Critics at the time described Tudor’s dances as “psychological” and “Freudian.” What they meant, most obviously, was that he was interested in sex—not in showing it (as later artists such as Kenneth MacMillan would) but in its repressed state. Indeed, much of Tudor and his dancers’ art lay in the way they closed the body up and made it appear as a dark arena with hidden secrets—so that what came “out” in movement had the force of confession. Kaye had this kind of body, naturally opaque and without luminosity or grace. Working with Tudor, furthermore, she developed ways of compressing and withholding emotion, which is much more difficult than it might seem: the combined physical and mental discipline required to charge a movement, to suffuse it with a precise emotional valence, is at least as demanding in a different way as all-out bravura turns and leaps. Pillar of Fire worked because Kaye understood—physically and intellectually—what Tudor was after, and the effect was electrifying: she received thirty curtain calls.
Nora Kaye in the opening scene of Antony Tudor’s Pillar of Fire. (12.1)
Tudor’s ballets were Freudian too in their emphasis on reason and control, in the ways they used logic and knowledge—technique and calculation—to reveal underlying subconscious feelings. Tudor’s approach was if anything scientific and he was a stickler for objectivity and detachment. “The best performances of my Pillar of Fire,” he explained, “were always executed in cold blood.” Rather than delving into their emotions, he encouraged his dancers to get rid of “their own miserable selves” and focus exclusively, stringently, on executing steps and gestures with clarity and precision. Behind that, however, lay an extensive Stanislavsky-like endeavor. When he created Pillar, for example, he did not begin with steps. First he talked with the dancers about the social and material world in which the steps would take place. They knew what and when their characters ate, where they slept, the color of the wallpaper and the style of furniture in the house. It was this fund of knowledge that gave the movement its quality and “depth charge.”5
Over the years Tudor developed exercises to foster the kinds of skills his ballets required. In one instance he challenged his dancers to sit in a circle, look at someone, and react visibly without moving. In another exercise the dancers were told: “Somebody is coming home after a long time. You hear the door. You’re standing there. You don’t know what the result will be. Show what happens, but without raising your arms or moving your feet. Do it with the breath alone and the neck.” Even more difficult: sit cross-legged, close your eyes, and pretend to be an umbrella opening and closing without moving until the dancers around you can see the umbrella.6
There was more. In the interest of creating “selfless” performances, “executed in cold blood,” Tudor was known for breaking his dancers emotionally. He did this largely through humiliation, with cutting personal attacks and sexual remarks that pulled dancers into a spiral of self-hatred until they felt empty and blank. This was not merely moodiness or run-of-the-mill directorial abuse; it was a deliberate strategy. As Nora Kaye once explained, Tudor forced dancers to “climb into the skin of the dance … for a while there are two of you in the same skin”; Tudor would then “climb out,” but “if [the dancer] goes back to herself the performance won’t be any good. The dancer needs to completely divorce herself from her own ego.” Thus although the process could be emotionally wrenching, most dancers later thanked Tudor for stripping them down and forcing them into a quasi-primitive state from which they could then build a role. Others said his kind of rough love brought forth real feelings—confusion, uncertainty, self-doubt—that they could then use onstage. Tudor himself once explained:
You’ve got to get rid of the personal mannerisms to get to the character in the ballet and dancers don’t want to let go. Breaking down a person isn’t hard. But you cannot break them down unless you are willing to pick up the ashes right away and turn them into the Phoenix. That’s the tough thing. You’re terribly tempted to lay them flat and walk on them.
