11. WALTZ
It has often been said that Balanchine didn’t care as much about his male dancers as he did about his female dancers, yet what greater need could they have answered for him than in serving his ballerinas? In Balanchine’s world, men and women, whatever their story together—and it is often deep, often deeply erotic—inevitably part again, so despite whatever pain she suffers from love, she survives: this is predetermined. Balanchine’s women are queens, and when they break, they make beauty. Their triumph ordained.
The men fare less well and often remain in their yearning, left alone after a brief encounter with a woman, real or imagined. Balanchine’s beloved is forever just out of reach. He was no sentimentalist—more Brothers Grimm than Disney—and knew that “happily ever after” was but wishful whimsy. For Balanchine’s woman, men were stops along the way, rarely destinations, and this is never more clearly stated than in Serenade—made just after he turned thirty years old. How did he know so much already?
From the Waltz Girl’s soft release into this new man’s embrace, he lifts her high in various grand jetés and arabesques, then pivots those arabesques in midair; he spins her, lifts her in arcs and circles; thus she floats. Then, staying earthbound, he puts his right hand about her waist and she places her right hand on his left shoulder while they face each other, but side by side. And they waltz, side to side across the stage. But it is not any waltz you have seen before.
Balanchine liked to say to us that the problem with waltzing was that the music was in three-quarter time—1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3—but that humans have only two legs: “It would be easier,” he said, “if we had three legs.” Here he eliminates the two-leg problem entirely. Intertwined with his partner, the man swoops his body and legs around in a deep semicircle while she keeps up with the swirling force of his movement by bourréeing on both her toe tips in tiny, tiny very fast steps, maybe one inch between each. But in parallel. They do this relay six times. She never comes off pointe. With her innocence and joy denoted by her delicate toe tipping, it is just about the sweetest dance between a man and a young woman you have ever seen.
During my years dancing Serenade, Joseph Duell was one of the few lead male dancers, along with the incomparable Adam Lüders, whom Balanchine trusted with this consummate job—the man who partners the Waltz Girl. The role is all about presence, elegance, line, and authoritative deference. Joe was particularly tall, lean, and handsome, and a strong, attentive partner, attaining a rare nobility onstage.
In the last decade of Balanchine’s life, most of his lead male dancers were still not American trained but imported from Europe, most often from Denmark, where the detailed, fast, and pure technique of Bournonville training (unlike Russian or British training) rendered these dancers not only more able to dance Balanchine’s speeds and precision but also more mentally prepared for his de-egotized aesthetic. Peter Martins, Adam Lüders, Ib Andersen, and Helgi Tomasson (from Iceland) all had the fantastic technique and self-effacing elegance that were hard to come by in American dancers. It was as if their being part of a tradition from such old and historied countries imbued them with the manners of aristocracy, without the Cagneyesque “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” eagerness of young Americans.[*]
But Joe was as American as it gets—from Dayton, Ohio, one of five children, his father a former Baptist minister. Both he and his brother, Daniel, also a lead dancer in the company, somehow managed through their natural predilection, intelligence, and drive to become, well, almost European, to become American Balanchine dancers.
I knew Joe. We went through the School together, and we both attended a short-lived ethics class instigated by Lincoln Kirstein where Joe was pretty much a one-man participant: we girls sat on the floor, stretching, massaging sore muscles, sewing toe shoes, and trying out new updos while Joe held court on the meaning of a morality and duty that we all practiced but were uninterested in verbalizing. Except him. He once made the largest salad I had ever seen, mixed in his kitchen sink and transported in a cauldron to a rare Central Park picnic. In 1976, during a particularly energized and exciting time in the company when Balanchine was choreographing Union Jack with a cast of fifty, Joe played the drums with incredible exuberance for rehearsals, working with Mr. B musician to musician. As a dancer, he worked perhaps even harder than everyone else—no easy achievement. Joe worked morning, noon, and night, his focus on his apparent inadequacies was relentless.
He entered the company in 1975 but shortly was absent: he had some sort of breakdown. But he returned a few months later, and quickly rose through the ranks to soloist, then principal dancer. He was also very involved in extracurricular activities to educate about ballet and Balanchine: he gave lectures, hosted Ballet Guild luncheons, and began choreographing. He showed his first piece to Balanchine, who liked the invention but was not interested in the Elton John music. Later he choreographed for the company itself, at Balanchine’s behest, to considerable success.
With his acumen and authority, Joe was considered by Lincoln Kirstein to be a likely successor to run the company after Balanchine. I was present at a meeting in 1985 at Kirstein’s house, when, during a leadership crisis in the company, two years after Balanchine’s death, he proposed the Duell brothers take over directing the company together: Danny the day-to-day, and Joe the artistic and choreographic. “Lincoln, I won’t do it, I just won’t do it,” Joe said in a rare refusal of a Kirstein request. I remember him pacing back and forth as he said this, while we all stayed seated in the back room of Kirstein’s Gramercy Park town house. Joe stood up to Lincoln in a way that was unimaginable to most of us.
