Ballet's Fundamentalist

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When ballet connoisseurs start talking about the esthetics of their subject, the average citizen beats his way out of the pink-tinted fog to the nearest exit. George Balanchine, the most effective maker of ballets now living, has a refreshingly realistic way of getting down to esthetic fundamentals.

"Ballet is important and significant--yes," he says. "But first of all, it is a pleasure. No one would enjoy watching a group of dancers jump about the stage aimlessly, no matter how well they jumped. After all, a pig can jump--but who wants to see a pig jump?" Nobody has a better right than George Balanchine to decide what ballet audiences do and do not want to see. As head man of the young (five years old) New York City Ballet Company, he has enticed record-breaking numbers of watchers into theaters on two continents; as a choreographer, he has ballets in the repertories of every top company in the Western world. Last week, on a night of Eskimo weather, his company opened its winter season in Manhattan. Taxis were hard to find; the swirling snow was ankle-deep even in Times Square. But there were few empty seats at the ballet's large (capacity: 3,010) City Center theater. The place was packed by an audience that buzzed and chattered with anticipation. They had come to see the most discussed ballet company in the world, built almost 100% on home-grown U.S. talent by Artistic Director Balanchine. It was the same company that last winter performed for an unprecedented twelve weeks in Manhattan, that routed out some 4,000 Angelenos a night for a month last summer. It had already made three visits to Europe, leaving such cities as London, Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Rome, Milan and Barcelona with the notion that the gadget-happy Americans might have a culture bump, after all.

Working Bodies. Most of the repertory that the New York company carries in its theater trunks is something new and different in ballet. It is danced in modern "classic" style, with clean-cut silhouettes and unwasted movements. It often dares to use "classical" scores by Mozart and Bach. But it avoids telling such long-winded old "classical" ballet tales as the beautiful mechanical doll (Coppelia), the bewitched princess (Sleeping Beauty), or the peasant girl in love with the prince (Giselle). Though it is sometimes called "American" ballet, it pays almost no attention to "Americana." The repertory leans heavily (about 60%) on the choreographic work of Balanchine himself. A typical program might contain his Symphony in C, set to Bizet and danced in simple costumes against a plain blue backdrop; his showy Pas de Trois (music from Minkus' Don Quixote) as a sop to oldtimers who like to watch three top soloists show off their grace and strength; his grotesque fantasy of insect life, Metamorphoses (music by Hindemith). and perhaps one of popular Choreographer Jerome Robbins' impudent romps such as Pied Piper (music by Copland).

The Balanchine style dispenses with elaborate sets. It concentrates on the rhythmic movement of trained bodies against plain backgrounds--whether the dancers are outfitted in feathers and fluffy skirts or simply in black bathing suits.

"When you get older," says George Balanchine, who is 50 this week, "you eliminate things. You want to see things pure and clear." New York's ballet company is remarkable in still another way: it is not simply a showcase for a few rare stars, such as the Danilovas, Markovas and Fonteyns of other troupes. The company offers a fresh tradition almost equally adaptable to any of its leading dancers, and its proudest possession is a chorus that can dance rings around any other. When New York City Ballet Company dancers become "ballerina-minded," wrap the public's plaudits around themselves and go looking for bookings of their own. Balanchine "puts them on a pedestal. This one here, and that one there--all around--and I look at them, but I have no use for them." Live Clay. Although Balanchine's own work is happily apparent to the public, his job never is. It begins back in the bare, mirror-walled classrooms of his own School of American Ballet, on Manhattan's Madison Avenue. There he selects his dancers, lines them up, and then works out his ideas on them, like a sculptor working in clay. While the cast watches, he walks through a routine, testing it, molding it, muttering almost inaudibly while he moves. The dancers pick up the phrase, dance it out, and wait for the next. Sometimes the rehearsals go on for weeks, while Balanchine watches and corrects; sometimes a few days are enough.

