I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [92]
Balanchine demonstrating, 1962 (image credit 10.3)
I heard from Balanchine the same thing. “Class is to analyze how to do the gesture. After you leave class, you must practice alone—practice your tendus by the thousands—while eating your eggs and brushing your teeth.” Then he would say, “Something will happen with your body. You will develop speed and strength. Virtuosity. The rest is up to—” and he would make one of his characteristic gestures heavenward, indicating it had something to do with divine forces.
Some of those “divine” forces must have been helping me: by the second performance of Apollo, stamina, style, and control were mine.
Dancing became so much more interesting, an odyssey toward excellence. In this singular striving toward an ideal, with only yourself as competition—no coach, no audience, just you, motivating and pushing—I found a joy. In my son Christopher’s book, Leap Year,1 he writes about how, when doing a challenging role, he’d be tossing and turning in bed at night, dancing in his mind, unable to sleep. He would go to the theater at two o’clock in the morning, turn on the lights in the rehearsal studio, and practice alone until five a.m. All our company dancers remember when the passionate Melissa Hayden had a role to dance, rehearsal rooms would be unavailable. She actually seemed to be in all three of them—at the same time.
Just to get ready for class in the morning, the dancer warms up, sometimes for an hour or so. Then after class comes a day full of hours of rehearsals, one after the other. Any additional time is devoted to working out little details of the choreography—honing, perfecting. Through it all, there is a sense of building toward performance.
Then arrives “Curtain going up!”—the peak. Now you’re free to forget everything, listen to the music, and dance.
(image credit 10.4)
Elation builds, you feel in complete command of the stage—your world—and the space it encompasses. It even seems you can master time. Occasionally, you become a doppelgänger, seemingly outside yourself, watching yourself dance, and partaking in reciprocal joy. Even time seems to slow.
After the performance, I’d be on such a high I felt I could envelop everything—audience, orchestra, stagehands, lights, curtains—and later, in the streets, the passersby. I could swallow them all with relish. While onstage, I often thought, “If all I have left to live is these next few minutes of dancing, it’s worth it.” At night I’d dream “dance.”
Distance runners speak of an endorphin high, how after running a long race, there is a sense of exhilaration. It comes, in some ways, from the release of tension after the race. The body tingles, there is an enormous sense of accomplishment. George Hirsch, a friend and world-class marathon runner, cajoled me to run the marathon in New York. “Why don’t you try it? It’s the first time they’re going to run through all five boroughs.” In 1976, I did, and after, celebrating at Tavern on the Green, I reflected, “Oh, if this is the runner’s rush, it’s what’s been happening to me after every performance all these years.”
Jacques d’Amboise’s drawings illustrating the evolution of the decor of Apollo over decades (image credit 10.5)
The three muses: from left, Patricia McBride, Allegra Kent, and Patricia Neary, 1957 (image credit 10.6)
Of course, not every performance succeeds, even if the dancer is the only one who realizes its shortcomings. The usual peaks of elation may be matched by equivalent depths of depression.
In that 1957 premiere of Agon, Apollo had a new look. Previous productions had used colorful and elaborate scenery. As Apollo, Lifar wore a Grecian-style tunic cut to a miniskirt, decorated with gold clasps, and danced in ballet shoes emulating sandals. Laces crisscrossing up his calves. In subsequent revivals in America, Lew, then Nicky Magallanes, and Eglevsky, appeared in similar costume and wore elaborate wigs or curled their hair and sprayed it gold. In Balanchine’s revival for me, he wanted a new look, pared down to essentials, black and white. Mount Olympus