1. AUDIENCE
Balanchine was omnipresent in the theater in those final years before he became ill. His presence has only increased since then: now he is entirely unavoidable. It was in those long, low-lit, winding narrow hallways of the theater that ran their slim course around the great body of the stage, which rose like the apse of a church in our midst, that we first noticed he was occasionally pushing off of a wall, as if stabilizing himself. It was upsetting to see him vulnerable, the man whose entire art can be viewed as a supreme high-wire act of balancing the spiritual inside the physical, seducing each from its entirety, making them merge. Even his name, Balanchine, contains the word “balance.” This teetering was just one of the symptoms of what he did die from—diagnosed only after his death as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease—but it was the one we saw, the one I think he must have hated most. It seemed especially cruel.
Not long after that he never came to the theater again, never taught class again, never took a dancer’s foot in his hand and showed it what to do, never walked those halls again. But before this, on those random meetings with him in the theater, I was always too shy to say anything more than a quiet “Hello,” said more like a question, so filled was I with uncertainty. He would always give a small bow and a nasal, elongated “Helloooww” back, as if imitating my American accent. It occurs to me only now that he respected us, me, as much as we did him, though such a notion was entirely unimaginable back then, when we were just out of the School and so in loving thrall to this man, this magician, this maker of ballets that made us far more beautiful than we were.
Mr. B knew, all too well, that we viewed him as God. He neither encouraged this nor liked it; it was simply the way it was, inevitable. “When I pull the toilet chain,” he liked to say, in a doomed attempt to make himself human to us, “it is for the same reason that you do.” While amusing, this did little to unthrone him in our eyes.
When Mr. B performed his small and ready bow, there was always the nod that went with it, the nod that we all still imitate when we speak of him. How much was conveyed in that small tilt of his head. Mr. B was our very own Fred Astaire, only more distant, more esoteric, more old-world, though equally elegant. That nod—up, then down—carried that amazing face with the chiseled, aquiline nose and that slight exotic inflection gleaned from his Georgian blood. With a small move on an inclined surface, he looked at you as if he were far away, but then his gaze would shoot out like a laser beam and pierce you.
I sometimes thought he was looking at us through a kaleidoscope of time itself, from St. Petersburg, where he was born as a dancer at the tsar’s Imperial Theatre School, from that unimaginable extravagance and luxury and velvet-lined carriages to the famine, cholera, and horrors of the Bolshevik Revolution, then to Europe and the convergence of modernism in Diaghilev, to us, the American dancers, the many Ginger Rogerses that he dreamed of after leaving the blue and gold Maryinsky Theatre.
By now I had been in the company for six years, and I still had nothing to say to him. I knew only one thing: the desire to dance for him. But he was in the hospital and he was dying, and I knew I must go despite the fear.
I took him a little loaf of orange-walnut bread that I had baked and then soaked in good brandy. I put a great deal of time and thought into my outfit: bright red overalls with white stitching over a pretty, gauzy white-and-green chiffon top with tiny red flowers on it and great blouson sleeves to the elbow. A wide, black elastic belt with a vertical gold clasp cinched my small waist tightly inside the red overalls.
I wore most of my voluminous dark hair up in a clip, not in a secure top-of-the-head tight Balanchine bun but soft and loose about my face, like a Gibson girl, with a single long dark braid hanging down my left side. I bathed myself in my perfume, Hope by Frances Denney—an American perfume with the old-world tones of a great Guerlain scent and a silly name. We Balanchine dancers drowned ourselves in our various perfumes, perpetuating, American-style, the wafting perfumes of our Russian ballerina teachers.
I remember precisely what I wore so long ago when it was so very, very important. But why I thought this was what to wear for an audience with George Balanchine is now totally beyond me. Today I would wear a long sage silk gown and an even longer dark green velvet duster, with peach roses in my hair, and I would bring him a bottle of Cristal rosé, his favorite champagne, the one designed for the tsar, where the glass of the bottle is so thick that it can have a flat base, unlike other champagnes, which have inverted bottoms to alleviate the pressure of the bubbles. But this was then, and I arrived at the hospital for my last visit with him in red overalls with homemade brandy bread wrapped in tinfoil, a red satin ribbon tied about its center.
I didn’t know if there were official visiting hours, and I didn’t know if he would be seeing anyone, if he might be sleeping or, most likely, if he had many other visitors already at his bedside. I had heard that he had a heavy stream of them—not just his dancers and balletmasters, but musicians, Russian friends, the occasional gawker, and Father Adrian, a Russian Orthodox monk and priest who looked like Rasputin; he visited Balanchine during his final months and would later bury him. I had even heard that there had been more than one little “party” held at his bedside with food and drink and merriment. But I had never partied with Mr. B, and I couldn’t imagine being flip or glib or even light with him. To me he was serious and sacred, and small talk was not an option.
