Apollo’s Angels

by Jennifer Homans

  Not so seen from Moscow. There many of the country’s best critics and dancers rallied behind Grigorovich. To them, he was a fresh voice, the author of a “new classicism” and a choreographer bent on rescuing ballet from the stranglehold of dram-balet and socialist realism. They find it difficult, even now, to see why we cannot perceive that his work reasserted ballet’s most timeless value: dancing. Grigorovich, they remind us, was trying to open ballet and steer it away from Stalin, and given the difficult conditions under which he worked, his dances were an important achievement—a breakthrough. Fighting the ideological fight, they say, was the only way forward—this was their world, and they had to engage it on its own terms. Indeed, the dancers who were there fondly recall how stimulating and serious Grigorovich’s early work was, and how engrossed they were with his ideas and choreography. They claim that Grigorovich—like Yakobson—was a genius and feel sure that they were at the forefront of a new movement in art.

  Is this merely a self-serving justification? Sour grapes? Not entirely. It is part of a larger picture. Former Soviet dancers like to point out, for example, that—unlike their counterparts in the West—they worked “communally” with visual artists, designers, and dramaturges and not under the “dictatorial” eye of a single director. Their ballets, moreover, were lavishly produced and fans queued for hours to attend important premieres. As dancers they had social status and generous state support far exceeding that of most dancers in the West. As one ballerina put it, referring to the early 1950s, “Of course it was [a] bad Stalinist time and some people were in prison and [the] gulag, but we were really happy then.…For us it was an absolutely unbelievable time.”47

  Even those who made the difficult decision to defect were not necessarily rushing to embrace the West, as observers often assumed. They wanted freedom—but freedom to practice their own, Russian art. Makarova and Nureyev were especially clear on this point (Baryshnikov was different). They both found ballet in Europe and America cold and flat, a “purely rational approach to movement” (Makarova) and lacking the drama and spirituality that characterized their own dancing; both spent their careers trying to transplant their own Soviet art to Western soil.48

  Thus we should not be too quick to separate the dancers from the dances, or the ballets from the state that produced them. If the dancers were great, it was at least in part because they believed in what they were doing—ballets and all. It is tempting to set aside the carcass of socialist realism (those awful ballets) and elevate the dancers as heroes who transcended them. But although the “great dancers, terrible ballets” adage is not entirely wrong, it does miss an important point: ballet in the USSR was made by and for its own people, in a world defined and circumscribed by a totalitarian police state. “They” really were different from “us.”

  When the USSR collapsed, the damage wrought from within the classical tradition over the long years of Soviet rule became fully apparent: without the backing of an all-powerful state, the Bolshoi was little more than an empty shell. In Leningrad all that remained were the bare bones of Vaganova training and the Russian school, along with a few dram-balets and reworked Petipa classics. The Soviet “revolution” in dance had elevated ballet to a high peak, but it had also, and at the same time, slowly and systematically destroyed it from within. The strong-arm tactics of the Party and the Ministry of Culture were one problem, but the real damage had finally been done by ideology and socialist realism. At the Kirov, Ulanova and Vaganova made an art of sublimating steps to drama and pushed the story ballet onto a new plane. But in Moscow, come Plisetskaya and Grigorovich, the regime’s grinding ideological requirements and rigidly diminished mind-set took over—they got inside artists’ minds and defined—and eventually corroded—their art. Plisetskaya, Grigorovich, and the Bolshoi’s dancers made ballet monumental, scaling it to the war and to the state that had so deeply marked their lives. But the effect was depressing: the Bolshoi’s rise signaled a sharp decline for the art of dance.

  Through it all, the West was a constant preoccupation. Russia had always held the West in its mind’s eye, and ballet had always been one of its most representative arts. The Soviets had put an end to all of that. They made ballet proudly and defiantly their own. But the West did not go away. For the first time since the early nineteenth century, it too had a viable and impressive classical tradition in dance, and it too had elevated ballet to an important position at the center of cultural life. There was a certain poetic logic to the situation: if the Russians had spent the better part of the nineteenth century absorbing French and Italian ballet and making it Russian, the Europeans in turn spent the twentieth century absorbing Russian ballet and making it their own. The twentieth century in dance did not belong to the Soviets, but it did belong to the Russians—not at home, but in exile in the West.

