Apollo’s Angels

by Jennifer Homans

  After Les Noces Nijinska turned largely away from Russian themes and in 1925 left the Ballets Russes to form her own troupe. Diaghilev, however, never stopped searching for talent from the East. In 1925 he was in touch with Prokofiev, and the composer wrote to a friend that Diaghilev had suggested he create a new ballet “on a subject from contemporary life … a Bolshevik ballet.” Diaghilev tried unsuccessfully to bring in the Soviet directors Meyerhold and Alexander Tairov and the ballet master Goleizovsky to work on the project, but in the end Massine took over. Premiered in Paris in 1927, Pas d’acier was a Foregger-like affair with wheels and pistons, a ballerina as factory worker, and dances with hammers, pulleys, and conveyor belts, performed in the harsh glare of industrial lights.59

  When Diaghilev heard that George Balanchine was in Europe, he immediately tracked the young choreographer down and grilled him—as he did anyone who came from the Soviet state—about artistic developments back home. Balanchine showed a sample of his work in Misia Sert’s living room, and the impresario hired him shortly thereafter. The two men were never emotionally or sexually attached, but Diaghilev nonetheless took Balanchine’s education in hand and pressed the young choreographer to study European painting and art. Balanchine later recalled being made to sit in a chapel in Italy staring at a painting by the Renaissance artist Perugino for hours (while the impresario disappeared to lunch), an imposition he initially resented but later deeply appreciated.

  Balanchine made many ballets for the Ballets Russes, mostly in the idiom he had developed in Petrograd, with draping bodies, erotic poses, and acrobatic and angular movements. But in the late 1920s, he had what he later called a “revelation” and switched course almost completely. The ballet was Apollon Musagète, and the source of the revelation was Stravinsky. In the years following Les Noces, the composer had turned increasingly away from folk traditions and toward the more Western-influenced Russian heritage of Tchaikovsky and The Sleeping Beauty. For Apollon Musagète, he looked back to the era of Louis XIV and to the French poet Nicolas Boileau’s 1674 defense of classicism, L’art poétique. Inspired by Boileau’s poetry, he composed a rigorous and restrained score of “musical alexandrines” based on the rules of seventeenth-century rhyme and meter; the pizzicato accompaniment in one variation also drew, he said, on a “Russian Alexandrine suggested to me by a couplet from Pushkin.” Gone were the pulsating, percussive rhythms of Sacre or Noces: Apollon Musagète was scored instead for strings. When Stravinsky played the music for Balanchine in 1928, the choreographer was stunned. He later reflected that Stravinsky’s music had taught him that he “could dare not to use everything,” that he too “could eliminate.” Watching a rehearsal one afternoon, Diaghilev turned to Derain in amazement: “What he is doing is magnificent. It is pure classicism, such as we have not seen since Petipa.”60

  Apollon Musagète was structured as a short dance essay, told in a series of tableaux: Apollo’s birth, his tutelage by the Muses of poetry, mime, and dance, and his reascent to Parnassus. Apollo is born raw and uncultured, and his movements are anarchic and unformed. To make the point, Balanchine later explained that his Apollo was not an Olympian monolith: he had wanted a “small Apollo, a boy with long hair,” and had made the steps with a soccer player in mind. The Muses, with Terpsichore in the lead, refine and civilize Apollo’s childlike, barbarian energies and teach him to behave like a god—and a dancer. He learns to move elegantly, not as an aristocrat but as one elevated by knowledge and sustained by beauty—the muses are women. The costumes, originally by André Bauchant, were redone in 1929 by Chanel. The role of Apollo was first performed by Serge Lifar, a young, inexperienced dancer recruited by Nijinska from Kiev. Lifar had a perfectly proportioned physique but undeveloped classical technique: his natural gifts and the effortful discipline it took to perform Balanchine’s steps were part of the choreography. He really was learning to dance.

