I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [98]
For a quarter of a century, Milly and I danced together, guesting with other companies, doing concerts and television—every opportunity to get onstage together. We became like an old couple, an institution, a caricature—in the ballet Stars and Stripes, the company nicknamed us “Ike and Mamie” after President Eisenhower and his wife. I danced my first full-length Coppélia, Giselle, and Swan Lake with her, and choreographed a production of Firebird for her.
In the fall of 1958, I returned to New York to discover the exquisite Violette Verdy had joined our company, and we were to dance together in Birgit Cullberg’s ballet Medea. I was to be Jason; Violette, King Creon’s daughter, Creusa; and Melissa, Medea. The ballet triumphed. Balanchine hated it. He complained to me that the choreography was unrelated to Bartók’s music, but I think he was peeved at the ballet’s success and audience acclaim.
Balanchine rarely did a ballet with the idea of building up the male dancer as star. If he needed a crowd-pleasing work, he would find music of quality and dancers who interested him, and he would create a wonderful ballet. But those were not the works closest to his heart; some of his own ballets he came to hate or actively resent, when he thought the principal performers and their performances superseded the choreography. When a dance artist had a tremendous success, with screaming fans, and the choreography faded into the shadows under the celebrity star, he fumed. Several times, he had been given assignments by Diaghilev to create star vehicles for Lifar, Diaghilev’s lover. Balanchine created Apollo and Prodigal Son for Lifar, and to this day they are stellar roles for the male dancer, but Balanchine did not want to be at the mercy of anyone telling him what to do—ballet critics, fans, patrons, or ballerinas. He ranted to me that audiences and critics had talked only about Lifar and not about “Balanchine,” and this was more than thirty years after the fact.
It was a dilemma he lived with all his life. He tried his best to avoid it, but audiences, patrons, management, and the stars themselves defeated him. He knew he needed stars, and with his ballets he created many of them, but he resented their success and hated their demands.
Lincoln insisted that Balanchine create a star vehicle for Jerry Robbins; Tyl Ulenspiegel resulted. It did not last long in the repertory. In each subsequent production of Firebird he diminished the star’s role. The audience would be screaming and cheering the firebird during the ballet, and Balanchine would say to me, “Why are they clapping? Who wants to hear clapping? It’s the music we want to hear.” When they applauded the star on the entrance, he’d say, “Music hasn’t even started, and dance not begun, and already they clap? It doesn’t matter what will happen. They’ve already lost their ears and their eyes.”
Tired of hearing audiences declare they only bought tickets to see Tallchief and Eglevsky in Sylvia: Pas de Deux, he ripped it out of the repertory. “I gave this to Eglevsky, you know, for his concerts.” Over the years, the Delibes music for Sylvia found fading life in Balanchine’s watered-down versions, first Pas de Deux and Divertissement and ultimately, diminished more, into the ballet La Source.
In the mid-1970s, Mr. B and I are in the wings. Apollo is onstage tonight, danced by Peter Martins. We’re watching a truncated version, missing the prologue (the birth of Apollo), and with a cut-and-pasted ending. No more Apollo ascending a staircase into the sky, an unstoppable force caressed by sunlight as the music fades into the ionosphere. Rather, Apollo now ends onstage, embraced by the muses, in an echo of an earlier pose. “Why did you do that, Mr. B? Cut Stravinsky’s music, cut out the prologue, and change the choreography for the ending?” Without looking at me, musing to himself, he whispers, “You know, audience only want to see stars, and stars only want to make poses, not do my steps.