Meanwhile, designers are working on the sets and costumes, and the orchestra is rehearsing.

On opening night last week, Director Balanchine stood in the backstage gloom, a slight (5 ft. 8 in., 145 Ibs.), straight, greying man with a rudderlike nose, wearing a brightly checked shirt and string tie, quietly smoking a cigarette while his dancers gathered in the wings. Nobody paid him much attention, and he made no move to watch the first number--"I've seen it," he said. Nor did he wish any of the dancers good luck. "We don't say anything," he says. "It's bad luck." During the performance, while dancers were bouncing in & out of the wings, he shuttled between backstage and the back of the house, watching for flaws, quietly checking up on a dancer in a new role.

Versatile Enigma. Balanchine, all but idolized by his pupils, old and new, remains an enigma and a system of paradoxes to most of them. He turns down an average of a dozen rich offers a year from Broadway and TV nowadays to go on working for the New York Ballet--where he takes no salary. He is satisfied with his income from the royalties (some $200 a week during a season) and occasional fees for outside commissions.

The movies' Sam Goldwyn, who hired him for Hollywood's first full-scale ballet (in 1938's Goldwyn Follies), calls him "the greatest choreographer we have in this country." and adds: "I don't think he has $10 to his name." In 1951 Goldwyn engaged him, at a sturdy fee, for the ballet in Hans Christian Andersen, only to have Balanchine beg off: too busy with ballet at City Center.

Choreographer Balanchine has had five wives, all famed dancers, and has remained on cordial good terms with all of them.

The five: Tamara Geva, Alexandra Danilova, Vera Zorina, Maria Tallchief and Tanaquil LeClercq. Ballerinas Tallchief and LeClercq are the steady leading lights of his present company.

Balanchine's attitude toward show business is a simple one. He does not look down his nose at Hollywood, Broadway or TV. He was the first to put ballet on Broadway (in On Your Toes}, and he has proved his skill in a string of hits--Babes in Arms, I Married an Angel, Louisiana Purchase and Cabin in the Sky--not to mention a polka for 50 elephants in pink panties, which he once whipped up for the Ringling Bros, circus.

Indeed, in the past, he has worked without undue complaint at jobs far less rewarding : harness-mender in a Russian harness shop, clown in a run-down circus, piano player in a silent movie. But nowadays, with royalties coming in from performances of his ballets. Choreographer Balanchine can stick to what he wants to do most. Outside of his school and company activities, this means leisure to play two-piano music, cook splendid epicurean dishes (his own favorite: partridge in sour cream), and read science-fiction stories in his Manhattan apartment.

A Straight Back. Born in imperial St.

Petersburg, the son of Meliton Antonovich Balanchivadze, a recognized composer, young George originally set out to be a soldier of the Czar. When he was nine, his mother marched him to the school for military cadets, but he was a year too young. Meanwhile, an official suggested, why not enroll young George in one of the other imperial schools? There might very well be an opening in the court ballet school--and then, after a year of it, transfer to the military cadets.

The Czar's ballet masters accepted George after asking him to walk the length of a room ("I was very straight; I had a straight back"). George became a court servant, fed, housed and taught at the Czar's expense, clothed in a uniform of dark blue with silver lyres on the collar. It was an arduous life. George worked, ate and slept ballet, crammed lessons in reading, writing, arithmetic and religion (Russian Orthodox), and studied piano on the side. At the end of the year there was no further talk of soldiering.

George plugged away at the grand old leaps and turns of the imperial ballet discipline until he knew the basic language to perfection appeared at the vast Mariinsky Theater* among casts of hundreds. The whole curriculum somehow became mixed up with food, because the penalty for a badly prepared lesson was no dessert for supper, and, worse, the malefactor had to stand rigidly against the wall, watching the others eat.

Return or Be Punished. With the revolution, the eating problem became more serious. George got down to stealing fish from the barges on the Neva. "Cats," he recalls, "were very scarce." Court Servant Balanchine had no court to serve, and his uniform with the silver lyres on the collar lost its meaning. The great Mariinsky Theater was cold, dark and empty.