  Apollon Musagète, then, was Balanchine and Stravinsky’s homage to both the French seventeenth century and the Russian Imperial traditions. But it was also a radical departure. Like Stravinsky’s music, Balanchine’s movements are classical but also unmistakably modern, bent and off balance with flexed feet, jutting hips, and concave backs sunk in contraction (Balanchine later told one Apollo: “You have no bones in your back. Slide like rubber”). It is never bravura: instead, Apollo and the Muses travel easily and lyrically, as if walking. It is not positions or poses that structure the dance, but lunges, delicate walks on pointe, bodies bending into the next phrase. The effect is spare and reflective—“white,” as Balanchine himself once described the music, “in places white on white.”61

  Balanchine, it seemed, had “eliminated” the hard edge of Soviet modernism, its erotic and gymnastic movements and mystical and millennial overtones, but he had kept its extreme plasticity and taste for spontaneity and freedom. He had purified and reduced, rescaled his dancers’ movements to human proportions. At one point, for example, the dancers perform a movement recalling Nijinska’s constructivist pile of human faces, but instead of a pyramid of static weight and mass, Apollo wraps the heads of each of his Muses, one by one, into his hand and they gently lay their faces on each other’s shoulders in a sign of devotion. The choreography owed much, as Diaghilev had observed, to the way Balanchine folded his own Maryinsky training into the ballet’s newly modern forms. This had to do with the steps, which were poised and noble even when the dancers arched acrobatically or collapsed their backs, but also with the ballet’s imagery and poses: its enlaced cloverleaf arms or legs opening into a fan of arabesques recalled Petipa (and Greek friezes) except that Balanchine’s were abstract and sculptural, never pretty or ornamental. Lopukhov had said it first, but Balanchine had found a way to make it into a dance: forward to Petipa!

  But not just Petipa. Balanchine also went “forward” to Greek and Renaissance art, using visual metaphors to hone the ballet’s themes and tie it back to past traditions in painting and statuary. At one point the Muses take the shape of a troika and pull Apollo along, but at the end it is he who leads them as he ascends to Parnassus. At another juncture, Apollo poses on the floor and reaches back to Terpsichore until their index fingers touch, thus bringing to mind Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel image of God giving life to Adam onstage. It would take years for audiences and critics to fully appreciate the importance of Apollon Musagète (and in years to come the ballet would undergo many revisions and changes), but Diaghilev had known it from the start. He was right: Apollon was a watershed dance, both for Balanchine and for the future of the art. Despite and because of his Russian heritage, Balanchine, with Stravinsky, had turned firmly away from the East—away from Firebird, Sacre, and Les Noces—and back to the humanist roots of western civilization.

  The following year Diaghilev died in Venice. The shock of his passing was felt across Europe, and those who had known him were disoriented and unhinged. “A part of my world has died with him,” wrote Count Harry Kessler. The Ballets Russes disbanded again, this time for good. Its legacy, however, would prove deep and enduring. The Ballets Russes had placed dance at the center of European culture for the first time since Louis XIV. Indeed, Diaghilev had successfully transferred an entire artistic tradition from Russia back to the West. And not only that: he had tapped the exploding energy of the Russian modernist dance avant-garde, opening new vistas and opportunities to many of its most promising artists. The radical changes brought about by Fokine, Nijinsky, and Balanchine had begun in St. Petersburg and were nourished by Imperial and revolutionary culture, but they found their fullest expression in Paris with the Ballets Russes. It was Diaghilev, moreover, who—following Petipa and Tchaikovsky—once and for all made choreographers work with real music and contemporary composers, pulling dance out of the ghetto of made-to-order ballet music and into Stravinsky’s modern world. So too with decor and costumes: fashion and art merged with theater and design. Behind all of this lay a new twentieth-century urgency. It was no longer enough to create entertaining novelt
ies: the point was to invent whole new “worlds of art.”62

  But if Diaghilev had returned ballet to western Europe, it was war and revolution that kept it there. Exiled Russian dancers, unable or unwilling to return home, spread out across the Continent and on to Britain, the United States, Canada, and South America, training performers and audiences wherever they went. Pavlova, Karsavina, Fokine, Nijinsky, Nijinska, Massine, Lifar, and Balanchine—all settled in the West. They were joined by many others—dancers, artists, and musicians too numerous to name here: it was a cultural brain drain of epic proportion and import. In addition, a new generation of west European dancers had been formed by Diaghilev, and they too would fan out and—with the Russians—build whole new national dance traditions in the image of the Ballets Russes. To take but one example: Frederick Ashton, Ninette de Valois, and Maynard Keynes, who between them would lay the foundation for England’s Royal Ballet, all took their cue from the Ballets Russes—and The Sleeping Princess. The point cannot be overstated: twentieth-century French, British, and American ballet owe their existence to Diaghilev and to the political upheavals of his time.

