I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [99]
EPISODES: BALANCHINE AND INVENTION
Spring 1959 brought an extraordinary dance event. Balanchine and Martha Graham, titans of the dance world, were to celebrate the music of Anton von Webern. A ballet titled Episodes, it would be a collaboration between NYCB dancers and some of Martha’s dancers, with Paul Taylor as a solo guest. Lincoln had seen Taylor dance and admired him. Balanchine, too, was impressed, and invited him to dance with us. Paul had an extremely muscular body and strange, pale eyes that stared at the audience as he danced. An amazing, facile dancer, he managed to look simian as well as feline. Balanchine created a bizarre solo for him, and I watched from the wings during every performance. Paul’s movements, the shape of his body, and the way he moved were the opposite of traditional ideas of gracefulness and symmetry. With tremendous muscular power, his movements were grotesque. They seemed to the eye, at first, awkward, odd shapes and patterns, that Paul transformed into riveting beauty. Fascinating, intriguing. He was (and remains) a great artist.
For Episodes, Balanchine called me to rehearse with Diana. “You know, we will do version of first man and first woman.” The music was Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, a thrilling composition, and, as was his wont with me, Balanchine described to me how he envisioned the ballet:
You know, you are naked. Two—Adam and Eve, naked, you see? And you’re next to each other, in pose, knees turn in, and you’re looking up, frozen and afraid. And, because you have eaten apple already, you are a little bit ashamed. You want to cover yourself, but you can’t find, you know, leaf. But there’s some hair on the floor, so you grab each piece of hair, and start to cover yourself. Girl on one side, boy on other, you wrap around, between legs, around body, and you’re turning as you wrap—you, Jacques, to the left, against the clock, and Diana, to the right. Hair is long, looong, long hair, and after maybe thirty, forty feet, it comes together, and it’s attached to the head of a bat-like witch. She has hair attached to her head, and she’s lying on back, facing sky. Underneath her is dancer, on hands and knees, dressed as toad. As you pull hair, hair pulls her, and toad moves. So, you two, on body winding hair, are pulling toad with bat woman riding on its back. And just when you’re completely wrapped like a cocoon, hair has come to end, and there is face of bat between you, upside down, staring at you, and you are looking back at this bat. Four men in black, two on each side, come and grab bat, spread-eagle bat, lift up in air, and start to run with her like kite that swoops down and up, all around the stage. Well, when they do that, you see, run with bat, it pulls hair and spins you out of hair cocoon, and into each other’s arms, naked again. Toad hops off frightened, and the bat, with all the hair flying around, swoops offstage. All of this is done with just spotlight on center, and another to follow bat. Audience does not see the floor of the stage. Now, when bat has left, stage lights up, and we see, all over the floor, clothes—blue jeans, blouses, right? Jackets. And we start pas de deux.
Balanchine started choreographing this pas de deux. I’m holding Diana, she leans over, picks up the edge of a skirt. As she makes a développé, she gets one leg into the skirt, and while supporting her, I am following choreography that eventually gets my legs into blue jeans, and continuing this most inventive dance of turning, twisting with contorted lifts, and rollings on the floor, up, down and around again. In less than a minute, we’re both standing, holding hands, attired in blue jeans, skirt, blouse, bandana—a pair of contemporary hippies, ready to dance for today. It was terrific, it was thrilling!
We’d had about four days of rehearsal, and had arrived at where the dressing pas de deux was complete, when … knock, knock, knock