It was a form of hubris, but it also worked: the intensity and engagement of the dancers were indisputable and made their performances riveting.7
Not all of Tudor’s ballets were as successful or as good as Pillar. In 1945 he created Undertow to a commissioned score by the American composer William Schuman with haunting, nightmarish sets by the Russian émigré painter Raymond Breinin. Billed as a “psychological murder story,” it was pretentious and clichéd, replete with heavy-handed symbolism and cardboard characters forced into a pseudo-Freudian dramatic mold. There is a child scarred at birth as he is yanked from his mother’s arms, a boyhood full of sexual abuse and molestation, and a man who strangles his erstwhile lover (danced of course by the ballerina who also plays his mother) at the moment of orgasm. The movement is violent and explicitly sexual, full of hip thrusts and elaborate pantomime scenes, with men groping under women’s dresses or a Salvation Army nurse comforting the boy and then sexually abusing him. Even to New York audiences drawn to the fashion for Freud and analysis, Undertow could seem shallow. As one disappointed critic sarcastically put it, “Ballet two jumps ahead of Mr. Freud, Tudor’s ‘Undertow’…is Deep Adult Stuff.”8
Undertow is a reminder of just how narrow an artistic path Tudor had carved. He had found a way to express inner conflicts and feelings by making an art of omission and understatement, of concealed feelings and social appearances. With Undertow, however, he reversed course and approached his subject head-on. Instead of a finely tuned physical and emotional study, he created a full-blown pantomime; he told the story rather than exposing the feelings beneath it. Indeed, Undertow was an indication of Tudor’s limits. His psychological ballets were distinctly social and Edwardian: as he moved away from the carefully circumscribed situations and techniques he had used in Lilac Garden or Pillar of Fire and tried to expand to bigger and more explicitly literary and psychological themes—murder and rape—he lost his way.
In 1952 he stumbled again, this time with La Gloire, to three expansive overtures by Beethoven and inspired by Bette Davis’s performance in the film All About Eve. Nora Kaye danced the diva role, but the piece was another overdrawn pantomime ballet complete with Greek-style chorus. Tudor later admitted that the ballet, and especially his choice of music, had been a “terrible mistake.”9
Instead of regrouping or persevering, however, Tudor did something quite extraordinary: he bowed out. He retreated into teaching, took up Zen Buddhism, and in the course of the next four decades created very few ballets—and only one of lasting value. That one ballet, however, was his greatest (if least known) work and a key to his perplexing withdrawal. Echoes of Trumpets (later renamed Echoing of Trumpets) was created in 1963, not in New York for American Ballet Theatre but in Stockholm for the Royal Swedish Ballet, to the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu˚’s Sixth Symphony, Fantaisies symphoniques. It was a ballet about war and retribution, and although Tudor noted that it was drawn in part from his memories of evacuation during the First World War and the trumpet calls and gunshots that rang out from a nearby army camp, it was clearly set during the Second World War, which Tudor—who had tried halfheartedly to enlist—had somewhat guiltily followed from New York.10
Martinu˚ had himself lived through the First World War in a small town in Bohemia; during the Second World War he had fled the Nazis and escaped to the United States. Program notes for the ballet confused the music for Echoes of Trumpets with another piece Martinu˚ had composed in memory of the horrific massacres at Lidice, Czechoslovakia, in which the men of an entire village were murdered by the Nazis. It was an understandable mistake. The ballet takes place in a ravaged wartime village, among ruins and barbed wire; the men have all been killed and only the women are left. Enemy soldiers soon arrive, however, and in the course of the afternoon they kill the lover of one of the women when he straggles in, and string him up to a tree. The women take revenge by seducing one of the soldiers and ritually strangling him with a scarf. They are discovered by his comrades, and vengeance is swift and b
rutal: rape and murder. At the end, a lone and exhausted woman watches, hand to her waist and back to the audience, as the few survivors limp off the stage.
The dancing is cold and expressionless and the steps strictly classical: the dancers don’t try to live the terror, they merely depict it “in cold blood.” Thus a dance between a young girl and the hostile soldiers: instead of offering his hand or taking hers, one of them stomps on her fingers with his boot as she reaches for a scrap of bread (an episode a friend who had survived the war related to Tudor). He partners her by the neck, hands splayed. She moves between the soldiers and is lifted, pulled, raised in arabesque, and thrown, as if in a classical pas de deux, but when she is caught her body gives—it doesn’t collapse, it just gives in the limpness of despair. At another point the women dance with arms linked, in unison: they turn, face the stone wall, backs to the audience, and throw their arms overhead. We see their resignation and solidarity; and the firing squad. At another point they all kneel, raise their shawls high as protection, then lower them around their heads and wrap their necks, carefully, quietly, in an almost religious way, as if in church. But this is also the scarf that will strangle the soldier. Similarly, in the final scene of rape and destruction there is no hysteria or emoting, only stretchers to cart off the dead and a few desolate gestures, such as a woman cradling a friend’s head in her hands.
