems in the United States. However, in the ensuing years, NYCB did many tours outside America. The ballet was never done again. It disappeared like a faded specter.
A couple of years later, my sister Ninette married Dr. Mel Kiddon, our lanky, good-looking company medic. He lost his equilibrium and tumbled into her eyes. At first I thought he was English, and he did nothing to dispel that impression, but he was from New Jersey, a bright medical student who had received a scholarship to study in London. An Anglophile, he adopted the camouflage of a Brit. On the mantel over the fireplace in their home, they had Dorothea Tanning’s painting of the set from The Witch. It glowed there for years in their apartment. On visits to them, I never failed to walk up to the painting and say, “Oh, The Witch! What ever happened to you?”
My sister Ninette, the teenage ballerina, 1948 (image credit 5.2)
As his career developed, Cranko found the soil of the British Isles unproductive, so he accepted