But the ballet staggered on, saved by the fact that Anatoly Lunacharsky, a playwright and novelist who became Commissar of Education, was a ballet fan.* The starveling staff of dancers danced for their Soviet suppers in the same old, Czar-favored style. But when the chance came to take a small troupe on a tour of Germany, Dancer George Balanchine, then 20, leaped at it.

Balanchine well remembers the Baltic steamer ride from Russia. Many passengers were seasick, and the hungry dancers, who included Tamara Geva and Alexandra Danilova, had plenty of food for the first time in years. "I think maybe we were seasick too," says Balanchine, "but we ate anyway." The ballet world remembers the trip because it was part of ballet's great westward movement. Like many other Russian tourists in those days, Balanchine & Co. finally got a telegram: return at once or be punished. Says Balanchine: "If we went back, we would be punished anyhow--no food." He never went back.

Westward Eyes. After a summer of trouping. Balanchine managed to crack the big time. In Paris he got an audition with Impresario Sergei Diaghilev, also an emigre, who hired the troupe on the spot.

Balanchine was a good dancer, but his build was slight for a top danseur noble.

Moreover, says Balanchine now, pushing up his nose with a forefinger and displaying his teeth, "I looked in the mirror.

Some people say it was not true, but I looked like a rat." Under Diaghilev he found himself as a choreographer.

The company had drawn on the talents of such famed members as Michel (Petroushka) Fokine, Vaslav (Afternoon of a Faun) Nijinsky, Leonide (Boutique Fantasque) Massine, Bronislava (Les Noces) Nijinska. For the most part, in their choreography, they had developed luxuriant numbers flush with gestures, elaborate costumes and scenery. With Diaghilev's blessing. Balanchine launched a one-man revolution of the right: he went back to severe, classic principles. Instead of involved, fairy-tale plots, he shaved his storylines down to wisps of familiar, ancient legends. Thus began his continuing battle to reduce ballet to its fundamentals: the dance itself.

In 1929, four years after Balanchine had gone to work with Diaghilev, the master died, and his company, based on no school of its own and without a guiding hand, dissolved almost as if it had never been.* For a while Balanchine wandered, picking up odd jobs in London variety shows ("16 Delightful Balanchine Girls"), staging half a dozen ballets for the crack Danish Royal Ballet, having a whirl at running his own company (called Les Ballets 1933}. But nothing quite worked out as he wanted it to, and he turned his eyes westward again. "I really wanted to go to America," he says. "I'd seen the movies. So many beautiful girls.

Healthy girls--good food, probably. A country that had all those beautiful girls would be a good place for ballet." At that crucial point, he met a young American named Lincoln Kirstein who had exactly the same idea.

Kirstein was a huge (6 ft. 4 in.), bullet-headed young man, who, though just out of Harvard, was already showing signs of becoming the U.S. version of Diaghilev himself (TIME, Jan. 26, 1953). An heir to a Filene department-store fortune in Boston, he was an editor of the arts magazine Hound & Horn, author of a rash first novel and a book of poetry, and teetering on the edge of balletomania. His dream: to found a truly American ballet company. There was nothing for it but to get the world's foremost Russian choreographer to spark it. Balanchine came.

The U.S. that stretched out before Immigrant Balanchine, though it had never found a ballet tradition of its own, had seen quite a bit of imported dancing. When Vienna's famed Fanny Elssler danced in Washington nearly a century before, Congress declared itself a holiday. During World War I, Pavlova had packed Manhattan's Hippodrome (on a bill with elephants and Chinese jugglers), went on to make The Dying Swan a synonym for ballet across the nation. Nijinsky had toured the country in 1916, was already a legendary dancer.

