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Heaven and Earth in Balanchine’s Philosophy

2014; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 7; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/thr.2014.0071

1939-9774

Jay Rogoff,

Theatre and Performance Studies

Heaven and Earth in Balanchine’s Philosophy Jay Rogoff (bio) By the mid-twentieth century George Balanchine had evolved into the supreme master of an innovative kind of ballet that discarded elaborate stories and characters in favor of focusing on bodies moving with music. To sharpen that focus, he also got rid of elaborate set designs and, to display his dancers’ beautiful bodies, often stripped them down to “practice clothes”: simple leotards that, as his New York City Ballet co-founder Lincoln Kirstein put it, represented “the ballet’s metaphor for nudity.” This modernist purification precisely paralleled other recent artistic revolutions: Ezra Pound’s Imagism, for example, or the geometric austerity of Malevich and the Constructivists, whose black squares and idealized, dynamic forms coincided with Balanchine’s own balletic apprenticeship in revolutionary Russia. In creating his new “black and white” works, as they quickly became known (although the women wear pink tights and toe shoes), Balanchine made a virtue of necessity for his financially strapped postwar company, which in 1948 became the New York City Ballet. But the streamlined look of the leotards also facilitated his experiments with kinds of gesture never before seen on a ballet stage, some borrowed from jazz and modern dance, others entirely invented, all integrated seamlessly with Balanchine’s neoclassicism, his sharpening and acceleration of classical technique. Non-narrative ballet had been around at least since 1908, when Michel Fokine created Chopiniana (later called Les Sylphides). Some of Balanchine’s lost early works apparently had no plot—later he would insist, “Put a man and woman onstage and there is already a story”—and by 1934 he was making the tragically lyrical Serenade, to Tschaikovsky, four years before Leonid Massine used Beethoven for The Seventh Symphony. But something extraordinary would almost always happen in Balanchine’s supposedly abstract works, which tended to transcend the formalist demands of choreographic gesture performed with music. His superb musicality—he usually prepared his own piano reductions of orchestral scores for rehearsal—would make the dancers appear not only to enact the music but actually to inhabit it, and, even more marvellous, these non-narrative works would often open up into allegory, unfolding a moral, emotional, and erotic universe. Rejecting the rigid hierarchies of most ballet companies, NYCB operated under a “no-stars” system, which gave the choreography top billing and listed the dancers alphabetically. While doubtless a means of keeping salaries in check, this admirably democratic approach also meant that on any given evening the company’s brightest stars were whoever happened to be performing onstage in the constellations of Balanchine’s black-and-white heaven. While Balanchine created many great ballerina roles for the dancers who inspired him—the neoclassical, non-narrative daughters of the swan, the technical and expressive heirs of Odette and Aurora—his ballets altered and enlarged the repertory by reinventing how ballet operated [End Page 402] and redefining what great roles looked like. Nevertheless, some critics who fully understand his profound transformation of dancing in our time appear not to have pursued the evaluative implications of his revolution: If Balanchine changed forever what ballet looked like, he certainly must have transformed the definition of a great dancer. Yet dance writers often rate today’s ballerinas based on their expertise in the nineteenth-century repertory, as if a dancer were defined by her Swan Lake or her Giselle, while her Agon, her Concerto Barocco, and her Stravinsky Violin Concerto, to name three great Balanchine black-and-whites, counted as minor diversions. Dance fans know these are great roles, and last Columbus Day weekend, the final performance of NYCB’s fall 2013 season brought great performances in The Four Temperaments (1946), Episodes (1959), and Duo Concertant and Symphony in Three Movements (both 1972) from the young dancers who, through their incisive understanding of these ballets, have helped initiate a new Golden Age for Balanchine’s company. As its title suggests, The Four Temperaments takes its inspiration from the ancient theory of the humors, though Balanchine denied the ballet had any program, calling the temperaments “merely the point of departure for both composer and choreographer.” In 1940, at the height of his success as a Broadway and...