  Curiously, however, Russian ballet did not reestablish itself as easily in France or Italy, where the art form had its deepest roots and longest traditions. To the contrary, it flourished most precisely in the two places where its cultural soil was thinnest: in Britain and America. In part this had to do with modernism, the guiding force of twentieth-century art and dance in the West. It was easier to “make ballet new” where there were fewer preconceptions—where the past was not in the way. Indeed, not unlike the Soviets, though for different reasons, dancers in Britain and America sought to reinvent ballet and forge a newly minted art. In Britain in particular this had a strong national aspect. The state supported and encouraged the fledgling art, and under its aegis British artists took the Russian tradition in hand and imbued it with their own aspirations and ideals. It too would be an official art, and the Royal Ballet—like the queen herself—would represent the country, both to itself and to the world. Classical ballet would be Britain’s finest cultural hour.

  *Until her death in 1951, Vaganova trained and coached many of the USSR’s great ballerinas, from Marina Semyonova and Natalya Dudinskaya to Irina Kolpakova. The teacher Alexander Pushkin, who worked with Vaganova and taught at the Leningrad school from 1932, would later become a key influence on both Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov.

  †Bright Stream was not Shostakovich’s first ballet: he had written scores for The Golden Age (1930), about a Soviet football team scoring a decisive defeat over bourgeois-fascist rivals, and The Bolt (1930–31), about industrial sabotage.

  The saga of Russian Ballet forms a pattern in my life.

  —NINETTE DE VALOIS

  He was our youth, and our growing up, and our growing older.

  —P. W. MANCHESTER, ON FREDERICK ASHTON

  CENTURY redrew the map of classical ballet. For over two centuries, as we have seen, ballet had been French, Italian, Danish, and Russian, but it had never been a native English art. Too frilly and French for proud British courts, it had been promoted for a brief moment in the early eighteenth century by reformers who tried—and failed—to tie it to urban civility and politeness. Since then, it had been relegated to the status of a “guest art” featuring star French and Italian performers, among others, imported from the Continent. By the mid-twentieth century, however, English ballet—with Margot Fonteyn as its reigning queen—would become Britain’s most venerated and representative national art and the Royal Ballet an undisputed world leader in dance. As though from nowhere, the British embraced classical ballet and made it their own. At the same time, ballet in France, Italy, and Denmark languished and was fading from view. This was a stunning change. No one surveying the culture of Europe in the early years of the century would have guessed at such an outcome. It is thus worth taking a moment to understand just why the cultural tables turned so dramatically, and why it was that artists in Britain, alone in western Europe, seized upon and developed ballet into an exemplary national and modern art.

  Why not France? Classical ballet, after all, had been centered in Paris from its flowering in the court of Louis XIV through the mid-nineteenth century, and although it had since shaded into burlesque, the French still had
a viable school and a long tradition to support the art; ballet was part of their patrimoine. It was no accident, as we have seen, that when Diaghilev brought Russian ballet to Europe he chose Paris as his artistic home, or that it was in the French capital that the Ballets Russes had its greatest triumphs. The Paris Opera, seeing the opportunity, took up Diaghilev’s lead and by the 1920s it had reclaimed Giselle (which, we will recall, originated in Paris in 1841), staged its own all-Russian evenings of dance, and hired Russian dancers to renew the hitherto etiolated French tradition. At one point Nijinsky was even invited to choreograph for the company, and in 1929 George Balanchine was asked to stage a new ballet there. He fell ill with tuberculosis and had to step aside, but Serge Lifar, the Ukrainian dancer and Diaghilev protégé, replaced him and in 1931 was appointed artistic director of the Paris Opera Ballet.