  Back in Russia itself, however, things looked quite different. By the late 1920s Stalin had consolidated his power, and art was increasingly forced to conform to the repressive dictates of the socialist state. The flow of art and ideas between East and West, which had been the lifeblood of the Ballets Russes and which Diaghilev had done so much to facilitate, was abruptly curtailed. In the Soviet Union Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes were demonized and eventually officially erased from the record: most of the company’s ballets would not be performed there until the end of the Cold War. The Russian ballet tradition thus split. In the West, Apollon Musagète signaled a promising new beginning, but in the Soviet Union classical ballet would follow a more constrained and ideologically driven course. It was not that there was no one left: a deep pool of talent remained, and the country would continue to produce magnificently trained dancers who performed with passion and commitment. Indeed, Stalin would give them—and classical ballet—pride of place. For better and for worse, classical ballet would become Stalin’s ballet.

  *Fokine had made “exotic” ballets before, but these were never meant to be “Russian”; rather, they were stylistic essays on national themes. Thus Cléopatre was Egyptian, and The Polovtsian Dances, from Borodin’s Slavic opera Prince Igor, featured an exuberant dance suited to the opera’s theme.

  *Eurythmics was a system of movement and music education pioneered by the Swiss musician Émile Jaques-Dalcroze that emphasized physical rhythms as a fundamental basis of music. Dalcroze directed a preparatory school for the arts in the “garden city” of Hellerau from 1910 to 1914: by 1914 the school had five hundred students and branches in St. Petersburg, Prague, Moscow, Vienna, Frankfurt, Breslau, Nürnberg, Warsaw, London, and Kiev. Diaghilev and Nijinsky visited the school together and were much taken with its teachings and ideas.

  *By 1920, Proletkult had developed a network of clubs, literary circles, and theaters involving more than eighty thousand people.

  *Georgi Balanchivadze did not become George Balanchine until after his arrival in the West in 1924, but I have used his Westernized name throughout for clarity.

  *Misia Sert told Count Harry Kessler of Diaghilev’s difficulties arranging an entry permit from the French government to return to Paris from Spain. When the permit finally came through, she went to Spain to accompany him back to France. Just before they crossed the border, she asked if he had anything at all suspicious with him and he produced a wad of letters, including two from Mata Hari, who had just been arrested for espionage. She hastily destroyed them.

  Now, I have a question for you. Which country has the best ballet? Yours? You do not even have a permanent opera and ballet theater. Your theater thrives on what is given them by rich people. In our country it is the state that gives it money. And the best ballet is in the Soviet Union. It is our pride.… You can see yourselves which art is on the upsurge and which is on the downgrade.

  —NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV

  The authorities liked fairy tales that distracted people from reality.…There was no reality in ballet so it was their art. But it was also our art. We didn’t want to face life either.…We were drowning in words. We loved ballet because no one spoke. No empty rituals.

  —VADIM GAYEVSKI

  But unfortunately socrealism is not merely a question of taste. It is a philosophy, too, and the cornerstone of official doctrine worked out in Stalin’s days. Socrealism is directly responsible for the deaths of millions of men and women, for it is based on the glorification of the state by the writer and artist, whose task it is to portray the power of the state as the greatest good, and to scorn the sufferings of the individual. It is thus an effective anaesthetic.…The battle against socrealism is, therefore, a battle in defense of truth and consequently in defense of man himself.