Echoes of Trumpets is the only ballet I know ever successfully to convey something of the human cost of war. It is harsh and deliberate, slow and spare, a disciplined accumulation of images that resonate and linger as Tudor builds a picture—shocking in its sustained lyricism—of horror but also of humanity. Aesthetically Echoes brings to mind Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal), and it is no accident that the ballet was first performed in Stockholm: the city’s dank northern ambiance, its sober colors, and its clean, uncluttered architectural style pervade the dances. The Swedish company, moreover, was no newcomer to this kind of aesthetic: it was led by the choreographer Birgit Cullberg, who was deeply sympathetic to Tudor and whose own work was also influenced by Kurt Jooss, Mary Wigman, and German modern dance. Tudor was at home here, one of several ballet choreographers of his generation to forge a link between these central European dance movements and Russian classical ballet.
Echoes of Trumpets was also a profoundly European ballet. By 1963 the full extent and meaning of the wartime atrocities were just beginning to resurface as a topic of tense debate across the Continent, and Echoes was part of that cultural self-reexamination. It was also, and above all, a reminder that Tudor himself belonged to an earlier time and place, that although he had made his career in postwar America, his deepest affinities were with Europe and the past. He had done his best work in the 1930s and ’40s, straddled between London and New York. The tensions and psychological aspects of his dances were rooted in a crumbling Edwardian morality and the disruption of the wars that followed. The themes that shaped his work—violence and suppressed anxiety, grief and disrupted communities—grew out of a sense, shared by so many artists at the time, that civilization was at best a thin veneer. Echoes was a return to these themes—and to the sources of his greatest creativity.
Thus, although Tudor had found a niche in New York during the war, he was never really at home in postwar America. Its bright surface optimism had little to do with the dark themes and suppressed sexuality that were the mainspring of his art. As the 1960s youth movement took hold, he appeared more and more culturally disoriented: he was genuinely appalled by his students’ promiscuity and growing interest in drugs. In 1964 he gave away all of his worldly possessions and moved into the First Zen Institute of America, where he lived in a small room with nothing to his name but a desk and a thin mattress. At one point he created a list of guiding Zen Buddhist principles—principles that might have been written to describe his art as well as his objections to the new Age of Aquarius: “Observe order, order, greatest possible order; Observe hidden practice—secret activity; Observe earnestness, sincerity (non deceiving); In Zen there are no dogmatic tenets; In Zen nothing goes to waste; In Zen nothing is expressed under disguise.” For Tudor, it seems, Zen was not so much an escape as an affinity and identification, and not least a way to finally rein in and control the tensions that had been such an important source of his art. The cost, however, was high: what he presumably gained in peace and tranquility, he lost in art.11
In spite of Tudor’s very small oeuvre, however, his few lasting dances came to stand for an entire approach and tradition. Historically, he was heir to the French Enlightenment and the eighteenth-century ballets of Jean-Georges Noverre. Tudor shared Noverre’s belief that a dance could tell stories and convey truths that words could not, and that ballet could take on serious themes and emotions. Noverre was the father of the story ballet; Tudor was the son who gave it an inner voice. It is worth emphasizing that (like Noverre) he did not express inner feelings. Rather, he showed what they looked like. Distance—looking in from the outside—was the most salient feature of his art. But it was also his choice of music that gave his dances such complexity and a modern look. He found his choreographic voice through Mahler and Schoenberg and Martinu˚, and it makes sense that he did so in part by pulling ideas from German modern dance and pressing them through the sieve of classical ballet.
