Apollo’s Angels

by Jennifer Homans

  It was also true, however, that in the course of the 1970s and ’80s Robbins was, by his own admission, overcome by Balanchine, and by what he took to be the high ideals of classical ballet. If Robbins’s early work had been steeped in social issues and an irreverent mix of styles, of which ballet was just one, his later ballets seemed to strive instead for the rarefied air of a formal balletic paradise. Even his diaries and notes show his frustration and struggle: he had a literary and dramatic mind, yet he drove himself to extract and distill the stories and emotions that inspired him, to boil all of that down into realms of pure lyrical loveliness. Ballet—plotless classical dance—became an aspiration and Platonic ideal. He yearned for it.

  But Robbins’s love affair with ballet was complicated. Ballet was not his first dance language, and as fluent as he was, he was acutely aware that his own formal training and understanding of classicism fell far short of Balanchine’s. When he taught company class, Robbins playfully instructed the dancers, “Now we’re going to do six big squats [grand plies]…and eight more big kicks [grand battements].” “We all try to speak ‘Balanchine,’ ” he explained in his diary in 1984, but “we all speak with the heavy accents of our natures—and only George can spin out the seamless flow of a natural native tongue.…At NYCB I’ve fallen backward and [been] put asleep by trying to trust more the GB vocabulary.”30

  Moreover, there was also a tormented Jewish twist. We know this from his notes for The Poppa Piece (at first he called it The Jew Piece), which he began in 1975 and worked on sporadically until the early 1990s; he never felt he got it right, and although it eventually went into workshop, it was never performed. As the title indicates, Robbins was rediscovering his Jewishness (as if he had ever lost it!). But this was not necessarily productive: anger, guilt, and insecurities, perhaps fueled by fashionable identity politics and pop psychology, flooded his imagination, and in diaries and notes he attributed his chronic depression and incapacitating “rages and discontents” in part to his desperate attempt “to become an American and by American I mean WASP American.”31

  Ballet was part of this. In a particularly revealing journal entry he wondered whether his fascination with ballet

  has something to do with “civilizationing” of my Jewishness. I affect a discipline over my body & take on another language … the language of court & christianity—church and state—a completely artificial convention of movement—one that deforms & reforms the body & imposes a set of artificial conventions of beauty—a language not universal—one foreign to East & 3rd world … In what wondrous & monstrous ways would I move if I would dig down to my Jewish self.32

  The answer, of course, was deeply ironic: he had done just that for most of his career, from The Cage and Faun to West Side Story, Fiddler, and Dances. It is not that these were “Jewish” dances (whatever that might mean), but they were dances that grew out of his life and beliefs. How sad that the more searching and self-consciously Jewish Robbins became, and the more he determined to belong—ethnically, sexually, artistically—the more he seemed to cut himself off from his own creative source, which lay precisely in the fact of not exactly belonging and of coming at ballet, modern dance, jazz, and Broadway from a sharp angle. Robbins knew he had hit a dead end. Balanchine’s death in 1983 did not help.

  As if reaching back to his roots, Robbins made a series of ballets that looked once again to popular culture and contemporary composers: Glass Pieces (1983, to music by Philip Glass) and I’m Old-Fashioned (a tribute to Astaire), Brahms/Handel (1984, with Twyla Tharp), Eight Lines (1985, to music by Steve Reich). None of these pieces matched his past work, not least because Glass and Reich are emphatically not Bernstein (Robbins wrote despondently in his journal, “Glass looks like a so what so so work … goes nowhere. Finishes poorly”). But then Robbins was not the same either. If the answer in Dances at a Gathering had been yes, it was now a confused maybe.33

  In 1998, however, he came full circle. With a sense of great urgency—he was eighty years old—he returned to a ballet that he had first done in 1965, Stravinsky’s Les Noces, originally choreographed by Nijinska in 1923. Robbins was not in good health. His hearing and balance were bad, his short-term memory faltering. He was weak, but he insisted on mounting the ballet personally. Ironically, he did it for the New York City Ballet: Balanchine had long rejected the idea of a ballet to this music. With its relentlessly driving score, a dissonant crossweave of religious and folk motifs, Les Noces is about a Russian peasant wedding. The occasion, however, is not joyous, and in Robbins’s ballet as in Nijinska’s, the young bride and groom are literally pushed forward by the group, pulled away from mother and father, and caught up in the relentless social ritual that is their marriage. It is not Robbins’s best work, but it has moments (for instance, the boys’ dance) of real power. The fact that he returned to it, however, was significant. He was looking back: to peasant (not Imperial) Russia, the Russia his parents came from, the Russia of ancient rituals and modernist aspirations, a world and a heritage that for him had receded too far. He collapsed the day after the opening. Two months later he was dead.