  —CZESLAW MILOSZ

  HAD his own private box at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater. He did not use the old, gold-encrusted royal accommodations once reserved for the tsar; instead he watched opera and ballet from a specially designed bulletproof enclave tucked into the corner of the house to the left of the stage. His box had a separate entrance from the street and an adjoining room stocked with vodka and equipped with a telephone. It was an arrangement that reflected the secretive and paranoid character of his reign: in sharp contrast to the public spectacle surrounding the former tsars’ appearances at the ballet, audiences and dancers never quite knew when Stalin might appear or which of his surrogates might be there, watching.

  And watch they did. The Great Leader took a special interest in ballet, and its productions were closely monitored and controlled by the Communist Party. This was a matter of local concern—Muscovites flocked to ballet—but also of international prestige. Visiting foreign diplomats and dignitaries could expect to spend an evening at the Bolshoi Theater and dancers also acted as cultural emissaries abroad, most famously in the years following the Second World War when the Bolshoi’s hugely successful tours to the West made the company an icon of Soviet power and cultural achievement. Indeed, Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev once complained that he had seen so many performances of Swan Lake that his dreams were haunted by “white tutus and tanks all mixed up together.” Classical ballet was the de facto official art of the Soviet state.1

  Why ballet? Why did this elegant nineteenth-century court art become the cultural centerpiece of a twentieth-century totalitarian state? The answer is complicated, but it had to do above all with ideology. The consequences of the shift from aristocracy and the tsar to revolutionary “workers” and “the people” were deep and lasting. Under Communist rule, the whole purpose of ballet changed. It was no longer enough to entertain or to mirror court hierarchies and styles; ballet had to educate and express “the people”—and it rose to prominence in part because it was thought ideally suited to the task. Unlike theater, opera, or film, ballet had the virtue of being a Russian performing art that did not require Russian in order to be understood or appreciated. No matter its Imperial roots, it was a universal language accessible to anyone, from barely literate workers to sophisticated foreign ambassadors—and especially (during the Cold War) the Americans.

  Music had this virtue too, of course, but it was ideologically harder to interpret: you could never be quite sure what a string of notes meant, and composers were routinely suspected by the authorities of encrypting their music with “riddles” (Stalin) and tricks designed to fool apparatchiks and undermine the regime. Ballet might have had this problem too: steps, after all, are inherently abstract. But the ambiguity of a ballet could be diminished by pinning its every step and pose to a story: Soviet ballets, as we shall see, were literary and didactic, mute dramas (or dumb shows) designed to depict or illustrate life in a socialist paradise. Indeed, the line separating dance from propaganda was often perilously thin, and deliberately so.2

  Of all the performing arts, ballet was perhaps
the easiest to control. In the worst years of Stalin’s rule—when a line in a poem could lead to arrest or execution—writers, composers, and even playwrights could retreat into inner exile and work privately; they could secretly stow their work in the desk drawer, to be retrieved in gentler times. But ballet had no desk drawer: it lacked a standardized written notation and could not be reliably recorded, much less scribbled down and set aside. Dancers and choreographers thus had little recourse. Their work was by nature public and collaborative, and in the 1930s, especially as Stalin consolidated his power, a vast web of Party organizations reached into every aspect of production: script, music, sets, costumes, and choreography were all subject to review by unions, Party officials, and committees of (competing and often vindictive) workers and peers. The ideological justification for these intrusions was that workers and “their” Party must be the best judges of art, but the consequences were often absurd: before the ballet Bright Stream (1935) was mounted in Moscow, to take but one example of many, a Theatrical Criticism Circle from the Kaganovich Ball-Bearing Plant attended a dress rehearsal and offered suggestions for revisions, which had to be duly noted.

  For artists, control meant compromise. Ballets produced under Soviet rule had no single author, nor did they represent a freely expressed artistic vision in the ways we take for granted in the West. Most Soviet ballets represented a complicated negotiation between artists and the state, between dogmatic and creative thinking. If a dance was found, as many were, to contradict the (frequently shifting) Party line, the pressure to accommodate—to change steps, revise the music or plot, or to alter costumes (the Party was notoriously prudish)—was intense. Every artist knew that months of work could end in disaster: productions, careers, even lives might be ruined. Self-censorship was thus an ingrained mental habit. A Soviet ballet was never just a ballet; it was, quite literally, a matter of state.