Lives of the Dancers

"See the music, hear the dance." —George Balanchine

Each year the survival of an entire art form—ballet—comes down to this month of December and its ubiquitous performances of The Nutcracker, the earnings from which must fund dance companies for the remainder of the year. A love of dance logically leads to a fascination with dancers, who seem almost a separate species, proportioned as purely as a mathematical equation. Several ballerinas have written memoirs worthy of our fascination, and they are among my favorite books by contemporary women writers.

I read my first dance memoir as a teenager and felt an instant kinship with its 22-year-old narrator, Toni Bentley. In Winter Season, Bentley is a member of the corps de ballet of the New York City Ballet during the final years of the Balanchine era. Bentley is not a star and beginning to realize she will never become one. But she writes marvelously, aphoristically—every page has lines I want to quote—and thinks deeply about her art. She sketches the sensibilities of dancers and the details of their daily lives with great insight and irreverence. The glories we witness onstage are made possible only by a Herculean work ethic and self-discipline, even self-abnegation:

We don’t eat food, we eat music. We need artistic sustenance only. Emotional, inspiring sustenance. All our physical energy is the overflow of spiritual feelings. We live on faith, belief, love, inspiration, vitamins and Tab. (16)

. . . And in moments of weakness we try to reassure ourselves that it is worth it, and best of all, that one has the whole rest of one’s life to live. We call “living” what we don’t do—we dance, we don’t live. After all, we are allowed none of the decorations—no love life, no food, no liquor, no late nights, no drugs. This is the general rule. Of course we all are human and forget ourselves, periodically and lapse into “living” habits, but the inevitable repercussions always let us know when living is interfering with dancing! (18)

With such resonant ambivalence about the sacrifices demanded by her art, it is no surprise that a crisis of commitment ensues. Knowing she is good enough to be a star in a lesser company, Bentley struggles to reconcile herself to a rank-and-file position on a premier stage.

The book’s inwardness is like reading a diary in which certain Greek gods —Balanchine, his eventual successor Peter Martins, Heather Watts, and especially Suzanne Farrell—periodically enter and exit, trailing gold-sequined scarves. No one has captured Suzanne Farrell better:

Suzanne just finished another Diamonds, and frankly I cannot put any words on paper to describe her magnificence, her giving. I watch her face and can only think of a love she has greater than I could ever contain. . . . To me she is beauty itself—the word came after her presence. Each time she smiles, I can only cry, and I think of something I read about the sadness of beauty: just to find it is not so hard, but to bear it, that is impossible. (30–31)

With Bentley so besotted, one can almost sympathize with George Balanchine’s plight upon encountering Farrell two decades earlier. Later Bentley dissects the psychodrama of a rehearsal featuring Farrell, Martins, and Balanchine:

[Suzanne’s] brown hair, held up by a single clip, loosens and spreads as she dances. Her face is unpainted but glorious, a wise and beautiful face. The big blue eyes speak of her humor, her sympathy, her devotion, her romance, her experience, her suffering and her care.

She is most attentive to Balanchine, dancing for him. Peter [Martins] listens but tries to maintain an aura of independence and self-composure, appearing to consider carefully and filter every remark of Balanchine’s and then appearing in agreement as if it were the verbalization of his own thoughts. (80)

Never accomplished enough to be a soloist, Bentley made a virtue of necessity in this slim volume by capturing the exigencies of life in the corps, and the book itself has since become the star. A meditation on the sacrifices that all artists make, it offers inspiration to anyone struggling to trust herself, embrace her journey, and find meaning short of fabulous success.

The memoir demanding to be read after Winter Season is of course Suzanne Farrell’s own, Holding on to the Air, co-authored with Toni Bentley in what must have been a very happy collaboration. I have only seen Farrell dance on film, which can never convey the amplitude of a live performance, but from that meager exposure it seems that Bentley’s description of Farrell is no exaggeration. Born in Cincinnati in 1945 with the unstageworthy name Roberta Sue Ficker, Farrell was 16 and Balanchine 57 when she joined NYCB in 1961, and by 1965 he had choreographed his first ballet for her, Don Quixote, dancing the title role himself.

Farrell’s memoir is a gripping counterpart to Bentley’s, revealing the opposite struggles of being a star at a very young age, and the tremendous pressures she faced in her relationship with Balanchine. Imagine: one of the geniuses of the century is creating new work for you, for which you have a deep affinity, he is 41 years older and in complete control of your career and everyone else’s, he’d really like you to become his fifth wife even though he’s still married to his forth, also a dancer, and the term “sexual harrassment” hasn’t been invented yet. From this career cauldron Farrell escaped in 1970 by marrying someone else, leaving the company, and joining a European troupe. Her prodigal return to NYCB in 1975, where she remained until her retirement in 1989, was greeted with elation by all of New York—except for those ballerinas who had been dancing the roles she vacated. It must have been wrenching for everyone. Farrell’s career has had a fitting third act: since 2000 the Suzanne Farrell Ballet has been in residence at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and receives the ravest reviews.