  Jerome Robbins’s accomplishments and legacy were huge and lasting. He did not create a vernacular, exactly, but something much more interesting: a distinctively American capacity to exaggerate and to distort, to invert and to reinvigorate across a panoply of styles and genres. He knew how to synthesize and assimilate, how to pull together opposites—classical ballet and street slang—and weld them into a seamless whole. He had a voracious intellect and appetite for experimentation, and his theatrical instincts were unrivaled. That he was torn between stories and pure dance placed him at the heart of the classical tradition, which itself was marked by this same tension. Only when he settled into a single tradition, ballet, and tried too hard to distill his stories into a pure classical language did Robbins falter. Dances at a Gathering was a peak; afterward his ballets offered a narrowing window onto his talent. And if he finally bowed to Balanchine, this was only another sign of his steely analytic mind. Robbins knew that his own talents were great. But he also knew that Balanchine’s were greater.

  Balanchine was a world apart. His ballets are the jewel in the crown of twentieth-century dance: their depth and scope far surpass those of the dances made by Robbins, Tudor, Ashton, or any of the Soviets. And even if their work at times played into his own, few doubted that Balanchine towered over them all; they were standing on his shoulders. Yet his work was very different from theirs. He was not interested in ordinary people or real social situations, much less colloquial movements and gestures. Rather, for him ballet was an art of angels, of idealized and elevated human figures, beautiful, chivalric, and above all strictly formal. It was classical in ways Louis XIV and Marius Petipa would have appreciated, even when it was also radically new. Nor was he much taken with story ballets or theatrical portraits as if “from life itself.” To the contrary; even when his dances followed a plot (as they sometimes did) they did not work through narrative or pantomime: they had a visual and musical logic all their own. “Must everything be defined by words?” he once complained. “When you place flowers on a table, are you affirming or denying or disproving anything? You like flowers because they are beautiful.…I only wish to prove the dance by dancing.”34

  George Balanchine began dancing, as we have seen, in Imperial St. Petersburg, where he and his contemporaries—many of whom would later join him in New York—were servants of the tsar, trained in the etiquette and sumptuous rituals of the court. Direct heirs to the Russian Imperial tradition in dance, they received their training from dancers who had worked with Marius Petipa in the original productions of The Sleeping Beauty and (with Lev Ivanov) Swan Lake. When the Revolution came, Balanchine, who had just turned thirteen, watched the majestic and seemingly eternal Imperial world of his childhood collapse. And if he subsequently turned on its conventions and went the way of a radical Russian modernism and progressive art, he also pressed the beauty and elegance of the court
and its dying aristocratic world deep into his memory.

  But it was not just Petipa’s classicism that Balanchine took from his St. Petersburg childhood. He also knew and loved the incense-suffused rituals of the Russian Orthodox Church. His grandfather and uncle were both priests, and the family regularly attended services at St. Vladimir’s Church: he remembered standing on the cold stone floor at Easter, waiting interminably and with heightened anticipation for the ritual opening of the holy or royal doors, thought to be a passageway between the visible and invisible worlds, which dramatically revealed the bejeweled icons and the priests in their heavy gold vestments. Balanchine was a lifelong believer and practicing member of the Church. In New York he attended the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Sign and in later years became close to its Father Adrian, a Canadian-born priest who had learned Russian and converted to the Orthodox faith. He kept (and worshiped) icons in his home and used to speak of the concrete physical and sensual quality of his religion: purple cloaks, strong incense, images of angels and the bearded Christ.