On February 16, 1986, a sunny Sunday morning, at ten o’clock, Joe jumped out of the window of his Upper West Side brownstone apartment to his death. He had danced the lead in the second movement of Symphony in C at the matinee the day before. That evening he had rehearsed his role in Balanchine’s ballet Who Cares? and when he finished his solo asked an onlooker: “Was that better?”
We were told just before the matinee performance. Stunned, devastated, dancers were weeping on every wall of the theater, stage makeup leaking down every face, but as when Balanchine died, we danced as scheduled. It is the tribute we offer. Joe gave all he had; he was done. Born on April 30—the same date that Balanchine departed—Joe was twenty-nine years old.
Karin von Aroldingen and Joseph Duell, in a rare moment when a man is welcomed into the female world of Serenade (© Paul Kolnik)
While Joe clearly had his demons to battle, I continue to wonder if Balanchine had still been alive whether Joe would have jumped. Probably not then, anyway. The state of grace that had magnetically enveloped the New York City Ballet during Balanchine’s late years began an inevitable fading in his absence, and signs, both small and large, backstage and onstage, physical and moral, appeared. Within six years of his death, the retirement of our most beloved remaining ballerinas, Patricia McBride and Suzanne Farrell (each had grown up with Balanchine since the early 1960s), removed from our midst two last, vital, irreplaceable pillars. (Violette Verdy, Melissa Hayden, and the translucent Allegra Kent had all retired before Balanchine’s death.) These dancers were our examples, our solace, our reminders, our standards, each a source of radiance: their loss marked the end of the Balanchine era. For me, though, during those years of dancing Balanchine while still mourning him, Joe’s suicide was the deepest cut of all.
Shortly after the Waltz Girl and her partner complete their duet, he does a large, quiet grand jeté off the stage, leaving her alone again: their communion has lasted just over one minute. Facing the audience, she kneels on stage right where he left her, arms outstretched to the side. As if called, eight of us, facing front, joined by our arms waist to waist, bourrée in from the far wing on her latitude and as we reach her, we kneel down beside her; an arm circles her waist, and she becomes one of us again, part of our lineup. Her interlude with a partner was beautiful, brief. There will be less brief ones to come. Especially when several other women join their affair.
We back up to form a stage-wide three-sided rectangle (the audience is the fourth side)—three dancers on each side, eight across the back of the stage for the long side—and while we hold hands for extra support, we each step forward into deep lunging penché arabesques, our back legs reaching high to the theater rafters, and then step back again, heads turned to our right. We do this sequence six times, and the effect is of a massive yet circumscribed field filled with high-kicking chorus girls. In the space inside the space we have created, various other dancers enter and exit and, sometimes together, sometimes alone, perform spins and spirals, pivot about each other, jump, hop, and lunge, leaning in and leaning out in an orderly maelstrom of activity. Minute 11:25.
We congregate in two horizontal lines of eight dancers each, and the Waltz Girl takes her place in front of us, in a classic lead dancer position. The man makes another brief entrance, arriving at her side just in time to join in the steps we all do, but when we all jump alone, he lifts her way up high as she performs our same steps. The ballet is rising.
We assemble in yet another formation: two diagonals of eight dancers each. The two lines meet on center upstage and fan outward to opposing sides, forming a stage-wide upside-down V to the audience. We each begin a simple three-part sequence in unison: soutenu turn, arms up above our heads, then down to one knee, head down, arms swooped behind us. Upon quickly standing we lean backward on one foot, the other extended in a tendu in front of us, and with both arms do a pliable push movement in front of ourselves. Each opposing diagonal does this sequence five times, but in alternating timing.
When one side kneels, the other side is pushing. When that side pushes, the other kneels. When they turn, the other pushes. For the other side, the juxtaposition is different: when they kneel, the other is pushing; when they push, the other is turning; and when they turn, the other is kneeling. These are what we call traveling steps, and as we proceed, each side of the V travels toward the other, crossing the stage, weaving between each other at the center. When we are halfway through five repeats, we form a perfect cross before moving forward.
While we do all this, the Russian Girl has taken center stage, the summit of our reversed V; as we cross the stage, she performs a series of turns and arabesques that lead her straight down the center of the stage toward the orchestra. By the time we finish, our V is perfectly re-created in reverse, its peak downstage, and there she meets us as our center, yet again. All this in words sounds complicated, intricate, even difficult, and when broken down in this way, it is. But each dancer has to know only her own steps and movement, and with Balanchine guiding us, the appearance is of an ultimate order. It is thrilling. Inevitable. Minute 13:42.
We bourrée into four lines and walk about to do elaborate bows to each other several times over. It is unusual for dancers to show reverence directly to their onstage peers. But then Balanchine goes one further. The Russian Girl walks forward and does a low bow to you, the audience, delivering her right leg to you and folding her body forward, over it. A curious breaking of the fourth wall, like a character in a film turning away from the action and speaking directly into the camera.