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By Root 1340 0

became a thin black staircase, silhouetted against a blue sky. Onstage, the enormous rock where Apollo sat became a diminutive black stool. No ornament at all, minimalist. I danced bare-chested, with only a thin white drapery of cloth over one shoulder, held by a solitary gold button, black tights, and white ballet shoes. Michael Arshansky couldn’t wait to play with my hair. “No!” Balanchine objected. “Hair is fine. Simple, teenage American boy hair.” The serenity of the strings in the music and purity of the choreography brings Apollo, in his apotheosis, into the sunlit sky. It was a perfect prelude to Agon, itself stark, etched in black and white. The new Apollo seemed thoroughly modern, as if the thirty years since its creation had vanished with the snap of a finger. Music and dance. Stravinsky and Balanchine, seamlessly pairing the sunlight of Apollo and the crackling radiation of Agon, lifting all up past the Van Allen belt.

And Agon, what a glory. Can you imagine the sight of two bodies—one, Arthur Mitchell, a black male, the other, Diana Adams, a milk-white ballerina—together on the stage in 1957? Clad in the simplest of form-fitting dance clothes, their pas de deux began with an entrance upstage left and moved diagonally like an express train to cross to the footlights on stage right. During their subsequent dance, there are times when Diana is held aloft with her legs spread, making an upside-down T over Arthur’s head. At the end of their pas de deux, brimming with sensuality, yet tasteful and with simplicity, Arthur is at her feet, his head close to her thigh. The hush from the audience, as if in concert they had stopped breathing, was prelude to an ear-throbbing roar, reverberating in the street outside the theater. Again, Balanchine decades before anyone else.

Whenever Apollo was staged, Balanchine would coach, refine, and demonstrate. He loved dancing every part himself—the birth pangs of Apollo’s mother, Leto, on top of the platform; the muses’ variations; Apollo playing his lute. Balanchine was beautiful to watch. In the course of the next twenty years dancing the role, I received more time and guidance from him than Lifar or anyone else. We discussed Apollo in cafés over countless meals. After every performance, he would come to the stage with some comment, suggestion, or piece of advice.2 I knew he wanted to dance it himself, and was out front performing the role along with me in his imagination.

When NYCB first performed in Monte Carlo, Balanchine seemed obsessed. “This is where Lifar and I rehearsed Apollo, in this theater, on this stage.” For the whole week, in every rehearsal, he insisted on going to the stage and standing in the wings; he would watch me practicing. He was a shadow or mirror. He wouldn’t leave, even when the cleaning crew came and tried to sweep me off. He told me he hated that Lifar had had such a big success with Apollo while Balanchine got poor reviews. He sniffed, “One critic said, ‘When does a god crawl on knees?’ ” Then Balanchine gleefully pronounced, “So I say to critic, ‘When have you seen a god?’ ”

From 1957 to the late 1970s, I did this ballet, staged it, and performed it all over the world. Better dancers than me have performed the role, but I had Balanchine, and I followed Kopeikine’s advice: “Copy Balanchine.” I never was good enough for what is inherent in the ballet, never equaled the monumental challenges and possibilities it offered, but the attempt transformed me from dancer to artist. If I skipped one performance, I felt I’d lost that opportunity to improve. The span of a dancer’s performing time is limited.

Half hour before curtain, clearing the stage, 1962 (image credit 10.7)

A few years ago, Arthur Mitchell asked me to work with Dance Theatre of Harlem on Apollo, and shortly after, Helgi Tomasson invited me to San Francisco to coach his dancers. Rasta Thomas at DTH and Gonzalo Garcia of SFB, were the Apollos, both beautiful male dancers of charisma and superb technique. The ballerinas from both companies excelled. But I was too old to be able to dance it