Tudor’s ballets spurred a new generation of artists eager to make ballets about serious themes—war, sex, violence, alienation. Like him, many worked for (or passed through) American Ballet Theatre. But his patrimony, however keenly felt, turned out to be false: their work broke decisively with his example. He was a modernist and neoclassicist: his language depended on physical and emotional control, on structure and constraint. Theirs did not. Consider, for example, the Czech-born choreographer Jir˘í Kylián (b. 1947), among the most talented choreographers of his generation and an artist Tudor admired and actively encouraged. Tudor even asked Kylián to take control of his own ballets after his death. Kylián declined, but in 1980 he paid tribute to the older choreographer in Overgrown Path, to music by Janác˘ek: the ballet was dedicated to Tudor, and at first glance we can see why. Like Dark Elegies and Leaves Are Fading, it is about grief and memory in an earthy central European community, and it uses a vocabulary fused from ballet and modern dance.
But the similarities end there. Rather than distilling and concentrating muscular tension, Kylián releases the body into easy, flowing movements and phrases; rather than concealing, he tells all and thrives on rushes of emotion, fully expressed. Dancing his ballets requires none of the intense muscular and psychological control demanded by Tudor: to the contrary, the movement feels natural and freeing. Tudor tightened ballet technique; Kylián loosened it. Another apparent but false heir was Britain’s Kenneth MacMillan, who became an artistic associate at Ballet Theatre in 1984. Known for his dances about rape and death, he might have seemed a natural choice to follow in Tudor’s path. But if Tudor had erred on the side of psychological reductionism in Undertow, MacMillan took this kind of coarse pantomimed violence as a guiding artistic principle. In MacMillan’s lexicon, emotion was flayed and agonizing; for Tudor at his best, it was tense and formal.
Thus although Tudor may have appeared—even to himself—to stand at the beginning of a new kind of twentieth-century psychological and story ballet tradition, he did not. Instead, his career marked the end of the tradition first elaborated by Noverre. That end came long before Kylián or MacMillan entered the scene. Tudor stopped short in the 1930s and ’40s; that was the story he told, and that was the limit of his talent. And if his ballets look like empty shells today—structurally solid but emotionally flat—we should hardly be surprised. Even when they were first created, dances such as Lilac Garden and Pillar of Fire looked back to a dying European world; Echoes of Trumpets laid that world in its grave. Today’s dancers can hardly be blamed for their inability to understand or re-create the elusive memories and fleeting emotions that once animated these dances. Tudor’s intensity and the way he worked with his
dancers, moreover, is not something that can ever be reproduced; it too was of its time. Yet approaching his ballets as period pieces—what other choice do today’s dancers have?—makes them appear earnest and quaint.
Everyone knows Jerome Robbins. His career spanned sixty years, from the late 1930s until his death in 1998. He worked on Broadway until 1964, choreographing and/or directing the original productions of Call Me Madam, Peter Pan, West Side Story, Gypsy, and Fiddler on the Roof, among many others. He is responsible for the best dance sequences in the film of West Side Story (he was fired midproduction for going over budget) and for the dances in The King and I, including the poignant “The Small House of Uncle Thomas.” But Broadway was only part of the story. From 1949 to 1956, and then again from 1969 until the end of his life, Robbins worked at the New York City Ballet, where he choreographed more than fifty ballets, among them Afternoon of a Faun, The Cage, and Dances at a Gathering.
Jerome Robbins was born Jerome Wilson (after the president) Rabinowitz in New York City in 1918. His parents were both Russian Jews. His mother had arrived from Minsk as a girl in 1893, and his father had fled a shtetl in Rozhanka near Vilna in 1904 (to escape conscription in the Russian army), and joined his older brothers in New York City. The family had a kosher deli on East 97th Street. It was a classic immigrant story, and Robbins’s life was marked by an intense emotional attachment to the old world and an opposite but equally strong desire to assimilate and make it in the new.
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