  Lifar brought renewed glamour and discipline to the company, but in other respects he was an awkward choice. As we have seen, he had poor classical training and technique—he was not from St. Petersburg—and his reputation rested instead on a strong and beautifully proportioned body and charismatic presence. His dancing, like his choreography, was static and heavy, ballet blunted by what one dancer later described as his “posing and rigid dramatic quality.” Lifar’s most famous work, Icare (1935), was choreographed in silence (to allow full expression of his natural body rhythms) with a percussion score later imposed on the steps; Lifar thought this wonderfully original and buttressed his ballet with a pompous theoretical treatise describing his approach. The dances, however, were derivative: a mix of faux Balanchine (Lifar had danced the title roles in Apollo and Prodigal Son) and Eurythmics. In the ballet’s central solo dance, Lifar posed, twisted and turned, jumped, lunged, and wrapped his body into and around itself, showing off his physical beauty and honed musculature from every possible angle. But if the ballet had few choreographic merits, Lifar was nonetheless a gifted performer with tremendous sex appeal. Icare—and Lifar—were a great success. Parisians flocked to the ballet.1

  There were other signs too that the émigré Russian seeding of French ballet might produce a rich yield. Two prominent former Maryinsky ballerinas opened schools in Paris in the 1920s, and dancers from across Europe and America made the pilgrimage to study with them. Olga Preobrazhenskaya, a dynamic technician with a demanding, irascible personality, had walked out of Russia in 1921, crossing the border into Finland on foot in the middle of winter. Her cramped studio, up a winding cast-iron staircase on the place Clichy in Montmartre, was a little Russia and a gathering point for émigré and foreign dancers. Lubov Egorova, known for her soulful Russian adagios, had her studio nearby at place de la Trinité, and Margot Fonteyn (among many others) would later be an avid student and admirer. Matilda Kschessinska (former mistress of the ill-fated Nicholas II) had settled in Paris too: she had married a grand duke and lived in an elegant Parisian suburb, where she taught in floral chiffon dresses with matching scarves. But it was not just dancers: even the French intellectual and political elite were showing a renewed interest in ballet. In 1931, to take just one example, René Blum, a prominent figure in Parisian theatrical circles and brother of Léon Blum (who would become prime minister of France in 1936), picked up where Diaghilev had left off and formed a ballet company in Monte Carlo. All of this added up to a moment of optimism: there was every reason to believe that ballet would resume its place as a prominent French national art.

  When France fell to the Germans in 1940, however, all of this came to an abrupt halt. Blum was eventually deported to Auschwitz, and his company’s activities shifted to the United States. Lifar stayed in Paris, and it is to him that French ballet owed its wartime stature—but also its postwar exhaustion and crisis. Opportunistic and self-promoting, Lifar wasted no time ingratiating himself with the German authorities. He met Goebbels (who liked ballet and came to a rehearsal of Giselle in 1940), attended lavish receptions at the German embassy, and became a close family friend to the Nazi commander in Paris, Otto Abetz. He was not alone. Parisian cultural life glittered under the occupation—the Germans had money and wanted to be entertained—and among the names that cropped up constantly on German guest lists, along with Lifar’s, were those of writer Henry de Montherlant, theater director Sacha Guitry, the actress Arletty, and even old Cocteau (who admired Hitler’s “sense of grand theater” as opposed to the Vichy leader Pétain’s “sentiments of an usherette”).2

  Ballet at the Paris Opera thrived. For Germans with little command of the French language it was a perfect entertainment, and Lifar went from success to success, producing a stream of lavishly theatrical ballets such as Joan de Zarissa, on a medieval and chivalric theme. It is difficult to say what effect collaboration with the occupier had on his art, but his luxurious lifestyle and close ties to the German authorities did pose a vexing problem for ballet when the war ended. The Paris Opera, after all, was not just any opera and ballet company; it was a prominent state institution, and in the purges and trials that shook French culture in the war’s aftermath, Lifar was targeted. He was banned from the Paris Opera and all state theaters for life, although the sentence was subsequently reduced to a year and finally commuted under pressure from his dancers and supporters, who claimed (and still do) that he had kept French ballet alive during the country’s darkest years. Lifar returned to Paris in 1947, but the controversy over his wartime activities did not go away. For a time the machinists and electricians at the theater refused to work for him, and although Lifar’s responsibilities as ballet master had been fully restored, he was initially prohibited from appearing onstage in public—as a dancer or even to take a bow. He finally reclaimed this right too in 1949 and would remain at the helm of the Paris Opera Ballet until his retirement in 1958.

