(3 of 4)
Modern dance is almost spiritually opposed to the promulgation of ballet, but Balanchine's good fortune has caused real outrage among classical dancers too. They fear he will use his influence and power to impose his own "American style" on the entire U.S. dance world. Mrs. Rebekah Harkness Kean has just created a new company with a $2,000,000 endowment to resist just that possibility. But long before any grants, the New York City Ballet was the only American company that could be compared to Moscow's Bolshoi, Leningrad's Kirov, London's Royal Ballet and Copenhagen's Royal Danish.
Thanks almost entirely to Balanchine, it now compares favorably. When Balanchine took his two-year-old company on its first trip abroad in 1950, a London critic proposed a memorial to all the gallant Americans who fell at Covent Garden. Since then, on the strength of a repertory that consists more than two-thirds of Balanchine's own works, the company has been pronounced the most creative ballet group now dancing. In the lean, neoclassical style that is distinctly its own, it is indeed peerless.
Enviable Virility. Balanchine avoids the big storytelling ballets, such as Sleeping Beauty and Giselle, to concentrate on musical values: "I think that dancing to music is entertaining alone," he says. Parisians greeted New York dancing as "le style Frigidaire," but Balanchine's ballets are now being performed frequently by more than a dozen major companies. With 110 ballets to his credit since he left Russia—including such masterpieces as Serenade, Agon, Apollo, The Four Temperaments, Concerto Barocco and Symphony in C—he has no rival as a choreographer, but it is his special genius to convey his thoughts to his dancers. He is, they say, the world's greatest teacher.
Balanchine occupies an incredibly large place in the life of each of his 66 dancers. Even the 16-year-olds in the corps de ballet speak of him as if he were Yahweh. The entire ballet is on call from ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week, and the pace gives no one time to think of anything beyond living up to Balanchine's artistic wishes.
The master does little talking, even when teaching a new dance. "Now we shall work with arms," he will say, helpfully turning his own into overcooked asparagus. The dancers copy. "Isn't it selfish of you," he will ask, "to expect 3,000 people to sit and watch you lift your leg if you're not going to do it beautifully?"
Many of the dancers quite seriously believe that leaving Balanchine's company would be as disastrously stupid as skipping Mozart's piano classes in Vienna, and every dancer states the same ambition: "First to be in the corps, then a soloist, then a principal." The resuit of such spirit is a company amazingly deep in great dancers; the merest member of the corps, Balanchine insists, could have been a prima ballerina in imperial Russia.