  Balanchine brought all of this with him to New York, via Diaghilev, Paris, and London, but although he eventually became a U.S. citizen, he never lost touch with his Russian roots. He subscribed to Russian newspapers, read and reread Russian literature, and could recite—in a Russian untainted by Sovietisms—from Pushkin, Griboyedov, and others. (A friend recalled that he especially liked to quote from Griboyedov’s Woe from Wit, about a Russian exile who returns to his native land but is so devastated by its backwardness that he flees, once again, to the West.) He surrounded himself with Russian friends—Igor Stravinsky among them—and never lost his taste for Russian food; he was so at home at the Russian Tea Room on 57th Street that he was known to disappear into the kitchen to prepare his own dishes. His American friends (and wives) were inducted into this world: finding herself surrounded by Russians on her wedding day, Balanchine’s fifth and last wife, the Parisian-born American dancer Tanaquil Le Clercq, turned to a friend and whispered: “What have I got myself into?”35

  In spite of his natural affability and large circle of Russian friends and American admirers, however, Balanchine was also on some level very much alone. He rarely spoke of his family back in the USSR, but the little we know suggests that he missed them, and the old Russia of his youth, terribly. After he arrived in the States, his mother wrote him plaintive, heart-wrenching notes; he wrote back, sent money, and carefully kept her letters until his death. Maria Tallchief, who was married to Balanchine from 1946 to 1952, recalled that he kept a framed photo of his father, who had died in 1937, on the bedside table in their New York apartment. Balanchine’s sister, of whom we know little, disappeared from Leningrad during the war, and his mother died in 1959. His brother was a composer in Tbilisi, but they saw each other only once, briefly, when NYCB toured the USSR in 1962.

  That trip, which might have been a victorious homecoming, was yet another indication of Balanchine’s sense of loss and loneliness. He despised the Soviets, and returning to their Russia literally made him sick. The church near his childhood home in Leningrad had been converted to a factory, and the great cathedral where he had witnessed his uncle’s consecration had become an “anti-God museum.” Nervous and irritable, he eventually became physically ill and returned briefly to New York before reluctantly rejoining the dancers in Georgia to complete the tour.

  Balanchine’s nostalgia for Russia, the old Russia he knew (and imagined), was a vital creative source. The School of American Ballet and the New York City Ballet were self-consciously American institutions, but they were also—and this mattered enormously—enclaves of Russian culture. Many of the administrators, pianists, teachers, and coaches at the school and in the company alike were émigrés who had fled Russia, like Balanchine, in the years before and after the Revolution. Nicholas Kopeikine, for example, one of Balanchine’s rehearsal pianists (he could sight-read a Stravinsky orchestral score, transposing for piano as he went), had escaped by jumping from a railway car, where he had hidden knee-deep in excrement among a stock of pigs, with the family jewels carefully sewn into his sable coat. Barbara Karinska (1886–1983), whose costume designs were integral to so many of Balanchine’s dances, was a former socialist from a wealthy family in Karkov; she had left home in 1924 and worked in London and Paris, on Broadway and in Hollywood, before finally settling in New York with Balanchine. Felia Doubrovska (1896–1981), who taught at the School of American Ballet from 1948 to 1980, had trained at the Maryinsky and left Russia with Diaghilev; her stories of Petersburg and Paris and her elegant old-world dress and manners swept her students (the present author among them) back into a fantastic Russian Imperial past. Pierre Vladimirov, her husband (1893–1970), and Anatole Obukhov (1896–1962) were both former Maryinsky stars who trained several generations of American dancers. There were many, many others.

  Balanchine made his Russian friends and colleagues feel at home: when SAB opened on Madison Avenue in 1934 he had the walls painted gray-blue, like those at the Maryinsky, and Russian was the lingua franca of the faculty. More important, the school and the company were run like a miniature Imperial court, with Balanchine as tsar. These were unabashedly hierarchical institutions in which authority went unchallenged, but they were also rigorously meritocratic. Dancers were trained and ranked as an aristocracy of skill, and they learned the manners and military-style discipline traditionally demanded of the tsar’s entourage—and of his dancers.

