“O body swayed to music . . .”
—W. B. Yeats
I OFTEN used to see Balanchine here on 67th Street where we both lived. The great ballet choreographer was small, neat, wearing, in his late years at least, unremarkable, practical clothes. He was, you might say, not noticeable, not even noticeable for appearing unfriendly or abstracted. A few people recognized him, but I never saw, in what was perhaps intimidating daylight, any fan stop to speak of his admiration. Instead, seeing him there on the street, in the drugstore and sometimes in the wine store, people would step back with a start and, or so it seemed to me, make a slight, nodding bow.
The artist was not a street star in the New York sense and neither are the members of his company as they go about the Lincoln Center neighborhood. Inside the New York State Theater, it was something else. He and the dancers were overwhelming presences, removed, on the stage, in the wings—presences real and not quite real also, for such is the mysteriousness of ballet landscape.
When George Balanchine died at the end of April of this year, a golden age of many kinds seemed to come to an end—his choreography, his supreme example of tradition and innovation, his inexhaustible inspiration. Of course, the ballets survive; the dancers bear his message, his art, and are even tonight fulfilling the dedication. And there will be a fall season, The Nutcracker for Christmas—on and on.
Still, the presence of Balanchine was of such a completeness and complexity that he himself was the sum of the parts, the sole possessor, one sometimes felt, of his secret, even though the secret was to be revealed in performance—that is, by others. Since it was dance, the work could not be private, arcane brilliance; all was designed for embodiment, realization, transference. But with him, there was more to it than that.
He was not, after his youth, often a performer, not, like Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and Merce Cunningham, the measure in his own body of the vision of his brain. New ballets every year of his creative life, revisions of previous work in a spirit of unquenchable fertility and inspiration—in that he did not differ from the great performer-choreographers who composed for their companies and for themselves. The difference at last was that, being himself disembodied on the stage of performance, he knew no limitations beyond those of others, the dancers, and these limitations he set himself against insofar as it was possible and desirable. He was a fearful challenge, or so I imagine. The aim of it all was to produce the impossible art, ballet, and to reach by its discipline profoundly human depths of feeling—human feeling usually abstracted beyond documentation and narrative, but feeling nevertheless of an ineradicable ancientness. Pure movement, pure dance, music in movement, always—but the work never seemed, as one sat in the dark of the theater, estranged by the purity of the art from the humble universals of experience.
Balanchine was born in Russia in 1904. He studied music, entered the Soviet State School of Ballet as a boy. So there it was—music and dance, the marriage of his gifts, enlightened by extraordinary intelligence and a dedication incorruptible. At the age of twenty, he left Russia and went to Paris. Indeed it was the historical moment, the electrifying time of Diaghilev, Picasso, Stravinsky, the transformation of the heights of the inherited tradition (Picasso could draw like Ingres, it was said), into the accents and rhythms, the restlessness, the ambivalence that were the challenge of the twentieth century.
And it was a fateful moment for us, for America, when this unpredictable European genius, still in his twenties, came here in 1933. It is always possible that he might have remained in Paris; but given the fifty years of his residence here it is difficult to imagine it otherwise, and who has the heart to linger on the idea. The New York City Ballet, The School of American Ballet, these unexpected institutions, fiercely unparochial or even nationalistic, are nevertheless American. It was the marriage of the New World and the Old, the union of Balanchine’s unshakable tradition and imperial integrity with the fluid and open American possibility, something of the American tonality. In this extraordinary combining, the great learning, taste, and dedication of Lincoln Kirstein was at hand, as if by some benevolent design of history.
In the classical ballet of Russia and Europe with its implacable and somewhat alien discipline, the discipline of the impossible, young American men and women became the instruments of interpretation for Balanchine’s genius. Girls from Cincinnati (Suzanne Farrell), from Saint Paul (Merrill Ashley), from California (Heather Watts and others), and young men from Massachusetts (Jacques D’Amboise), from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (Sean Lavery), from Ogden, Utah (Bart Cook) are in the present company, following all those memorable others from Oklahoma and, you might say, wherever. Of course the company of the revered St. Petersburg master or benign despot is international and catches in its net the talents of Copenhagen, Iceland, and Soviet Russia itself.
We have in America our precocious revolutionaries of modern dance, a tradition of distinctive eminence and a kind of evangelical force. When Balanchine was born in 1904, Isadora Duncan was already touring Europe with spectacular zeal and confidence. In the 1940s, Martha Graham created Letter to the World, Deaths and Entrances, and Appalachian Spring. These works, austere and eloquent, seemed to arise out of the national inheritance in matter and technique. The body and the mind, the movement itself were mirrors of the large, democratic vistas of puritanism, frontier hope, and a very contemporary tension. This high, reflective art, on the one hand, and the endlessly beguiling inventions of the popular idiom, on the other hand, are our classics. New choreographers spring forth in each generation and the sheer amount of dance just now is staggering. Sometimes the exuberance overwhelms other theatrical elements and they seem to be running behind, clumsy, hesitant, and unprepared.
Thus, the tradition of ballet is invariably challenged and it, itself, challenges. Owing to Balanchine, no aspect of dance is the same, and his inventions flow effortlessly into the most routine Broadway musical and the elevated insights of modern dance flow back into his work. And if at last nothing is interdicted or superceded, the example of ballet, the classical rigor of it, has been absorbed as an immediacy, released from a mandarin exclusiveness. This is the way of art and if there is education in it, training as there must be for the performers and the audience, it is not scholastic but the very command of our time.
As a genius of the dance theater, Balanchine is able to enhance every demand. Ballet comique with its pertness, teasing, and dazzling speed is not now, nor has it ever been, a plebeian intrusion in the repertory. There is a little tart in every ballerina and an Apache in each danseur noble. But for me, an ignorant member of the audience, the address to the deepest sensibilities lies in the adagio duets, in the consuming silence, in the presence of something fatalistic and borne with passionate reserve and stoicism. This is perhaps true, if it is, of all such moments in ballet. Still, in Balanchine, the effect upon the emotions is almost archaic, of something hidden in human history, very old and outside of time. Some of it is the chastity of ballet itself, the black and whites or palest pastels, the wordless superiority, the unfathomable subtlety, the refinement and lack of insistence. If all we were aware of was the element of impossibility, the purity of movement, the musicality, the ethereal discipline, we could not be so deeply moved by Agon, Serenade, and Davidsbündlertänze, so different indeed from the gorgeous tristesse of Swan Lake and Giselle.
So you come out into the night of New York City, unable to express or to persevere in this ineffable revelation that is not the story of your life or the rhythm of it either. The golden age is a memory of promise, of suitability of response to the conditions of life, of some lost glory that remains in longings and in endurance. It is the memory of a greater and more complete simplicity, a lament perhaps. This is what Balanchine’s “modern” classical arrangements of space and movement accomplish for the spirit.
Here in the city, in this country, he received the means necessary for the elegant, costly performance of ballet. And above all the support to train generations, to establish standards and a pure style. The School of American Ballet, the New York City Ballet, became a fixed point in the dreams of young dancers, a daunting discipline and hope. In providing the means, we may be said to have honored him, Balanchine, as a small repayment of the incomparable honor he bestowed upon us.
1983