This year marks the 60th anniversary of George Balanchine’s arrival in the United States and the 10th anniversary of his death, a time for renewed appreciation and evaluation of America’s supreme ballet master.
In the decade since he succumbed to a degenerative nerve disease that cruelly wasted his hearing and sense of balance and finally destroyed his mind, the founder and leader of America’s mightiest ballet company, the New York City Ballet, has remained a powerful influence on dance in America.
His dances are regularly performed by troupes throughout the world, including his native Russia, and many of his former dancers are now installed as leaders of the country`s leading ballet troupes, from San Francisco to New York.
Patricia Wilde, a Balanchine ballerina who went on to become artistic director of the Pittsburgh Ballet Theater, says, “When I first took over that company, I would make sure in my first few seasons that I had at least one Balanchine ballet on every program, because I knew then that I would always have something solid I could count on.”
Several biographies already have assessed Balanchine’s life and times, and several dancers who worked under him have written autobiographies that attest to the profound and enduring influencethat he had on their lives.
This May in New York, his home company, now directed by Peter Martins, will launch a “Balanchine Celebration,” presenting 73 of his works over a period of eight weeks; and next weekend, on a more modest scale, Ballet Chicago, directed by NYCB alumnus Daniel Duell, will present its own “Tribute to George Balanchine,” when it features his “Rubies” and “Square Dance” as part of its Thursday through Saturday programs in the Civic Opera House.
Balanchine’s presence in Chicago’s dance life has been impressive but irregular. New York City Ballet, once a regular summer visitor to the Ravinia Festival and the premiere attraction at the reopening of the Auditorium Theatre in 1967, has not appeared here in 13 years; and the heavily-influenced Balanchine repertoire of the old Chicago City Ballet, founded by Balanchine’s great prima ballerina and former wife Maria Tallchief Paschen, disappeared when the company dissolved in 1987.
Certain Balanchine ballets have had memorable single performances here-Mikhail Baryshnikov danced Balanchine’s “The Prodigal Son” for the first time in the 1970s at the Chicago International Dance Festival-but there have always been some Chicago dance insiders, including the late teacher Bentley Stone, who believed that Balanchine’s work was too dry and abstract for Chicago audiences, who, he suggested, preferred the stars and story ballets of American Ballet Theatre.
Balanchine himself was skeptical of anyone’s ability to perpetuate his ballets. In his later years, he said, “They will remember the steps, but they will forget the idea.” And the ballet world Balanchine helped build has undergone radical changes in the decade since his death. Now, instead of contemplating expanding horizons, many companies, including NYCB, are concerned with growing deficits and shrinking financial support.
Still, Balanchine’s force as a creator endures, and for the immediate present there are still many dancers/disciples who can summon in their minds and bodies the qualities that made his ballets so revealing.
One could see this ballet legacy in action recently in the large rehearsal space of Curtiss Hall in the Fine Arts Building, where Wilde and Patricia McBride, another former Balanchine ballerina, were in residence for one day to help guide the young dancers of Ballet Chicago through the intricacies of “Rubies” and “Square Dance.”
It was thrilling to watch McBride, who retired in 1989 and now teaches dance at Indiana University, coach her young charges in “Rubies.” She is 50 now, but her dancer’s body seemed as supple and as responsive to the physical demands of the ballet as it had when she began dancing with Balanchine in the 1960s.
She spoke at length of Balanchine’s “musicality,” of the choreographer’s ability to shape movement to music, and all one had to do was to look at her own body to see how thoroughly and gracefully she had absorbed that musicality into her every bone and muscle.
Wilde, who danced with NYCB from 1950 to 1965, knows well the importance of providing such hands-on instruction from Balanchine dancers to a new generation who never knew his personal care.
No choreographer has been more extensively documented on film and videotape than Balanchine, but Wilde is leery of using these sources as definitive instruction.
“You can watch them, and they’re interesting,” she says, “but often you’ll see mistakes or inserts that were present in that performance only.” Balanchine frequently changed his works to suit the talents of individual dancers-for Duell, for example, he added a new finale, a trio for three men, to “Emeralds.”
To Duell, too, this direct passing of Balanchine’s gift from generation to generation is crucial. “His dancers know the motivation behind the steps,” Duell says, “and they are able to communicate that motivation.”
Few persons communicate the significance of Balanchine’s legacy to the arts better than Duell, who joined NYCB in 1972, when he was 20, and became a principal dancer with the troupe in 1979.
“Ballet does change to some extent,” Duell says. “Mr. Balanchine was often quoted as saying, `Fifty years from now, my ballets will be unrecognizable.’ However, if these ballets are expertly passed on with the guidance of people who know them from firsthand experience, the intent of the piece will be preserved.
“But he gave us more than these ballets, important though they may be. He gave us a very comprehensive vision of articulation of movement and musical phrasing. He saw a gifted composer as a very great person who starts with nothing, and he taught his dancers not to ignore one note of that composer’s music.
“He was known for the speed of his dances, but they could be agonizingly slow, too, as the music demanded; every articulation of the arms and back was shaped according to the exact moment, the accent and dynamics, of the music.
“He exuded the belief that dance, his art form, has a strong moral base, that it is not a trivial matter but a way of life. He believed that dancing was a privilege, and he passed that belief on to his dancers.
“It wasn’t just force of personality, either. It was the force with which he demanded commitment.”
Balanchine, however, was sometimes accused of indifference to his dancers, once they had served his purpose as instruments of his choreography.
“It’s true that throughout his life he was attracted to new dancers who inspired him,” Duell admits, “but, on the other hand, if you were a dancer who retired to become a member of the New York City Ballet teaching or administrative staff, you had the most secure job of your life.”
Balanchine, the creator of the swift, spare “neoclassicism” of American dance, was also a showman, a former Broadway and movie choreographer who loved the splendor of story ballets such as “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and reveled in the mass formations of such spectacles as his “Union Jack.”
But for Duell, Balanchine’s great contribution to dance was “moving it ahead from where it was when he started. He upheld a view of dance in which the effort was not previous or trivial. He showed the world an approach to dancing that was daring and bold.
“He created a niche, a very specific niche, a place to depart from in dance, where dancing of design and character, without a plot laid on them, was sufficient.”
In short, Duell believes, “Balanchine brought dance closer to the condition of music than anyone else.”