I told no one I was going—I didn’t want to be told not to go—so I just went early in the afternoon, after morning company class, on a Tuesday in early February, taking my chances. After asking numerous friendly hospital personnel where to go, I arrived on his floor and went to the nurses’ station. “I am looking for Mr. Balanchine,” I said, ready to be turned away. I later heard that the nurses had been directed by him to allow dancers in to see him even when their visits were not during the prescribed hours: he wanted to see us. By now they had seen a parade of lean men and women with bulging dance bags coming to visit the man in the room at the end of the hall. Apparently the staff at Roosevelt Hospital had never seen anything like it—the scale of it, the often eccentric beauty of the earnest young people visiting this elderly man. When I appeared in my curious outfit to ask which room was his, the nurses looked me up and down and told me, “Down the hall, last room on the left.” It felt surreal that such a vital man would be in a hospital.
I found the room. The door was open and I stood on the threshold. There he was in a large, bright, airy room, under a white sheet, wearing a crisp white hospital gown, sitting up in the narrow bed. He reminded me of Don Quixote, as he had choreographed the Don’s death scene in his 1965 ballet; the knight-errant rose higher and higher on a platform in his final exaltation, his long white gown trailing after him. Mr. B was alone—no party, no Russians, no priest, no dancers. I did not cry. I was not going to cry. He beckoned me in.
“Ah, the writer!” he said, with a twinkle in his eye. I was amazed. I was always surprised that he recognized me at all—though he always had—since I had been so well taught at home to appear unseen. But these were the all-seeing eyes, and who was I to think I could hide? A few months earlier, I had published some of my diary as a dancer in his company as a book; he had read it, and I was told via an intermediary that he liked it very much. He had been most amused, I heard, when excerpts had been serialized for a week in the New York Post with sensational headlines that hardly matched my modest text. I had been afraid that he would fire me for writing that backstage story, but he hadn’t. With great trepidation, I had told him about the publication in his office before he became ill. He listened to my brief speech and then asked one question: “So, dear, is it about me?” And in my innocent narcissism I said quickly, “Oh no! It’s about me!” (Ha! Everything was about Balanchine once you knew him.) So now I was “the writer.” Funny that, when all I had ever wanted was to be his dancer.
I pulled up a chair, but he patted the bed next to him and told me to sit there, beside him. I obeyed, of course, and never had I felt such closeness with him: the young girl so in need of the father’s love, of his blessing. But had he not blessed me so many times? By choosing me from my large dance class at the School to dance Princess Aurora in the Rose Adagio of The Sleeping Beauty for the annual Workshop performance; by choosing me for the Workshop again the following year, to dance the ballerina role in Allegro Brillante—a ballet, he said, into which he’d put everything he knew about classical ballet into sixteen ferocious minutes; by making me an apprentice to the New York City Ballet; by making me a company member and all that meant: a contract, a salary, twelve pairs of new satin pointe shoes every week, gorgeous tutus and tiaras and the opportunity to learn and dance so many of his glorious ballets, to inhabit his world. But still, I thought he didn’t know me, and felt myself unchosen. The frailties of ego.
No matter; there we were alone in the room, me sitting in the red overalls on the bed. He thanked me for the walnut bread and asked what I had put in it—he was a master chef himself. Then he placed it carefully on his side table, patting it gently, saying, “For later.” I wonder if he ever ate it.
“So, you are still with us, dear?” he asked. Yes, I was still with him, I told him, dancing at New York City Ballet. My book had received some recognition, and he must have thought I might have moved on from my position in his corps de ballet to a possibly more prominent position as a writer. Ah, no—this he had wrong. I not only still wanted to dance but also knew one thing: that dancing Balanchine was a harder, deeper, and more beautiful endeavor than writing, and that being a Balanchine dancer was where the real beauty lay. My ambition was not to be recognized by others but to overcome myself, to be a better dancer. All I ever wanted was to be a better dancer than the one I was. All I still want, even now, in a way. To be that curious creature that is so close, so far: the one I could be. Ballet, you see, provides the most fantastic future for every devotee, something far beyond the promise of public acknowledgment or the flicker of fame. It provides the prospect of conquering one’s own self to find, possibly, transcendence. If that is not a more interesting pursuit than renown or fortune, then I know nothing.
