I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [56]
Balanchine leaned back and pronounced, “You see? Tchaikovsky got together with Pushkin and Stravinsky.” Balanchine clapped his hands together and yelled, “BANG!” All the dancers in the room froze, and then he announced, “THEY STOPPED HIM!”
Approaching the upper atmosphere, Cranko had choked on a piece of food while strapped into his seat. The Heimlich maneuver could have saved him.
Lincoln and Lew
What are the glïba snegovàyas of George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein? Nobody can sum up these giants—or perhaps any human being—but there are a handful of defining moments in my relationship with each, and I recount them in hopes to illuminate, in some small degree, the marvels and complexities of both. In many ways, they were the teachers and mentors who wrote the scripts for the roles I would play in my life.
They came from different worlds—one Russian, one American; one poor, one rich; one short, one tall. One, the professional, a supreme master, and, arguably, the greatest artist in the field of dance in the twentieth century. The other, a flawed genius who aspired to be the supreme arbiter of all the arts in the twentieth century. Although of small stature, and having only one lung—its twin lost to tuberculosis—Balanchine had great confidence, was unflappable; Lincoln, with his tall and powerful frame, was riddled with doubts gnawing at his convictions.
United in their love of arts, and ballet in particular, their paths crossed. Balanchine often remarked, “Ballet is woman … Man is partner, you know. In service to woman. You see?” To Lincoln, the ballerina was peripheral. He saw only the male, and the male was always the focus of Lincoln’s vision of ballet.
“You’re a dancer today, Buster, because I wanted to fuck Lew Christensen.”
Lincoln Kirstein’s growling voice reverberated, as he rubbed my hair affectionately. He relished shocking statements, pointed, rude, and jarring. No honeyed packaging for him. His blunt opinions, riveted with truth (the way he saw it), were aimed to knock you off-balance, shake your tightrope, and manipulate you. Grand and menacing, Lincoln was. Primal. At this moment, he had coalesced into a black hole looming over me.
I had just turned fifteen, and was in my first week of rehearsal in the corps of New York City Ballet. This was the first of many times Lincoln would bestow this confession/blessing on me, usually with his hand on my head, as if he were the pope imparting great dogma to the anointed—other times pontificating with a stabbing finger, accusing and threatening the chosen one.
“There wouldn’t be any of this if it wasn’t for Lew. I did everything for Lew.”
“What did he mean by everything?” I thought. The ballet company, the school, the teachers, the students, the pianists, Balanchine, the costumes, the building, me? He did mean all of that.
“Don’t you forget it, buster. It’s all because of Lew.”
“I first saw him in a vaudeville act with his brother, Willam,” Lincoln recounted. Their act was billed “The Christensen Brothers and Company.” The brothers were Mormons from Ogden, Utah, but a rare type of Mormon. They smoked and drank, danced, played musical instruments, knew and loved theater and the visual arts, and somehow managed to meld it all together in a raucous act with the “company.” The “company” consisted of two lovely girls, their dancing partners. (There was a third brother, Harold, but he opted not to be a performer; instead, he went to West Point, graduated, and became a ballet teacher.) As young boys in Utah, William and Lew had their hearts and minds captured by the arts. They dreamed of careers in those fields, and were destined to spend a lifetime in exploration and service to those arts. They were constantly seeking out any person who could teach, guide, and further them in their careers, and every opportunity to travel to wherever the arts were flourishing had them on their way.
Willam was a dramatic performer: short, dynamic, and bursting with ideas on theater.