I’ll never forget the first time I saw a Balanchine ballet. It was the Pennsylvania Ballet in Philadelphia, run by another Balanchine protégé and thus granted performance rights by the Balanchine Trust. It was Serenade, an early work (1935), and it remains the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen—indeed very hard to bear. “See the music, hear the dance” is how Balanchine described his mission, and no other choreographer seems to have achieved that same mystical union of music and movement. Until Balanchine, ballets were expected to tell a story. Not that there’s anything wrong with that—I’m a fierce defender of ungainly hybrids like the Broadway musical. But most of Balanchine’s ballets don’t have a narrative. Instead, they tell tales musicians love—dramas of eighth notes and syncopation and crescendos and resolved triads, all made visible, as if by some new kind of creator.

It is this universal reverence for his ballets that has fueled the publication of so many compelling memoirs by Balanchine’s leading dancers. I also recommend:

·        Barbara Fisher, In Balanchine’s Company: A Dancer’s Memoir (2006)—danced with NYCB mid-century and later became an English professor at City College of New York

·        Allegra Kent, Once a Dancer (1997)—a quirky character and lovely writer who dared to birth three children during the prime of her career

·        Edward Villella, Prodigal Son (1998)—America’s leading home-grown male ballet star who founded and continues to direct the Miami City Ballet

·        Maria Tallchief, Maria Tallchief: America’s Prima Ballerina (2005)—whose popularity with audiences was a great boon during the founding of NYCB, also married to Balanchine

·        Gelsey Kirland, Dancing on My Grave (1996)—began her career with NYCB and famously danced Clara in the 1977 televised version of The Nutcracker, later defecting to the American Ballet Theater, more suited to her dramatic flair

·        Merrill Ashley, Dancing for Balanchine (1984)

·        Darci Kistler, Ballerina: My Story (1993)—the last great soloist favored by Balanchine before his death in 1983, she subsequently married his successor, Peter Martins

·        All offer intoxicating glimpses into that endlessly fascinating subject—life in the performing arts in New York City.

Last is a truly scintillating work of wide appeal that needs to be brought back into print, Dance to the Piper (1951) by the extraordinary Agnes DeMille, niece of the Hollywood impressario Cecil B. DeMille. DeMille’s achievements as a choreographer began with the ballet Rodeo (1942), which earned her a job choreographing the Broadway musical Oklahoma (1943), followed by over a dozen other musicals, including Carousel (1945), Brigadoon (1947), and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1949). De Mille is credited with revolutionizing musical theater by creating dances that weren’t just interludes but deepened the plot and character development. Her memoir vividly captures the glory days of early Hollywood, Broadway, and the world of dance in the 1930s and 40s. It begins:

This is the story of an American dancer, a spoiled egocentric wealthy girl, who learned with difficulty to become a worker, to set and meet standards, to brace a Victorian sensibility to contemporary roughhousing, and who, with happy good fortune, participated by the side of great colleagues in a renaissance of the most ancient and magical of all the arts.

This tone of zesty, self-dramatizing certitude instantly transports us to an earlier era and makes DeMille a highly entertaining companion. She was born into theater royalty—Cecil's older brother, her father, was a successful Broadway playwright—but Agnes’s early attraction to dance and her parents’ disdain of it meant that her successes came only after many years of rebellion, apprenticeship, and struggle. It was a Saturday matinee performance by a legendary ballerina that set DeMille on this hard path:

Anna Pavlova! My life stops as I write that name. Across the daily preoccupation of lessons, lunch boxes, tooth brushings and quarrelings with Margaret flashed this bright, unworldly experience and burned in a single afternoon a path over which I could never retrace my steps. I had witnessed the power of beauty, and in some chamber of my heart I lost forever my irresponsibility. I was as clearly marked as though she had looked me in the face and called my name.

DeMille’s parents refused lessons and “Matters might have gone on this way for years if my sister’s arches hadn’t providentially fallen. She was taken to a great orthopedist who advised, of all things, ballet dancing.” Agnes is suffered to tag along.

There is much to love about Dance to the Piper. In addition to her many insights into choreography, DeMille is brilliant at sketching the larger-than-life personalities of her millieu. We get indelible portraits of Anna Pavlova, Martha Graham, and Agnes’s own “Uncle Cecil,” whom she calls “one of the most remarkable men I have ever met”:

His manner was princely and courteous. . . .If he lost his temper it was in the grand manner, building up from a simple statement of displeasure, through long developments of sarcasm to a fulminating climax of operatic splendor which not infrequently terminated with dismissal. (33)

. . . Everything that transpired in his home was gracious, opulent, and shot through always with the excitement of his personality, the note of danger he injected, the sense of change and adventure. (35)

DeMille draws provocative conclusions about the attractions of a dancing career for women in that pre-feminist era, when such displays called her purity into question. Few women dancers “married well,” and only the most self-possessed and kinesthetically driven managed to persevere. That so many of DeMille’s observations on this topic (especially in the chapter “Ballet and Sex”) seem dated now is a somber reminder of how generations of feminists have remade the world into a more welcoming place for women’s achievement in the performing arts.