  But the company never regained its prewar confidence. In a particularly telling incident in 1947 (just before Lifar’s return), George Balanchine, who had by then settled in New York, was invited to create Le Palais de Cristal (later renamed Symphony in C) at the Paris Opera. Following the performances, which were enthusiastically received, Georges Hirsch, the company’s administrative director (and a member of the French Resistance during the war), made an impassioned speech backstage, later reported in the press: he implored Balanchine to tell “the Americans” that French ballet was alive and well, and begged him to help allay ugly rumors to the contrary. To no avail: on tour in New York the following year, Lifar and the Paris Opera Ballet were booed and picketed by angry protesters. And although Lifar had his admirers, his work was never more than mediocre (one dancer later wryly commented on how he “would use the corps de ballet like salad around the lobster”). It did not help that as a dancer he was growing older and less beautiful. When he finally retired, the company was artistically drained and rudderless; his ballets largely disappeared from the repertoire, and the Paris Opera Ballet veered aimlessly from director to director, trying on every latest dance fashion and uncertain of who or what it represented.3

  It was not within but outside the Paris Opera that ballet in France took its greatest strides. After the war several Paris Opera dancers, frustrated with Lifar’s domination and the lack of opportunities for experimentation, left the company to pursue independent careers. Foremost among them was an impatient and ambitious young choreographer, Roland Petit (b. 1924). Petit was inspired by film—which seemed to him to have a vitality and interest that ballet sorely lacked—and he especially admired the director Marcel Carné and the poet and writer Jacques Prévert, whose Les Enfants de Paradis, made during the war and released in 1945, met with huge popular success. One of Petit’s first ballets (Les Rendez-Vous in 1945) was a collaboration with Prévert, and Petit also befriended the gritty, streetwise actress Arletty, star of this and other popular films.

  In 1946 Petit created Le Jeune Homme et la Mort for the Ballets des Champs-Élysées, a small company he started with a group of former Diaghilev artists, including the ever-versatile Cocteau. The ballet, written by Cocteau and performed to music by Ba
ch, featured the maverick dancer and Paris Opera renegade Jean Babilée (born Gutman, he had taken his mother’s name during the war). Babilée’s rugged athleticism and sexy, proletarian look made him a kind of Jean Gabin of dance, and in fact the ballet’s plot and tone recalled another Marcel Carné film, Le Jour se lève (1938), starring Gabin. The ballet was set in a derelict garret. A painter, bare-chested in a dirty pair of overalls and smoking (real) cigarettes, pursued a violently passionate relationship with his lover. When she spurned him, he hung himself, center stage. In a surrealist touch, Death then appeared in the image of the woman and led the dead man away. Two years later Petit went on to create Carmen, starring the former Paris Opera dancer Renée Marcelle (Zizi) Jeanmaire, whose impassioned acting and sexy gamin look—cropped hair and more cigarettes—were a sensation. The ballet launched both Zizi and Petit (they would later marry) on an international career in film, theater, and dance.

  Petit was a man of style with an unerring instinct for commercial taste and fashion, but he was not particularly interested in the formal rigor and traditions of classical ballet. He correctly perceived that the vitality of French culture in the immediate postwar years lay in theater, burlesque, and film and not in the hallowed (and somewhat tainted) halls of the Paris Opera. But if he revitalized dance, he did it by pulling it down to a lively popular and street culture born in part of the war: Zizi Jeanmaire’s classical training was a boost to cabaret and burlesque, not the reverse, and it was there, amid the plumed costumes and sexy numbers, that she and Petit made their marks. Moreover, although they were both (very) French, their careers were international and did little in the immediate postwar years to revive Parisian ballet: Carmen had its premiere in London.