Stravinsky’s death, however, inspired Balanchine to one of his greatest achievements yet: the 1972 Stravinsky Festival, a tour de force unmatched in the history of ballet. In eight intensely anticipated performances, the New York City Ballet mounted some thirty-one ballets to music that spanned the composer’s life, including twenty-two world premieres by seven choreographers—ten by Balanchine himself—and several important revivals. The sheer scope and creative force of the undertaking was breathtaking, and many of the ballets Balanchine created for the festival remain classics today.
Perhaps most important among them was Violin Concerto (later renamed Stravinsky Violin Concerto), to a score dating from 1931. Balanchine had made a ballet to this music in 1941 entitled Balustrade, a plotless dance with eerie sets by Pavel Tchelitchew showing two blood-red skeletal trees, veined like nerve ganglia. And although the ballet has been lost, a surviving grainy film fragment gives some feel for the work’s coiling, larva-like tangle of bodies and situates it firmly in Balanchine’s earlier, Four Temperaments style. The ballet Balanchine made in 1972 could not have been more different. It looked back to Agon but was less austere and seemed to encompass and distill all of the elements of his art: it was American jazz and Russian folk dance, classical ballet, baroque etiquette, and Romantic lyricism, all fused into a single electrifying idiom. Balanchine himself thought it his best work.
Stravinsky Violin Concerto features two couples and a group. It is plotless and performed in practice clothes on a bare stage. The dances are short and the pace urgent, driven by Stravinsky’s visceral rhythmic pulse and Balanchine’s unerring precision. This is not an old-style bravura; to the contrary, the steps are small walks, prances, lunges, and quick batteries of pointe work, cut with turns and jumps. The leaps do not soar or reach for the sky; they are reined in by time, earthy and disciplined. The body is never classically held: it bends and arcs and seems to turn inside out. At points, the movement is so subtle and detailed that the arms, shoulders, feet, and eyes each seem to be responding to a different rhythm or pulse: “time that worked with the small parts of how our bodies are made.” The parts of the body and the parts of the ballet—arms in relation to legs and dancers in relation to each other—are nonetheless highly coordinated and synchronized.
The first (of two) pas de deux begins with the dancers just standing there, side by side and facing the audience, feet turned in. They appear disarmingly bare and alone. Their bodies jolt as the music begins, as if an electric current has passed through them, and they are drawn together in a sinewy, contracted, back-bending dance. This pas de deux was originally performed by Jean-Pierre Bonnefous and Karin von Aroldingen, and her wide, muscular back, broad hands, and angular build gave the dance a wiry and introspective feel, as if she were climbing inside the movement and music to examine its full reach. At one point she arches back into a bridge and “walks,” flipping over, hand to hand, into another bridge; he follows her but performs classical steps. The dance ends as he partners her in a traditional arabesque promenade—except her supporting leg is bent, not straight—which stretches into an acrobatic back walkover. She completes the walkover, pulling it out with the musical phrase into a deep arch back as he lies flat on the floor in front of her. On the last chord he turns onto his back, arms stretched to the side.
The second pas de deux was danced by Kay Mazzo—delicate, flexible, and petite—and Peter Martins, an elegant classicist whose movements were nonetheless weighted and dense, with a low center of gravity. There are moments of great tenderness, but her body is also pulled, extended, pushed, distorted. Together they interlock, shift weight, and counterbalance as if they were a single unit. At one especially poignant moment, she opens her legs to second position on pointe, legs in a V-shape—a standard classical pose—but her knees suddenly collapse inward: it is an impossible position, broken and vulnerable, but he crouches and holds her knees. Similarly, at the end he stands close behind her and together they bow in a traditional courtly reverence—except that the bow is performed with his arm and her foot, as if their bodies were one. They stand again and the movement continues as he places his hand gently on her forehead and kneels, pulling her face and body uncomfortably back into a deep arch with her face buried in his hand. Both pas de deux thus end with the woman in a backward arch and the man kneeling or flat on the floor: it is a traditional cavalier pose, but bent, upside down, askew.
Kay Mazzo and Peter Martins in Balanchine’s Violin Concerto. (12.3)
The ballet concludes with the full cast onstage in a celebratory folk-dance-inspired finale, arms crossed at moments Russian-style—but the steps and movements are stripped clean of any folkish or ethnic flavor: their diction is strictly balletic, suffused with an infectious rhythmic complexity, full of switchbacks and oppositions. Yet it looks simple, feels simple—the rhythms are so clearly articulated that they appear easy to perform, even if they are not. The music races to an end, building tension, until the dancers stop and stand in couples, as if in a portrait, facing the audience. They seem at once graciously formal—severe, highly trained—and very much like us. Drawing on Russian themes, Balanchine had made a twentieth-century urban and American court dance.