Mr. B was looking at me closely. He was so very concentrated. His ability to be inside the moment of time that is actual, this one, now, was of such an ease that sitting on his hospital bed, I somehow disembarked right then, right there, from my ever-nervous, buzzing self, and landed in a microsecond in the very place he was in, the only existing one, a place I usually avoided. The effortlessness of his demeanor was as a magnet, and the weight of the armor of my endless worries—including my awe of him—fell right off me, and the resulting lightness was literally transporting. So unprecedented was this strangely happy place to me that I felt it to be magic. It reminds me now of his explaining how he had no past, no future, only “a continuous present”: this was that. One more lesson from a master teacher—never giving up—even though he was himself about to relocate from mortal to immortal. But I had no time at all to think of any of this—I understand it only all these years later. Then, it just happened. Total simplicity. It felt like I was in a timeless bubble—the exquisite irony of a real moment.
He reached out and took my left hand in his right, and I felt the warm current of his energy: finally ready, willing, at zero hour. I almost cried feeling the sweetness, the closeness, but stayed quiet, watching him while he watched me. He then let go and moved his hand up to my wrist slowly, feeling my skin, circling his fingers around my small wrist then up to my forearm. It was not the first time he had taken my wrist, touched my hand or arm: ballet is a physical profession, and he had been moving me around—adjusting head, legs, feet, fingers—in class and rehearsals for well over ten years, since I was eleven years old as a child dancing in The Nutcracker. Our entire profession is about being in a particular shape in three-dimensional physical space; rearranging bodies, and body parts, was the choreography he did all day long with us in the theater. But the circumstances here were different, more personal, and the unspoken sadness of finality invaded me.
I was with him entirely in a calm accord that I had not had with him before, my resisting fear finally absented itself for this last dance. He moved his hand up to my elbow, feeling the size and shape of my arm and shoulders through my thin blouse, across the bones of my clavicle, my neck, and then traveling sideways to my other shoulder, and then down that arm taking hold of my right hand. A symmetrical surveillance.
Never has anyone touched me with such gentle deliberation as Mr. B did on his deathbed that day. In what was likely only a minute in clock time, he made, in his dying grace, an invisible girl feel visible—one final adjustment.
He touched me as if he were memorizing, as if my body were Braille. He must have known that he was not leaving that bed, that he had little future left. But he had the present. He was like a scientist studying a young dancer’s body. His kaleidoscope vision was adding my small parts into its prisms and patterns, as if he were taking me, my shapes—the shapes he had shaped—with him. Not a word was said. The air was still as if a rite had, silently, imperceptibly, arrived and passed. I felt known in a way not known before. I loved him. We all did.
Finally, he took my left hand in his again and I held his hand in return. His grip was so strong, not that of a man ready to go upstairs. So went my brief pas de deux with Mr. B and how he partnered me beyond my scope, beyond my obstinate disbelief in either of us—he too great, me too slight. He looked me straight in the eyes then, still holding my hands, not letting go. Not yet, anyway.
After a long silence, while still holding my gaze, he spoke again. “Maybe, dear, you will write a story about a man and two women. A man and three women. A man and…” He was tired now, and he closed his eyes. I kissed his cheek and left.
The next time I saw him, less than three months later, he was dead, lying in his open casket at his memorial service, where I, like all of us orphans, stood alongside four of his five wives for hours and hours holding a single white burning taper, wax dripping like tears. Once the service was over, we lined up as only dancers can, in the longest chorus line of his life, like Busby Berkeley ballerinas—the line trailed out of the church, down the stairs, and down the block and then curved around onto Park Avenue—each waiting to kiss him one last time. So many of us kissed him. He traveled to that other world carried high on a raft of dancers’ kisses. He was the first person I loved who died.
His last words to me have echoed through the decades and become a kind of koan, the last one, from the master. “A story about a man and two women. A man and three women. A man and…” For Balanchine, the story was her, always her. Each one, many ones—even, perhaps, one like me. His devotion spawned the greatest body of work by a single choreographer in the history of dance. It will never be surpassed—these portraits of women—not in all future lifetimes.
Five decades earlier, just off the boat from France, in early 1934, Balanchine had declared this single and abiding love in Serenade: to Tschaikovsky’s soaring, sweet but mournful score, he made the world in a story about a man and two women…three women…
As Serenade begins, the curtain floats up on a sea of maidens, Botticelli’s Venus multiplied into a small platoon. We are dressed in pale blue, right arms raised toward a light, against a light, long layered skirts filled with air, legs like vertical pale sea anemones beneath. Though we are seventeen, if you care to count, in the formation we appear as if we are simply an arbitrary slice, a section of a pattern that goes deep and wide, to the right and to the left, and stretches far, far back to an unknowable horizon. As if these girls are just the ones the audience happens to see now, at this very moment, as they stand and pass by on a conveyor belt. The ocean is large in Balanchine’s world, the infinite denoted with precision.