  The dancers, even those who knew Balanchine personally, revered him, not just because of the godlike ballets he created but also because, through his ballets, they entered this very Russian world and came to believe in it. (An interviewer for Time magazine at the height of the rebellious 1960s noted incredulously that the younger dancers spoke of Balanchine “as if he were Yahweh.”) Dancers’ labor unions were out, or (later) barely tolerated: this was Balanchine’s company, and absolute loyalty was required. It was not that he was despotic or heavy-handed—unlike Robbins, Balanchine was known for his even temper and quiet civility—but some American onlookers nonetheless disapproved, finding the culture of NYCB backward and repressive. Others, company dancers among them, called it a cult.36

  But Balanchine knew what he was doing. The dancers who worked with him all say that he taught them much more than to dance: ballet was also and above all a philosophy and approach to life. This was neither pompous nor pretentious: it faithfully reflected Balanchine’s beliefs, rooted in his experience of exile and in his Russian Orthodox faith. Consider, for example, Balanchine’s uncompromising emphasis on now. He hated it when dancers held back or saved their energy for a later performance. Dancing, he said, is not the past (over) or the future (uncertain), and he insisted that a performer focus everything on the present moment (not as easy as it sounds). The result was dances of gripping physical and emotional concentration; he pushed his dancers hard, asking for more, and more again, making them tap sources of energy and commitment most did not know they possessed. This was an artistic principle, but it was also matched by experience. Balanchine had lived through the upheavals of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and his own exile. He had been entirely cut off from his family and homeland, and none of his marriages lasted. His health was intermittently fragile. Now was the only thing he could count on.

  Except God. Balanchine saw himself as a servant of God, and the public image he projected as a craftsman or cook was rooted in his religious beliefs. He hated it when critics referred to his “creations”: “God creates, I assemble.” Making ballets, he said, was like gardening, or like planning and assembling the ingredients of a good meal. He was practical and scoffed at romantic notions of artistic inspiration: his classes and rehearsals had a simple, workmanlike atmosphere. He was genuinely humble and saw himself as a vessel, even though he also fully recognized the power of his own talent. If anything, he believed that music, not dance, was the most sacred of the arts. He was an accomplished musician himself—he played the piano and on occasion conduc
ted—and once explained that music is the “floor” without which there could be no dance. “The composer creates time, and we have to dance to it.”37

  Musical and physical precision lay at the core of his art. When he received a section of Stravinsky’s music for Agon, for example, Balanchine was in awe: “not a single extra note; take one away and the whole thing crumbles.” This, he said, was a kind of truth. “Nobody,” he once commented, “criticizes the sun or moon or the earth because it is very precise, and that’s why it has life. If it’s not precise, it falls to pieces.” So when Balanchine taught company class, as he did almost daily in the early years, he emphasized clarity and precision—not perfection, necessarily, but the physical geometry of classical ballet. Hours were spent, for example, on fifth position—exactly heel to toe—and tendus, hundreds of them, to make the movement (however unnatural) second nature. A foot pointed front must be placed exactly in front of the dancer’s nose, not a centimeter off. If it is off, it is not just incorrect, it strays from the truth—“and the whole thing crumbles.”38

  Although few of the dancers knew it at the time, these ideas were a bridge back to the religious and humanist origins of ballet: back to the Great Chain of Being, to angels and the harmony of spheres, to the court of Louis XIV and the strict aristocratic etiquette that had first given ballet its forms. But they were also, and not least, a bridge back to Balanchine’s own faith. In the Orthodox Church, music and visual beauty are more important than the written word. It is through the senses, through seeing, smelling, and hearing, that one finds God. “My work is with what I see, with moving, with making ballets,” Balanchine later explained. “So too with God, he is real, before me.…You see, that’s how I believe, and I believe so fantastic.” It was not a stretch, as Lincoln Kirstein once pointed out, to see Balanchine’s ballets as icons. To Orthodox believers, icons are not merely a representation of a venerated object or person: they actually bring the worshiper into another spiritual world, more real than the real. They are the gateway between the temporal world and eternity, between the visible and invisible, between the living and the dead. The icon painter, moreover, like the ballet master, is not a creator or an artist but merely someone who reveals an image and the truths it holds.39