Balanchine lived for another decade, but by the mid-1970s his health was beginning to fail. He had a heart attack in 1978 and bypass surgery in 1979; his eyes were weak, and the disease that would eventually kill him (Creutzfeldt-Jakob) was taking its toll. In these years he looked back: the 1972 Stravinsky Festival was followed in 1975 by the Ravel Festival (which also celebrated Farrell’s return to the company) and in 1981 by the Tchaikovsky Festival, with its poignant Adagio Lamentoso. He also had plans to choreograph his own Sleeping Beauty to Tchaikovsky’s score. In 1982 he staged another festival to commemorate Stravinsky’s birthday centennial, but by then he had grown too sick and weak to fully engage in the work. His last ballet, a solo for Suzanne Farrell to music by Stravinsky, was completed with difficulty.
George Balanchine died in New York on April 30, 1983. His death sent shock waves through the dance world, and no one who congregated at the New York State Theater that day could fail to understand the magnitude of what Balanchine had achieved. The public outpouring and sense of disorientation at his passing were unforgettable. The New York State Theater—Balanchine’s theater—drew hundreds of mourners, all joined in grief and all looking to the stage for solace. Balanchine had always said that in Russia death is an occasion for joy, but although Lincoln Kirstein bravely addressed the audience— “I don’t have to tell you that Mr. B. is with Mozart and Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky”—this was one Russian custom Balanchine’s American dancers were hard-pressed to learn. They wept, and so did their audience. Balanchine’s requiem services were held at the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of Our Lady of the Sign at 93rd Street and Park Avenue, where he had worshiped for so many years. More than a thousand people filed past the open coffin where the ballet master lay, an Orthodox funeral crown on his head and a red rose in his lapel. The memorial service at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine included selections from Mozart’s Requiem, readings from the Bible, and a spectacular procession of Russian Orthodox clergy.64
An era in ballet had ended. The world Balanchine had made at the New York City Ballet could never outlast its founder: it depended too much, as Balanchine himself had always insisted, on “these dancers and this music, here and now.” The ballets could be reproduced—they were and are—but the world that had animated them gradually died away. Only the paradox of Balanchine’s success remained: classical ballet was radically recast in twentieth-century America by a Russian born in the twilight of the nineteenth century and steeped in classicism, folk traditions, and the Orthodox faith; by a man who steered dance to the forefront of modern culture by setting it on a religious and humanist course.
To Balanchine’s dancers, however, this was not as strange as it might seem. They insist that he taught them to respect ballet as a set of ethical principles—about hard work, humility
, precision, limits, and self-presentation. They knew that they were becoming aristocrats of a sort, even when they were also street kids or corn-fed Midwestern gals. Their direct, open, and unselfconscious physical trust and daring—their willingness to submit to the laws of ballet and music, even when they also broke them—fit perfectly with Balanchine’s aesthetic. With them, and following a musical lead, Balanchine pulled ballet back to its classical foundations and built a modern tradition.
Balanchine’s legacy was immense. He had given the world the greatest oeuvre in the history of dance and made classical ballet a preeminently modernist and twentieth-century art. In New York he had created a public for dance and built a genuine civic community loyal to his work, an agora of theater and art focused around City Center and then the New York State Theater. Along the way, he had solved the problem of narrative and pantomime that had plagued ballet masters since the Enlightenment. His ballets did not translate words into dances: to the contrary, he made ballet fully its own language— a physical, visual, and musical language—and created dances that could be seen and understood in their own terms. Following Petipa and Diaghilev, moreover, he had rooted ballet in serious music ranging from Bach to Stravinsky, and trained several generations of dancers to rise to the challenge. But above all, he had taken the leap back, via Russia and Petipa, to Louis XIV and back yet further to the ancient Greeks—to times and places when ballet, and dance, truly mattered. He had restored its place as fine entertainment and as a sensual and sensuous art, but also—and at the same time—as an Olympian ideal. Tudor and Robbins were great choreographers because they were of their time. Balanchine was of his time too, but he also transcended it. Apollo’s angels had found a modern voice.
*Jooss, who had trouble with the Nazis, settled in Britain in 1934 at Dartington Hall, an experimental living colony on the estate of Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst. The British authorities briefly interned him on the Isle of Man, but the Elmhirsts arranged for his release in 1940. His company continued to tour the world, supported in part by the British Council. In 1948 he returned to Essen to teach and eventually direct the Folkwang School, where the choreographer Pina Bausch was one of his students.
*Two years after Agon, Balanchine invited Graham to work on Episodes, a ballet to music by Webern. She choreographed the first movement on her dancers and he choreographed the second on his.
following Balanchine’s death his angels fell, one by one, from their heights. Classical ballet, which had achieved so much in the course of the twentieth century, entered a slow decline. It was not just New York: from London to St. Petersburg, and Copenhagen to Moscow, ballet seemed to grind to a crawl, as if the tradition itself had become clogged and exhausted. In part this could be explained by generational change: by the turn of the twenty-first century the artists who had made ballet so vibrant were dead or retired. Balanchine, Robbins, and Tudor; Stravinsky and Kirstein; Ashton, Keynes, and de Valois; Lopukhov, Lavrovsky, and Vaganova—they were all gone, and the dancers who had brought their ballets and so many others to life had left or retired from the stage.