Mr. B said that we, his dancers, were like fish, music our water. This image describes exactly the interplay of dancers with gravity—our ally, our enemy—where the lush fullness of any movement is slowed as if by the viscous counterpull of liquid. Dancing in Serenade, we are contained inside a giant aquarium where water echoes spirit and our bodies stream into freedom.
There are so many patterns laid out in this opening that after years of watching, you still won’t see them all. We are standing in two diamonds, each of nine girls, equidistant from each other in diagonals of three, but viewed from one corner of the square, set on its head. The two diamonds are connected by one girl common to both diamonds, the seventeenth girl. She links us, at center stage. She is also the pivot, the middle girl of two larger diagonals of six girls each who divide the stage in a large cross, four quadrants. A crucifix, tic-tac-toe…you choose.
Our parallel feet, seventeen pairs strong, mark the planting of ballet, quite literally, in America. Balanchine even said, years later, that he placed the dancers in the pattern of a California orange grove. What orange grove? In 1934, he hadn’t been to California; he was barely past the authorities on Ellis Island. What a trickster. So lies the legend of Balanchine and the orange grove and Serenade’s famous opening scene, smoke and mirrors all.
There we stand, ten parallel lines, five of each in opposing diagonals, with five girls forming a straight line that bifurcates the center of the stage both horizontally and from side to side. If you are sitting in the audience to either the far left or the far right of the center of the stage, you may not perceive the two diamonds but will rather see parallel diagonal rows of girls of varying lengths in repetitive succession. Confusing? Ah, but not at all. I have merely described just a few of the many ways in which this opening garden of girls can be viewed if one were studying Balanchinian geometry. He had the rare ability to devise Euclidean formations, and then move those formations all about a stage, fast and slow, and faster still, in endlessly shifting symmetries without a moment of awkward transition. He spoke once of a ballet being like “a string of pearls” held upon “an invisible horizontal line” that “extends unbroken from the point where the dance begins to where it ends.”
As dancers, not one of us knew any of this, nor could we see it, nor did we need to, nor, frankly, did we care. We were not only on the ground, looking toward what Lincoln Kirstein called an “intolerable lunar light”—that is, stage light RF961, infused with a light blue gel—which for us was more a midnight sun, but we, each a piece of the plan, were also in the midst of the pattern, of a grand design, a cog in Balanchine’s wheel. It is a design so beautiful that to this day there is an audible intake of breath from the audience when the curtain is raised and the pattern is revealed: a gesture to infinity that by the ballet’s end will have expanded into eternity.
The opening of Serenade shows how Balanchine was somehow able to reach straight to the gut through unexpected divisions of the three spatial dimensions. He was primarily, after all, an architect of spirit, wrangling its evanescence to the stage, into our bodies, and then out again in our movement. If one were overhead, in the nosebleed-section seats that used to be cheap, one would see all these patterns at a heightened angle, adding an aerial view that is perhaps the most encompassing one. But in this tableau, there is no bad angle, no incorrect angle, no angle devoid of a kind of lacerating solace. We danced knowing God was watching us from everywhere. That is just how it was.
In our group—eight and eight, plus one—I always felt like the odd dancer out, the one just outside the symmetry, who doesn’t quite fit, what with my not-so-good feet, too-busy mind, and belief that I had been chosen by mistake. We are seventeen because that is how many dancers Balanchine had that first day in rehearsal on March 14, 1934, on the fourth floor at 637 Madison Avenue at 59th Street, where the School of American Ballet first opened its doors a few months after Balanchine got off the boat in New York Harbor. “If I had only sixteen,” he explained once, “an even amount, there would be two lines.” And just how different it all would have been then is unimaginable—the two-diamond lineup now being known as Serenade’s first heraldic device.
Choreographers will more often than not choose even numbers for a corps de ballet—eight, twelve, sixteen—symmetry being such an element of beauty, and so much easier to move around en masse. But Balanchine began with the girls he had at hand—a jumbled lot with mixed levels of previous training, some of them wearing bathing suits as leotards—not a preconceived idea. He wanted to use them all: How else could he teach them how to dance? And Serenade, more than any other of his ballets, was made to teach his new American students how to dance—how to take all those classroom steps and put them together, how to work in cooperation with each other. We learned, all right.