Lucking Out - James Wolcott [113]
All That Jazz (1979), starring Roy Scheider as Fosse’s pill-popping, bed-hopping on-screen avatar, was shot in Times Square, and although it seldom spent time in the nasty streets, rotating from morning shower and first gulp of pills to rehearsal studio to editing room to home base day after day in a wheelhouse grind, the porniness of Eighth Avenue pitted the atmosphere of the film, the taste of cinders. One hotsy number, “Air Rotica,” staged as a promo for the only airline to offer in-flight orgies, plunged Balanchine’s PAMTGG into the polymorphously perverse, nose-diving into an orchestrated free-for-all bathed in a bathhouse fog presided over by a blond, bare-breasted Valkyrie named Sandahl Bergman, who, recumbent, lifted her left leg into a perfect forty-five-degree extension, her foot pointed at the ceiling like a pistol, making all men her slaves. It should have been a crowning image, the Christmas tree star, but the rest of the dance fell apart before your eyes, like a human pyramid sleepily buckling, tumbling into soft rubble. It was like the big bang with a boomerang effect. The inherent escalation in porn/erotica, the need to keep upping the kinky ante, had only so much room to multiply before the explosion of energy dispersed and diffused, leaving a dead core and a lot of mess for the maid to clean up afterward. Once you get to orgy, artistically there’s no place left to go.
Ballet delivered a better bang, one that sunflowered and fanned out into the future. When Mikhail Baryshnikov defected from the Kirov Ballet in 1974 (“Glimpses of Genius” was the title of Croce’s critical dispatch on Baryshnikov’s pre-defection performances in Montreal, just as word of Bruce Springsteen’s thundering thighs was traveling up from the Jersey shore) and made his U.S. debut with American Ballet Theatre in Giselle, it was not only a comet moment for ballet but one of the defining jolts to hit New York in the seventies. And this was a positive jolt, unlike the string of sucker punches that kept the city reeling from one what-next? crisis to another, stuck in a revolving turnstile of tabloid fright headlines, disappointment being a portion of our daily bread during the protracted death croak of the Nixon presidency. His thunderbolt arrival was a Lindbergh-landing morale lifter from where I sat, which was in the balcony of City Center on West Fifty-fifth, whose seats were a tight squeeze even before the great expansion of American butts spread across the vast prairie. It was there that I saw Baryshnikov’s first rabidly awaited performances and received a tutorial in star power as paradigm shifter. “Ballet is Woman,” goes the inevitable Balanchine maxim, and, as Elizabeth Kendall writes in a bio-historical work in progress about Balanchine, ballerinas were the drama initiators and primary interpreters onstage, the searchers and choosers—that’s what made them heroines to many young feminists, eager to climb out of their heads. But when it comes to the wider public, it is usually the herald infusion of male force, glamour, and elevation that socks dance to a new level of matador excitement and supplies critical mass. Now, Baryshnikov was no Rudolf Nureyev, whose defection to the West in 1961 struck a Byronic chord that cape-whipped through the decade, his dance partnership with Margot Fonteyn the closest thing ballet ever had to an ongoing royal wedding. Baryshnikov wasn’t dark, imperious, mercurial, and knightly; he didn’t possess a matinee idol profile, cruel amusement