Today’s artists—their students and heirs—have been curiously unable to rise to the challenge of their legacy. They seem crushed and confused by its iconoclasm and grandeur, unable to build on its foundation yet unwilling to throw it off in favor of a vision of their own. Contemporary choreography veers aimlessly from unimaginative imitation to strident innovation—usually in the form of gymnastic or melodramatic excess, accentuated by overzealous lighting and special effects. This taste for unthinking athleticism and dense thickets of steps, for spectacle and sentiment, is not the final cry of a dying artistic era; it represents a collapse of confidence and a generation ill at ease with itself and uncertain of its relationship to the past.
For performers, things are no easier. Committed and well-trained dancers are still in good supply, but very few are exciting or interesting enough to draw or hold an audience. Technically conservative, their dancing is opaque and flat, emotionally dimmed. And although many can perform astonishing stunts, the overall level of technique has fallen. Today’s dancers are more brittle and unsubtle, with fewer half-tones than their predecessors. Uncertainty and doubt have crept in. Many of today’s dancers, for example, have a revealing habit: they attack steps with apparent conviction—but then at the height of the step they shift or adjust, almost imperceptibly, as if they were not quite at ease with its statement. This is so commonplace that we hardly notice. But we should: these adjustments are a kind of fudging, a way of taking distance and not quite committing (literally) to a firm stand. With the best of intentions, the dancer thus undercuts her own performance. There are, to be sure, dancers whose larger vision and more sophisticated technique set them apart—Diana Vishneva (Kirov/ Maryinsky), Angel Corella (American Ballet Theatre), or Alina Cojocaru (Royal Ballet)—but too often they waste their talent in mediocre new works or plow their energies into reviving the old.
Especially the old. Today the modernist proviso “make it new” has been superseded. In dance as in so much else, we have entered an age of retrospective. This means, above all, the nineteenth-century Russian classics, and audiences everywhere are awash in productions of Nutcracker, Swan Lake, and The Sleeping Beauty. In one sense, this is nothing new. The twentieth-century Moderns, as we have seen, self-consciously set their art on these very same foundations. But they had a confidence and connection to these dances that today’s artists lack: they grew up in the shadow of the nineteenth century. Thus when Balanchine choreographed Raymonda Variations or The Nutcracker, he was drawing on nostalgic memories of productions he had seen as a child in St. Petersburg. Yet these stagings were emphatically his own, never slavish reproductions. Ashton mounted Swan Lake so beautifully because he was at once immersed in Russian classicism and free from its orthodoxies. Even in the Soviet Union, where ideology often obscured choreography, many artists shared—and valued—their direct links to the Imperial past.
The current generation of dancers and choreographers faces a more difficult situation. They are far removed from the nineteenth century and know it only secondhand. Hence, perhaps, their anxiety to preserve the past, as if the tradition were at risk of ebbing away. There is a palpable desire to hold on: slippage and erosion are acutely felt and much discussed today. The result, however, is ironic: the world’s major ballet companies—companies that built their reputations on new work—have now become museums for the old. The ubiquitous presence of reconstructors, notators, and directors—ballet’s curators and conservators—rather than choreographers is further evidence of this obsession with preservation. London’s Royal Ballet and New York’s American Ballet Theatre have both devoted vast resources in recent years to new productions of The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake. Even the New York City Ballet, vanguard of modernism, now has its own full-length productions of these nineteenth-century classics with new but blandly conventional choreography.
But nowhere have the classics been more important—or controversial—than in Russia. By the end of the Cold War, Russian artists were deeply ambivalent about Soviet culture and their own past; many were eager to excise or forget the dances they had grown up with, tainted as they were by totalitarianism and a failed social experiment. One way to do this was to “bracket” the twentieth century and reclaim the Imperial heritage. Thus the Kirov, named after Stalin’s minister, became once again the Maryinsky Theater (except for touring: Kirov sells tickets, Maryinsky does not).
Some years later the company added two “new-old” jewels to its repertory: lavish reconstructions of the original Sleeping Beauty and La Bayadère. These productions were painstakingly pieced together, like large mosaics, from fragments of past knowledge: Nikolai Sergeyev’s (incomplete) choreographic notes in a now-defunct notation system, old costume and set designs, printed and visual sources, interviews, snatches of memory. Where the texts fell silent, as they often did, ballet masters retouched “in the style of.” The result was historically and politically rivetin
g but artistically moribund; what is gained in authenticity is lost in art.
The same is true of the more recent past. Today the work of Balanchine, Ashton, Tudor, Robbins, Zakharov, Lavrovsky, and Grigorovich is being preserved, filmed, and set for future generations. In this spirit, there has been an impressive effort to revive or document lost works, especially those of George Balanchine. His known works are now copyrighted and controlled by a trust established after his death (comparable organizations control the works of Robbins, Tudor, and Ashton). If a company wishes to mount one of his ballets, they must apply to the trust, which dispatches repetiteurs—dancers who worked with the ballet master directly—to stage the work.
In this way, many of Balanchine’s ballets have become standard repertory—classics—for companies around the world, perhaps most notably at the Kirov/Maryinsky, which has been eager to reclaim the St. Petersburg–born Balanchine as their own posthumous prodigal son. The result has been welcome, if ironic: today Balanchine’s ballets are danced with at least as much vigor and interest in St. Petersburg, Paris, and Copenhagen as they are in New York.
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