Raw Beginners. Balanchine and Kirstein put their heads together and decided that the first step in forming a company would be to open a ballet school. The reasoning: it would provide a constant source of new dancers whose training could be controlled so that they could walk right into the company. That is the way it worked out. The School of American Ballet soon became the best and busiest in the U.S., and from its classes came a stream of top American dancers.* School Director Balanchine drew up and supervised the curriculum, from the first positions of the eight-year-olds clutching the barre, to master classes for his never-finished products. "Mr. B.," says one graduate, "never makes anything easy. You think it will be simple when he starts a class, but he speeds everything up so much that before you're through you feel like a raw beginner." The school's three ballroom-size classrooms are busy from io to 7, six days a week. Its entrance hall is always acrawl with teen-agers in woolen practice tights, knitting, gossiping, giggling between sessions. Many of them take lessons every day (cost: some $450 a year). After their third year, the girls put on their first toe slippers; after their seventh or eighth, the most talented pupils are ready for positions in the company.

Some 90% of its 400 regular pupils are girls. Balanchine shakes his head sadly about this, thinks it is because U.S. parents have an idea that dancing "is sissy," despite the fact that the male dancers must be strong enough to lift ballerinas over their heads. "Look at a pitcher," he says. "His windup is just as much of a dance, if you look at it in slow motion, as anything our boys do." An Exercise in Nostalgia. From his school, Choreographer Balanchine can pick the kind of girls he always wanted for his company. His favorite qualities: 1) long legs, 2) "bird bones" (i.e., lightly boned), 3) small head, 4) strong back. A good many who were not lucky enough to get into the company after school have scattered across the U.S. to teach in some of today's 2,000-odd schools where ballet is offered. Their futures look secure: the enrollment of such schools has doubled in the past decade, now totals about 200,000.

Latest estimate on the annual U.S. sale of ballet slippers: 1,250,000 pairs.

Across Europe in the wake of the New York City Ballet's tours, the word has gone that here, at last, is the "American" style. Ever modest George Balanchine, unwilling to call his style anything, attributes its special qualities to the dancers themselves. He never hesitates to pick up a gesture that comes from one of them. Once, recently, his uninhibited cast jokingly picked up a new step before he was through demonstrating it, made it look like a baseball pitch. He put it into the ballet.

The school itself was the nucleus of three earlier companies (American Ballet, Ballet Caravan, Ballet Society) before the present company achieved success. Today, more European cities than U.S. cities have seen the New York City troupe. But after last summer's visit, Los Angeles is bidding to bring the company back for six weeks instead of four this year, and San Francisco wants three. Manhattan

itself can expect a bonanza: three complete "seasons" by the end of next winter.

Meanwhile, Choreographer Balanchine is busy polishing two brand-new ballets (his 80th and 81st), which will have their premieres later this season. They will give collectors of Balanchine paradoxes fresh material for study, for they are as dissimilar in substance as any two ballets in the man's repertory. One. a severe abstraction, set to the strains of Atonalist Arnold Schoenberg's Opus 34. fits the music so closely that it seems to simplify the score. But the dance movements themselves are so involved that balletomanes will be arguing about it for a long time.

The other new work is a loving exercise in Russian nostalgia: a Balanchine version of the old story-telling Nutcracker, with music by Tchaikovsky, sugarplum fairies, and a Christmas tree as big as Balanchine can fit on to the stage. The Nutcracker will take a full evening, and provide 35 children's roles for youngsters of Balanchine's ballet school. Central theme of Nutcracker: food.

* Whose imperial ballerinas traditionally became the companions of grand dukes. * And a political success. After service in Geneva, he was appointed Ambassador to Spain (1933), died (in bed) just before he was scheduled to leave Moscow for Madrid. * Except for a rash of "Ballets Russes," all of which claimed Diaghilev's magical mantle. * Among them: Tanaquil LeClercq, Patricia Wilde. Herbert Bliss. Todd Bolender, Nicholas Magallanes, Francisco Moncion.

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